The Mangrove Doesn’t Forget

A woman returns to her ancestral home, where mangroves speak memory, loss, and land history long buried.

Amitav Ghosh in Munich: Inspirations, Insights, and Storytelling

In the fall of 2024, Amitav Ghosh visited the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society as part of the project “One Book—Many Worlds: Munich Reads Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh.” This exhibition emerges from the multifaceted discussion of climate change and its challenges conducted in the “One Book—Many Worlds” project and grapples with the question of the role of literary fiction in interdisciplinary academic exchange and climate communication beyond academia. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s recent writings on the global climate crisis, in particular the novel Gun Island, as a vantage point, the chapters in this exhibition engage with various aspects Gun Island from different disciplinary perspectives, drawing on storylines and narrative elements that allow a multifocal engagement with different social and ecological repercussions of climate change. Additionally, pieces from the spring 2025 taumelnd trauen, verschlungen bleiben student exhibition and winning and honorable mentions from the 2025 “Tell the Untold!” writing competition take the provocation to think creatively about the past and future of our environment and world further. Thereby, the exhibition chapters create a web of diverse thoughts on and readings of the role of storytelling for the contemporary interlinked social and environmental crises from a number of perspectives.

About This Exhibition

About the author

Felix, Rachel Desiree

Rachel Desiree Felix is a Malaysian writer based in South Korea. Her work often explores the emotional landscapes of memory, intergenerational trauma, and the deep, symbolic relationship between nature and the self. A lifelong seeker of quiet, she draws inspiration from coastal villages, mangrove forests, and the rhythms of slow, simple living.
Her fiction and creative nonfiction are shaped by lived experiences as a brown-skinned woman in intercultural spaces, navigating displacement, silence, and the ancestral pull of storytelling. She is particularly drawn to the ways in which landscapes hold grief—and how nonhuman voices, whether trees, tides, or wind, can speak truths too-long buried.
“The Mangrove Doesn’t Forget” is part of an ongoing body of fiction rooted in Southeast Asian environments, where the natural world acts not just as setting, but as witness and participant. Rachel believes stories have the power to unearth what history conceals—and that sometimes, the forest remembers what families cannot.

Browse the exhibition

“‘We are the Dispossessed’: Displacement, Knowledge Production and Bare Life in West Bengali Climate Fiction”

An analysis of the book Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh.

Read more about “‘We are the Dispossessed’: Displacement, Knowledge Production and Bare Life in West Bengali Climate Fiction”

Money in the Mangroves

This short film combines remote sensing, qualitative interviews, desk research, and illustrations to show the complexities and controversies surrounding mangrove reforestation in Senegal and The Gambia.

Read more about Money in the Mangroves

The Sundarbans Inscripted as UNESCO World Heritage Site

The Sundarbans, one of the largest remaining areas of mangroves in the world with an exceptional level of biodiversity, is inscripted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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