The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh Michael Kimaid The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Amitav Ghosh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. ix–339, black & white illustrations, notes, bibliography. $25.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-2268-1545-9. $18.00, paperback, ISBN 978-0-2268-2395-9. $24.99, eBook, ISBN 978-0-2268-1546-6. In his most recent work Amitav Ghosh focuses on the history of the spice nutmeg, using it as an avatar to represent a host of forces and conditions that have brought the planet and its inhabitants to the precarious condition in which we currently live. By exploring both history and geography through nutmeg's travels, Ghosh exposes and explains the systems that have deracinated people from place and desensitized people from the natural world they inhabit. At stake is nothing less than the future of the biosphere, and the maintenance of anything resembling a holistically human life. Throughout, Ghosh writes with a fluid style, with regard to both the content and the form of the work. Amitav Ghash is a masterful storyteller who highlights connections between time and space, past and present, and obscure and familiar, all in a shifting frame of first and third person. The intent is to encourage humanity to refocus itself on a matter of true importance: the preservation of life in all its diverse and comprehensive forms. The result is the conveyance of a deep appreciation for the connections between all places, all times, all things, and all people. With regard to the book's sense of place, its most impressive element is the fluidity of scale that Ghosh applies to his topic. The first chapter opens in a village in the Banda archipelago, where Ghosh vividly sets the scene for what would become the global trade in nutmeg. From there, Ghosh connects indigenous people in Oceania and the Americas through a network of shared understandings about trade, the ecosystem, and the kinship of life in general. To do so, Ghosh draws on the ideas and the agency of landscape that are linked to the geography and geology of the places he describes, along with the written words commercial agents from Europe employed to denature and demean the comprehensive connection native peoples had with their homelands. Therein, Ghosh demonstrates how the spice became part of a global trading empire that promoted and rationalized omnicide as both a business tactic and a comprehensive belief system. In the process, Ghosh shows how clearly the local and the global are linked, and he demonstrates how closely [End Page 100] connected we are to places we have never been, and conditions with which we may be entirely unfamiliar. As easily as Ghosh moves through the scale of place in The Nutmeg's Curse, he also applies such fluidity to the sense of time in the narrative. While the foundation of his work lies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ghosh is particularly adept at demonstrating the ways in which the past resonates in the present. Whether through governing structures, technology, economic arrangements, or epidemiological conditions, the work makes historical connections clear and essentially obvious to the reader on consideration. Where Ghosh particularly excels at this is his attention to landscape throughout the book. Whether in seventeenth-century Banda, the nineteenth-century American Southwest, or twenty-first-century Brazil, the work clearly demonstrates both the changes and continuities in the landscape, and relates the reasons why certain things have changed while others remain. By acknowledging a fundamental difference in worldviews between indigenous and colonizing peoples, in particular their respective weighting of "where something happened" versus "when something happened," Ghosh complicates our understanding of both. In rationalized Enlightenment thought, the past is altogether separate from the present and therefore abstracted. Indigenous thought is more comprehensive; past and present are connected in place. The landscape is alive and dynamic, and communicates to us the lessons of the past, if only we know how to listen. It is a difficult task to relate obscure things, and an equally difficult task to retell familiar things. Perhaps most difficult of all is to move between...