Reading Reef in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Set between Sri Lankan independence and the outbreak of civil war, Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef features a marine biologist named Salgado who predicts the decay of the island’s coral exoskeleton, a fragile barrier against inundation by the sea. Critics overwhelmingly view the eroding reef as a symbolic harbinger of the violence that eventually engulfed Sri Lanka. But this essay takes the novel’s motif of dying coral and rising seas more literally, reading Reef as an incipient work of postcolonial Anthropocene fiction. A finalist for the 1994 Booker Prize, Reef preceded a wave of climate novels published by prominent authors after the turn of the millennium. More remarkable, it appeared five years before the first major report linking widespread coral damage to anthropogenic climate change. While Salgado’s research serves as a failed fictional antecedent to these findings, his servant Triton ultimately perceives that carbon emissions are destroying the reef. Indeed, what makes Gunesekera’s novel a postcolonial work of Anthropocene fiction is precisely Triton’s status as a servant. I argue that this status not only enables Triton to perceive the material and social conditions that cause climate change. It also shapes his interspecies perspective, allowing Triton to think and feel like a reef.