Remaking the Sense(s) in Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree: A Stylistic Analysis

Representing the senses in a text is a complex issue, given the difficulty of expressing embodied perceptions, but in some cases it can be instrumental in the organisation of discourse. Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree (2017) is an innovative non-fictional narrative, blending genres as different as memoir, literary history and botanical scholarship, in which the author deliberately challenges the reader to adopt a new perspective by harmonising the human and the non-human, epitomised by trees and plants. Provocatively, the writer metamorphosises human senses thanks to various linguistic resources, in order to elaborate a new ideology pertaining to the environment, and the very meaning of life on the planet. The text borrows references to plants from the Indian landscape to put forward a fresh idea of sensation, affecting touch, sight and hearing, which reconceptualises and recalibrates human life by means of non-standard collocations, synaesthetic metaphorical patterns, and other rhetorical devices.