The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

Long after the publication of The Circle of Reason, I wrote a piece in which I attempted to account for this mysterious absence: ‘To the principal protagonists in the Oil Encounter (which means, in effect, America and Americans, on the one hand, and the peoples of the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf, on the other), the history of oil is a matter of embarrassment verging on the unspeakable, the pornographic. It is perhaps the one cultural issue on which the two sides are in complete agreement. . . . Try and imagine a major American writer taking on the Oil Encounter. The idea is literally inconceivable.’ The above passage appears in a review of one of the few works of fiction to address the Oil Encounter, a five-part series of novels by the Jordanian-born writer Abdel Rahman Munif. My review, entitled ‘Petrofiction’, dealt only with the first two books in the cycle, which were published in English translation as Cities of Salt (Mudun al Malh) and The Trench (Al-ukhdud). ‘The truth is,’ I wrote in my review, ‘that we do not yet possess the form that can give the Oil Encounter a literary expression. For this reason alone Cities of Salt . . . ought to be regarded as a work of immense significance. It so happens that the first novel in the cycle is also in many ways a wonderful work of fiction, perhaps even in parts a great one.’ This was written in 1992. I was not aware then that Cities of Salt had been reviewed four years earlier by one of the most influential figures ...