ABSTRACT
Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef presents a delicate balance between differently conceived worlds-coexisting, separating, colliding, intersecting, or swimming apart. The novel explicates fl ows between the “small world” of the tear-drop island of Sri Lanka, and the wider worlds of travelling ideas, peoples, goods, as well as peoples as goods. The ripples of events seem to run inward and outward, both synchronic and diachronic, apparently expanding and contracting seamlessly. This is achieved through a narrative offering a species of “history from below” in which Sri Lanka’s spiral into civil war between the 1960s and 1980s coexists with the material realities of life in the kitchen, seen from the inside, through the eyes of a servant. At the same time, this perspective encompasses the prehistoric deep-sea mountains at “the bottom of the world” just off the fort town of Galle, and beyond the coral reef where one can apparently drift effortlessly to Indonesia and back.2 All this against the insight gained that, “human history is always a story of someone’s diaspora.”3 Arguably, Reef can be read as exemplary for exploring the connectedness that is the subject of much recent scholarship on the Indian Ocean world as contact zone.4 This connectedness, however, is also at the heart of the complicities and ruptures that are tracked in the text.
