Climate change means that millions of people now face the risk of catastrophic flooding, but few more so than the char-dwellers of Bangladesh, clinging to tiny impermanent islands of sand in the Jamuna river. Tahmima Anam, whose debut novel A Golden Age charted the nation’s birth, returns to see what the future might hold for her homeland. From The Guardian:
Every six months, for the better part of my life, I have been making a seasonal journey to Bangladesh. I left Dhaka at the age of two, and I have always called it home, though the city my parents and I left in the 70s is unrecognisable, now a jumble of Lego-shaped buildings, barely a road or a tree between them. My visits home, which used to consist of lazy rickshaw rides around Dhanmondi Lake, are now spent waiting in the frozen car-seas of Dhaka traffic. And, of course, there are family visits and long lunches and my parents, who wait eagerly for me and shower me with affection, no matter how old I am, or how often I have disappointed them by refusing to move back.
But this time around, I am leaving the city and travelling to an island off the banks of the Jamuna river, to learn how people are adapting to a difficult environment. I was recently told by a journalist that, having written a novel about the birth of my country, perhaps I should now write about its death. Bangladesh is sinking under the weight of the rising seas, one of the first victims of our transforming climate. Already there are great swaths of land in the coastal belt that have surrendered to the tides.
The facts about climate change in Bangladesh are indeed grim. The country is a low-lying delta, meaning any slight shift in sea levels will cause the land to be slowly swallowed by the waters of the Bay of Bengal.
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