The EcoGothic and Contemporary Sri Lankan English Literature: Reading Ecophobia in Patricia Weerakoon’s Empire’s Children and Roma Tearne’s Mosquito

Abstract

This paper aims to read two contemporary Sri Lankan English novels—Patricia Weerakoon’s Empire’s Children (2015) and Roma Tearne’s Mosquito (2007)—as EcoGothic texts that use gothicised architecture and landscape tropes of the sea, the forest, the beach, and tea plantations to highlight the intersections between human exploitation and environmental degradation in post-colonial Sri Lanka. By drawing on the theories of the EcoGothic and associated concepts such as Ecophobia, I examine how the EcoGothic is manifested in the selected novels through a close connection between nature and the (dark) history of a place immersed in colonialism, civil war, terrorism, and capitalist commodification. Empire’s Children portrays how the colonialist’s fear of tropical landscapes generates monocultures, exploitative behaviour, and conflict. The paper further argues that Mosquito portrays how the civil war turned nature into a location of monstrosity, as the government paid more attention to war and defence budgets rather than the local environment and human welfare. The use to which certain landscapes are put in post-colonial Sri Lanka during the civil war creates an ecophobic narrative about them. Through the EcoGothic, the writers overturn popular conceptions of tropical islands as idyllic and show these landscapes as sites of fear and the uncanny, and as palimpsests of multiple histories of political and ecological violence.