On tidalectics and resonances amidst ruination: Caribbean storms, Pacific tides, (post)colonial temporality, and transnational thinking

On tidalectics and resonances amidst ruination:
Caribbean storms, Pacific tides, (post)colonial temporality, and transnational thinking

Introduction: The Language of Storms

The headlines for our stories down here in the Caribbean always come in graphic type, written by the wind, and sung by the sea […]. Now, since Hurricane Ivan swoop down and dekatche (destroy) Grenada in September 2004, I’m thinking that Grenada’s history for the half century from 1955 to 2005 might be titled, From Janet to Ivan: Tout Moun ka Plewe [Everybody Bawling] and this, of course, could also be the title of a calypso, the sung history of the land.[1]

Reflecting on the literal atmospheric currents of tropical storms and the metaphorical currents of five decades of political change in the Caribbean, Merle Collins described what seems to be the peculiar serendipity of the arrival of Hurricane Janet in 1955: “People just got the vote in 1951. […] [S]o much was happening in Grenada in the 1950s that it not surprising Janet decide to come and punctuate the story. […] That Atlantic always have something to say in we story”[2]. What is the Atlantic saying? Can we understand it? Five decades later, Hurricane Ivan left “the leaves from Mount Gozo plastered right around the house […] [upon] the doors and the windows and the walls,” as if “Ivan say, you don’t have to wait till they cut the tree, make paper, put in book, write things for you to read”; “Hmmm; Ivan leave message on leaf for everybody to read”[3]. The flattened cocoa and nutmeg leaves are part of a vocabulary. Perhaps the full weight of Ivan’s message requires simultaneous consideration of the political context of those islands in its path. Indeed, many Caribbean scholars might propose, of course, that there is no one story without the other: The proclamation of the storm is the history of the islands. The trauma of several centuries of marginalization, from Iberian encounters with the Taino, through the Middle Passage and plantocratic sugar kingdoms, to postcolonial austerity, is inseparably, intimately entangled with those islands blanketed in the same soils which fed the plantation crops, and lapped by the same tides of the sea which facilitated the cargo ships carried across the same Atlantic which bore witness to it all.

Collins is not alone in interpreting the language of the hurricane. Kamau Brathwaite, the Barbadian scholar and poet who articulated a conception of “tidal dialectics,” also consistently explored the crucial importance of storms in Caribbean experience: in his words, the “hurricane does not roar in pentameter”[4]. If the hurricane doesn’t speak—at least, not always—through traditional Anglophone poetic form, surely the hurricane must be—in true Caribbean fashion—multilingual. Brathwaite’s theorizing of tidalectics might be kindred with iconic Cuban writer Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s conception of “repeating islands.” Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that Benitez-Rojo describes Caribbean culture in such environmental terms: the “generalized instability of vertigo and hurricane” is not only a feature of tropical maritime seasonality and literal storms, but is also reflective of a “historiographic turbulence”[5]. In a region at the center of five hundred years of colonial machinations and subservient to those global circuits of wealth, and so consistently manipulated by and exchanged among the political dominions of power-brokers elsewhere—from sixteenth-century Madrid and eighteenth-century Paris and twentieth-century US leisure tour marketeers—this turbulence is spectacular. Benitez-Rojo’s acknowledgement of such a scale of entanglement between environment and the social (and, too, the personal) recalls Collins’s reflections in Grenada. Once again, the Atlantic has much to say.

Aside from the hurricane, other environmental elements of the American hemisphere might tell similar stories: The rows of monoculture at banana plantations, the boiling vats at the sugar refinery, the scars of silver mines in Mexico. These might be interpreted broadly as forms of ruins. From the Iberian instantiation of trans-Atlantic circulation to the advent of US naval presence and beyond, the Caribbean—and Latin America more generally—is full of such sites of irresolution, of plantocratic ruination, and yet still of the persistence of the people who endured those histories. Indeed, in the estimation of Caribbean poets and scholars, these environments are quintessential to the identity of the region. Proposing that “[t]he sigh of History rises over ruins,” Derek Walcott suggests that “the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes” are pieces of a vast “vocabulary”[6]. This vocabulary is spoken by and through landscape and, perhaps in a framework similar to Eduoard Glissant’s, that environmental vocabulary is especially clearly heard through ruination. In direct reference to and conversation with Walcott’s evaluation of how “the Sea is History,” Glissant describes how “landscape is its own monument,” whose full “meaning can only be traced on the underside”[7].

