Nutmeg, Planets and Words: for an Ecostylistic analysis of Amitav Ghosh’s Ecological Parables

According to Indian anthropologist, essayist and novelist Amitav Ghosh, the present-day environmental crisis is deeply entrenched in wide historical and political processes, in particular those connected with colonialism and neo-colonialism. To illustrate this point and warn about the degradation of the world we live in, his 2021 book The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) picks the story of the material exploitation and human extermination of the Banda Islands (1621), and applies a particular rhetorical frame since the subtitle reads Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Bearing in mind that narratives do not merely represent the world, but somehow construct it, ideologically and culturally, Ghosh articulates his prose through cognitive structures such as parables, which operate via projection, intertextuality and blending (Burke, 2003). For the author, parables and stories in general influence readers, and can endorse complex beneficial discourses that suggest how “Traditional Ecological Knowledge”, in reality, has to be rebalanced by considering the resources of storytelling and lore to refresh epistemological paradigms and encourage environmental awareness and change. In this chapter, I implement a mixed methodology based on ecostylistics, ecolinguistics, and postcolonial studies (Huggan & Tiffin, 2010; Stibbe, 2015; Virdis, 2022) to investigate Ghosh’s text, in particular focusing on 1) the discursive, rhetorical and symbolic configuration of parables, 2) the persuasive and affective power of narratives, and 3) the author’s ecosophy and commitment towards social justice and resistance.