Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation - Hardcover

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Translated into 25 languages, Sudeep Sen’s works include Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems, Fractals: New & Selected Poems/ Translations 1980–2015, EroText (Global Literary Festival Award for "Literary Excellence & Best Book of the Year" 2017;Rabindranath Tagore Literature Prize shortlist 2020); Rain ("Best Books of the Year", The Statesman),Aria(A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award 2009, "Best Books of the Year", Outlook magazine), andKaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury 2019).

Influential anthologies edited by him include The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, World English Poetry, and Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians, and his work has appeared in TLS, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, and Telegraph, and Newsweek, and been broadcast on the BBC, PBS, CNN, IBN, NDTV, All India Radio and Doordarshan.

Sen is the only Asian who has been honored by being asked to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and to read at the Nobel Laureate Festival (in 2013).

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The Role of the Artist Is Not to Look Away

1.

I paint flowers so they will not die.

— Frida Kahlo

I have always been deeply fascinated with the natural world and its phenomenon. I have vivid memories of devouring issues of the National Geographic magazine as a child, collecting their wonderfully detailed fold-out maps, watching Carl Sagan and David Attenborough’s documentaries on the cosmos, wildlife and our planet. I marvelled at how solar and lunar gravitational pulls choreograph the seasonal orchestra — how the wind’s slipstreams dance, the oceans churn, and earth’s tilted rotation creates the vicissitudes of tides.    

There was a point when geography was my favourite subject at school. For a while, I even wanted to become an oceanographer — so I could explore the earth’s deepest point in the Mariana Trench, and ride icebergs in the Arctic/Antarctic photographing the colour-blazed magnetic lights of Aurora Borealis/Australis.

As an avid reader, I have been tuned in to the global discussion on climate change — this man-made tragedy that threatens our planet in what has become the critical age of anthropocene. Still, I could not help feeling shaken to the core, when I chanced upon a news clip featuring the President of the island nation of Kiribati (in the central Pacific Ocean) informing the rest of the world that the first country to be submerged would be theirs — and that their people would be the first ‘climate refugees,’ in the not-so-distant future.

Stanford University climatologist, Stephen H. Schneider, has said that the small island nation of Kiribati is made up of 33 small atolls, none of which is more than 6.5 feet above the South Pacific, and it is only a matter of time before the rising sea submerges the entire country. “For Kiribati, the tipping point has already occurred,” Schneider told The Washington Post in January 29, 2006. “As far as they’re concerned, it’s tipped, but they have no economic clout in the world.”

            2.

Climate change poses a powerful challenge to what is perhaps the single most important political conception of the modern era: the idea of freedom, which is central not only to contemporary politics but also to the humanities, the arts and literature.

— Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

It is ironic that the most powerful nations of our world are the largest emitters of greenhouse gases and contribute the maximum tonnage of carbon footprint. The Covid-19 pandemic is only the most recent in a series of epidemics that have ravaged the world (both human and animal) in recent decades. With the melting of polar ice caps and the rapid thaw of glacial sites— humanity faces, among other dangers — discharge of dangerous levels of methane & CO2 gases, and the activation of infectious life forms that were frozen for millennia. Add to this, rising sea levels, increased frequency of natural disasters, a growing tribe of self-serving Fascist leaders — and life as we know it seems to be imploding.

Katie Pavid writes on the Natural History Museum website, “The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and modern humans have been around for a mere 200,000 years. Yet in that time we have fundamentally altered the physical, chemical and biological systems of the planet on which we and all other organisms depend. In the past 60 years in particular, these human impacts have unfolded at an unprecedented rate and scale. This period is sometimes

known as the ‘Great Acceleration’. Carbon dioxide emissions, global warming, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, extinction and wide scale natural resource extraction are all signs that we have significantly modified our planet.” Still, it seems clear, the world is not taking sufficient heed.

            3.

At what distance should I keep myself from others in order to build with them a sociability without alienation and a solitude without exile?

— Roland Barthes, How to Live Together

I spend most of my waking hours in the day (and night) in my book-lined study. The panoramic picture window across my desk is the lens through which I view the changing of seasons imprinted on the magnificent wide-topped neem tree. The bough’s intricate armature, the leaves’ serrated floret-pattern, the tree’s broccoli-shaped structure — all provide an exo-skeleton for my canvas — and the constantly-altering skyscape, provides a slideshow cyclorama.

I have been writing on climate related phenomenon for a long time. My poems frequently dwell on the theme of excess. Having lived in Delhi for most of my life and braved its predominantly hot weather for decades, I have often written on aspects of ‘heat’. Heat annoys, repels, inspires and exasperates:

                  Heat outside is like filigreed sand on my skin —

                  swift, sharp, pointed, deceptive, furnace hot.”

                                                (from ‘Heat Sand’)

In the early 2000s however, I lived in Bangladesh for some years. As a result of living for half a decade in the region of the ‘two Bengals’ — West Bengal in India and Bangladesh — I published a book titled Monsoon that was later republished as Rain.

It is bone-dry — I pray for any moisture that might fall from the emaciated skies — // There is a cloud, just a solitary cloud wafting perilously — // But it is too far in the distance for any real hope — for rain.

                                                (‘Drought, Cloud’, Rain)

The book reflected and meditated on the various moods and effects of rain — its passion and politics, its beauty and fury, its hope and hopelessness, its ability of “douse and arouse”. In some ways, it was a book on aspects of climate change — even though I confess that I did not overtly set out to do so, at least not consciously.

            4.

[The pandemic] has reinforced my understanding of the best parts of human nature, and the worst. The best is the selfless courage of so many on the front lines, and the brilliance of scientists trying to find the cure. The worst is the degeneration of parts of society into an aggressive, hostile, ignorant, bigoted rabble. I’ve always believed that both these elements exist. The pandemic shines a bright light both on nobility and on ugliness, the will to overcome adversity and a sort of Lord of the Flies barbarism. 

— Salman Rushdie, Interview magazine (June 1, 2020)

During the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown, things were changing so fast...