In contrast to European imaginaries of idyllic metropolitan pastoralism, or the imagining of the Caribbean as fundamentally Edenic, Glissant instead suggests that a defining feature of Caribbean environment is “the irruption into modernity”[8]. This irruption involves the debris and victims of civilizing projects: gravestones on the plantation periphery, and those bodies thrown overboard during the Atlantic crossing. What else can we learn from Caribbean ruins, and whose lives might we acknowledge? Noting that ‘[t]he idea of the plantation is migratory” and has “lingered” in the “imaginative geographies” of “reified global segregations” initially experimented with among “post-1492 colonial arrangements” of European projects in the Caribbean, scholar Katherine McKittrick proposes that, despite this haunting, “differential modes of survival emerge—[…] the blues, marronage, revolution, and more—revealing that the plantation” has always been negotiated against[9]. Reflecting on the earlier work of Sylvia Wyner, McKittrick cites this as reason for why “we [ought] to seek out secretive histories that are not invested in rehearsing lifelessness” and instead “undo the teleological […] underpinnings of” a “spatiality” of segregation[10]. Thus, while colonial schemes deemed to convert the Caribbean (or late-nineteenth-century Hawaii, or early-twentieth-century Philippines) into archipelagos marked by captivity and extraction, many oceanic or archipelagic thinkers might argue for the possibility of counter-plantation of a co-opting of archipelagos in something like a transnational solidarity.

Empires have their own archipelagos, a sort of a parallel corruption of the island form: Plantation archipelagos, prison archipelagos, poverty archipelagos, industrial corridors, sacrifice zones. These spatial formations also have attendant ideological formations: Who is made to be dispensable? Where is the mine petitioned for and constructed? What kind of rhetorical devolorization happens to doom certain types of environments and the people who live there? This is enacted through policy, but also discourse. Traci Voyles describes “the wasteland” as both a spatial and racial signifier: A place like the desert, and the Dine Navajo who live there, are both imaginatively constructed as peripheral, pre-empting or co-occurring with violence enacted on both. The results can often take archipelagic form: Cancer Alley in Louisiana or Australian offshore immigration detention at Nauru.

Does something like a Caribbean e/affect occur elsewhere—in both time and space? The ruination of sacrifice zones exists in other archipelagos at both sea (Hawaii, the Philippines, Indonesia) and on land (Cancer Alley, monoculture along a highway in the Brazilian Cerrado, a string of rural prisons in the Adirondacks of upstate New York). A survey of tidalectics in comparison to a context of wider global currents (pun intended) of ecopoetics, from Caribbean tidalectics to South Pacific imaginaries of a “sea of islands,” suggests that archipelagic thinking has great relevance beyond the Caribbean.

Section 1: Unfinished Histories

The implied ethical imperative to recover and bear witness to obscured lives takes on added weight in the Caribbean. Scholar Alexandra Campbell finds a consistency between Glissant’s beachcombing and Brathwaite’s tidalectics: “Brathwaite mediates a sense of ruin, fragmentation and decay with the possibility of restoration” while “gathering together the various strands, shards and splinters of history and culture that have washed ashore,” a process not unlike Glissant’s invocation of beachcombing[11]. Brathwaite’s project here “seeks to address past narratives of “struggle” and conquest that have shaped the Caribbean, and in doing so gives rise to the possibility of “restoration” and recovery”; ultimately, Brathwaite “establishes a new order out of the wreckage of the beachscape, where “out of the ruins”, “out of the cracks”, “out of the silence” new voices and images might begin to grow”[12].

The voice of material environment—whether industrial or “natural”—is echoed (pun intended) by the work and turns of phrases of Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, who has extensively written about the Caribbean eco-poetics of extinction and environmental debris while tracing Caribbean authors’ invocation of environment-as-vocabulary, from Brathwaite and Cesaire to Walcott and visual artists. Describing how sugarcane cultivation was among “the most salient form[s] of power and environmental violence through which empires manifested their hegemony,” Paravisini-Gebert identifies how Martinican artist Gerve Beuze uses both colonial-era maps of the Caribbean and the physical debris of sugarcane plantations, since “Beuze’s understanding of mapping” acknowledges colonial surveying and partition as “the point of departure for the geographic, military, and human conquest […] linked to notions of borders and peripheries” which made Martinique “a container for plantation debris”[13]. Beuze’s Machinique (2007) installation “was mounted at the old distillery buildings of […] one of Martinique’s best-known producers of artisanal rums,” where the piece “was suspended over the grinding machinery […] by thin plastic threads” reminiscent of spiderweb, and positioned adjacent to “life-size portraits of the cane workers”; in the artwork, a map’s suspension like a massive spider in a web is “[g]leaming and menacing—as if to express the possibility of their eternal return” such that “the machinery hovers over the island, ready to crunch cane again at any moment”[14].

