‘Sometimes I write to think’
On evoking how our identity is interlinked with the landscape
1 Intertidal is based on a diary you kept in Chennai between 2020 and 2022. What made you record your “observations of coast, wetland, climate and self” in such detail? Did this start out as something personal, or was it meant to be public?
There were multiple entry points into this book. Deep observation, note-making and writing have been my practice when I’ve had any close engagement with a local landscape or the natural world, or an environmental campaign.
Between 2020 and 2022, I was becoming deeply involved with multiple coast-related campaigns. In the process of advocacy, travel, campaigning, conversation and ground work, I also wanted to create a literary work that would evoke these landscapes powerfully in people’s minds, in such a way that would be able to appreciate how our identity is indelibly interlinked with these spaces that are so important for us and all manner of life.
Sometimes I write to think; sometimes I write to express and put things out in the world. It resulted in a detailed documentation of a large stretch of coast, local biodiversity and local communities, threads connecting with them, and a constant effort to create material such as citizenscience data and educational resources.
2 How do you explain what “intertidal” means to people unfamiliar with this word?
When you go to the beach, you find that the waves, the ocean, the water level... the tides, go in and come out at six-hour intervals because of the combined pull of the sun and the moon. The space that is uncovered during low tide, and covered during high tide, is called the intertidal. That, of course, is the physical or oceanographic definition. But the intertidal is also a very rich metaphor in terms of metaphysical space — a space where land and ocean meet, merge and blur boundaries.
This space is ecologically vulnerable but also very rich in life. Any intertidal space can help one think about other intertidal spaces; for instance, the intertidal space between self and other. What is the blurring boundary between these?
When one stands on the coast, one wonders: Where does the ocean start? Where does the land begin? As such, the binary between land and water is broken. Similarly, we can think about the intertidal space between inner and outer; the intertidal space between human and non-human. All these clean binaries, these broad strokes of categorisation, influence so much of our thinking, and limit it in a way. The intertidal helps us perceive in a richer, deeper way.
3 For whom did you write this book?
For whoever picks up the book and reads it! One of the principles I’ve followed is to make action — a campaign, direct observation, conservation, or work in nature education and self-enquiry — my fuel. In hindsight, I can say a high-school child can read this book and find meaning in it. But while writing the diary, I wasn’t thinking about the target audience or who would read it. I was trying to get at the essence of what I wanted to say, and at the feelings that were coming up while writing.