Deposition Dispossession: Climate Change in the Sundarbans

Poetry. Introduction by Angela Hume. DEPOSITION DISPOSESSION: CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE SUNDARBANS, the posthumously published work by Marthe Reed, responds to the ecological crises of the Sundarbans of south Bangladesh and India. The work talks back to climate denialism, questioning Reed’s own and the United States’ role in climate change and its collateral damage. Interrogative, defiant, elegiac, the writing speaks to a realm in crisis–the fragility of a landscape, its human and other-than-human inhabitants, and the Sundarbans islands and archipelagos rapidly being swallowed by rising sea levels. Under such pressures, how do the inhabitants–and we who live elsewhere on the earth–respond? Reed does so by adopting a poetic method and collage technique that draws on a diverse set of resources. The completed book-length poem fuses together personal anecdotes and collected notes ranging in origin from scientific publications, the IPCC Synthesis Report, research on native plant and animal species, to discussions of cultural figures of the region, addresses to ethics and climate change boards, and literary texts such as The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, Travels In The Mugal Empire by François Bernier, and Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil.