The adverse effects of climate change have been a concern for citizens of many countries around the world. However, the richer ones do not seem to care as much, since their source of generating electricity is mostly based on fossil fuels. To tackle this, environmentalists have protested for years, and novelists have been using their greatest weapon—their words. Gun Island is a novel written by Amitav Ghosh, published in 2019 that depicts contemporary issues of climate change that lead to migration and human trafficking.
Deen, a scholar, and collector of rare books, who lives in New York, goes to the Sunderbans in West Bengal to uncover the mystery and legend of a seventeenth-century merchant, Bonduki Saudagar, and his persecution by Manasa Devi. On his quest, he discovers how climate change has affected the lives of the people of the Sundarbans.
The Sundarbans, situated at the Bay of Bengal delta, have saved Bengal and nearby lands from several natural disasters. However, the Bhola cyclone of 1970 was recorded as the greatest natural disaster of the twentieth century, taking away an estimated half a million lives. Lusibari, from the West Bengal part of the Sundarbans, was greatly affected because a huge part of the island was separated because of the storm. One of the reasons why East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) wanted independence from West Pakistan was their reluctance to help the people affected by the cyclone. Due to this, people from East Pakistan crossed the border and arrived in West Bengal, India, to avoid the political problems in Pakistan. The Indian administration suffered problems because both the migrants and the inhabitants were all affected by disasters, devoid of land and food.
Being prone to natural disasters, the inhabitants of the Sundarbans are always traveling to places, and the number of traffickers increases after each disaster to trap the poor and earn profit by using their crisis as an opportunity. They manipulate women into faraway brothels and able-bodied men into work sites. According to Tipu, a local boy from the Sundarbans in the novel, the downtrodden people from the Sundarbans choose to cross national boundaries illegally since they cannot easily arrange officially authorised documents like passports and visas. Horen, a fisherman from the Sundarbans, stopped his fishing business after two of his trawlers and a couple of other boats capsized in the Aila Cyclone in 2009. Farmers left the place as the soil became uncultivable due to saltwater intrusresultinguing from extreme weather events and sea-level rise. High salinity content in the land and water makes cultivation and fishing unsuitable professions. Ecological damages have caused negative phenomena such as the birth of oceanic dead zones and fish kills. Thus, the illiterate and poverty-stricken people of the Sundarbans will starve to death if they do not move out.
Since the Sundarbans is a disaster-prone area, the inhabitants try to move to the cities or travel to western countries for a better life. However, since they lack the necessary monetary resources, they use the medium of human traffickers to travel, who immensely exploit them. The journey to the west is nothing less than what the slaves from the transatlantic slave trade faced back in the 16th to 18th centuries.
Due to the availability of the internet, underprivileged people get enticed by fascinating images of foreign countries. They try to illegally reach places by forging documents. Rafi from the novel, narrates his horrific experiences of the perilous journey from the Sundarbans with Tipu, and what he shares is the same as what other people traveling illegally go through. Tipu arranged their travel with the aid of some traffickers from Bangladesh. Crossing the Raimangal River, they were first taken to Dhaka and then to Kolkata and kept locked and hidden in a connection house, which has extremely unhygienic conditions. If someone complained or asked too many questions, that victim would be slapped or beaten.
Later, their journey would begin in a truck, and their condition would be like cows and goats without having sufficient space to even to sit down. Many of them suffered from car sickness, and most of the time, they would not know about their destination. When they were close to the Pakistan border, they were asked to arrange for an extra payment of fifty US dollars each. When Tipu protested, the traffickers slapped him and shoved a stick into him.
The migrants were given prior instructions to run and save their lives from the firing of the border guards. However, when the truck reached the Turkish border and the migrants started running, Rafi and Tipu got separated in the resulting confusion, and became terrified. After being separated from Tipu, Rafi became baffled, as he did not know anything about where to go next. Tipu eventually called Rafi and advised him to join a group of refugees who planned to walk to Europe. Among the refugees, there were a few Bengalis, and the others were from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Pakistan. Tipu also advised him to try to reach Venice. Finally, Rafi arrived in Venice with many other illegal immigrants like himself after having some horrible experiences. In this way, the illegal migrants, previously obsessed with the idea of an improved life in a foreign country, became disillusioned during the course of their journey.
Gun Island also gives a realistic portrayal of the lives of Bangladeshi immigrants in Italy. Not having knowledge of the number of Bengalis in Italy, Deen is surprised to know Venice is full of Bengalis from Madaripur, a district of Bangladesh. Illegal immigrants from Bangladesh come to Italy for a better life, and the locals of Italy exploit them, by giving them wages lower than the national minimum wage, because they cannot legally take any action against them.
Italians are dependent on the labor of the immigrants who have left their own countries and who ultimately clear dirty places in Italy to earn a living. For a long time, Bengalis have been settling in Venice. Long ago, they came to work in the shipyards, for it is a port city. But now they are involved in every other job, starting with making pizzas for the tourists, cleaning hotels, and playing the accordion at street corners. It is difficult for the immigrants to work several jobs all day long, barely getting any sleep. They are even forbidden to give interviews to journalists because they expose their lives to the world.
This novel is highly informative in that it makes its readers aware of the effects of climate change through gripping storytelling. The perils faced by the migrants while traveling from one country to another are indeed painful, and this novel lets its readers know that information.
Do not forget to read Gun Island.
Writer:
Risalat Rahman Hridoy
Intern, Content Writing Department
YSSE