Beings Seen and Unseen

A discussion around Ghosh’s ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’ explores the colonial roots of capitalism and the European “ideology of conquest and supremacy” – “it wasn’t the ideas leading to the mastery; rather, it was the mastery leading to the ideas… It was really this violence that Europeans unleashed upon other peoples that ultimately became a violence unleashed upon the Earth… You don’t get capitalism without first colonialism and slavery. What is really ‘harder to imagine than the end of the world’ is the end of the absolute geopolitical dominance of the West.” Ghosh goes on to suggest how storytellers should respond: “the planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit a living Earth… This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans.”