Memory plays a critical role in understanding the effects of climate change, and collective memories of past climate events help in turning a community into an environmentally-responsible and eco-conscious one. There are emerging studies on how climate changes, either drastic or over a long period of time, threaten the ruin of historical monuments, which are memories of shared histories and cultures for individuals of a community, or even, amongst several communities. Meghan Michel asserts:
Long-term environmental memories might help a community respond to otherwise destructive climate changes in a way that allows them to survive, recover, and sometimes even thrive. Given the increasing impact of extreme weather events due to anthropogenic climate change, it is uniquely important right now to understand how memory can contribute to creating a more resilient culture."
What role do memories play in the lives of communities facing climate change or climate refugee narratives? How do fictional narratives on climate change imbibe lived experiences, oral narratives, local myths, and so on to provide an intersectional approach to the question of climate change and climate refugees? For instance, the narratives of Banbibi, who is considered as the guardian of the Sundarbans, can be found in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004). The country of eighteen tides, as Sundarbans is known in the oral narratives, is rich with the tales of Banbibi, who is worshipped by the local people belonging to different religious faiths in the delta region shared by India and Bangladesh. Climate fiction, sometimes, merge realities and folk tales that have survived through the re-tellings of the people before finding a place in the written forms. These local, alternate narratives, which do not find a place in the mainstream narratives, might have eco-conscious answers to climate change disasters.
This paper would attempt to understand how oral narratives, histories of a culture and community, are imbibed into the climate fiction narratives. The paper would consider Emmi Itäranta's Memory of Water (2019) to understand how memories of marginalized communities and memories of the non-human world could hold secrets to future survival strategies in the face of climate disasters. The ways in which collective memories of communities keep an increasingly divisive world, moving towards impending climate catastrophes, together and form alternate narratives, and how these are reflected in the emerging climate fiction narratives, would be studied here.
Works Cited:
Michel, Meghan. 2019. "Remembering Disaster: How Qing Dynasty Records Reveal Connections Between Memory and Environment." Historical Climatology. Online. Accessed on Oct 4, 2020.