Haunted by this predator, this ghost of the plantation, colonial hierarchies remain a threat. These histories are not over, nor done with. Alternately, this “unfinished” history suggests that assertions of agency, of resistance to those plantation legacies, also remains a present reality and future potentiality. Walcott describes the witnessing of a sunrise on a Caribbean shore, when “the noun, the “Antilles” ripples like brightening water, and the sounds of leaves, palm fronds, and birds are the sounds of a fresh dialect”; moreover, “[i]t is not that History is obliterated by this sunrise,” not that a painful legacy of the Middle Passage or the sweltering heat of the sugar refinery is an obscured set of histories, but that “[i]t is there in Antillean geography, in the vegetation itself”[15]. Like Collins’s reading of the “red petticoat” of nutmeg leaves flattened in the wind, and like Brathwaite’s translation of the not-in-pentameter hurricane roars, Walcott reaches to interpret the vocabulary of the fresh dialect of the sounds of leaves by the shore. They each at least hint not at landscapes and peoples with foreclosed and pre-determined futures, but at the existence of an agential Caribbean.

If tidalectics often aspires towards the translation of Caribbean ecologies, then perhaps a feature of the conception that ought to be highlighted is its frequent concern also with the interconnectivity of what at first might seem to be separate or disparate islands. This interconnectivity implies shared concerns among cultures and linguistic traditions (human language this time, rather than the patois of hurricanes). Brathwaite and Collins were born in Barbados, Benitez-Rojo was Cuban, Beuze is Martinican, and Walcott was from Saint Lucia; their work was variously written in different languages including Bajan, Spanish, English, and French. Yet all were concerned with interpreting the entangled environmental and social histories and the languages of storms. Each of their islands was subjected to similar mechanisms of imperial control, importation of indentured servants, and extractivism. Each of their islands was seemingly fated to remain peripheral. We might think of Glissant’s archipelagic thought, Benitez-Rojo’s repeating islands, and Brathwaite’s tidalectics as theoretically similar to Epeli Hau’ofa’s sea of islands concept. In other words, Pacific and Caribbean thinkers both attest to similar notions: an impetus to conceive of the residents of archipelagos, and their experiences enduring cultural and material subjugation imposed by (post)colonial extraction, to share common ground (or common sea!).

Section 2: Ruins of the South

In describing the ruination of Amazonia, scarred by twentieth-century industrial projects like the ill-fated rubber extraction hub of Fordlandia and the sugarcane plantations of Bahia, historian Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal invokes the words of Argentinian poet Edgar Bayley, whose poem Es infinita riqueza abandonada (they are infinite, these abandoned riches) “captures well the sense of vastness and waste, of the awe before the enormity” of devastation “that produces the ruins of the South” and hints at “the indissoluble link between the post-industrial metropolis and the wider phenomena of ruination”[16]. Ruination is seemingly endless. Who—in the Caribbean, in Latin American broadly, in the tropics at large—has not been affected? In the same piece invoking these infinite ruins, Gonzalez-Ruibal notes that “[i]t is well known that human memory is tricky,” and asks what might be concealed, suggesting that we might look to ruination and debris to lift the veil.

Recounting the storied persistence of un barco en el monte, a ship in the forest, curiously stranded “in the heart of the Chaco plains near the Bermejo River” dating from the time when “private companies had launched steamships on the river as part of an effort to create a commercial route across the Gran Chaco” following the 1854 US Navy steamboat expedition upriver, anthropologist Gaston Gordillo perceives that “[t]he overlapping absences these ruined places and objects—the [partially dried] Bermejo, ships, progress—saturate the regional space as well as the local memories with phantom presences”[17]. Yet, this material debris of state-backed commercial expansion speaks, like a hurricane, about a sort of historiographical turbulence: Not every industrial operation on Latin American frontiers was always successful. This wrecked ship relatively close to “the foot of the Andes” also evidenced the wreckage of nineteenth-century notions of “transportation utopias” and constituted “potent material confirmation of the defeat of previous attempts to civilize the Chaco”[18].

Taken together, these two cases might tell us that ruination and debris can help us perceive unheralded histories bulldozed by the project(s) of colonialism, but also reveal the resilience of lives lived otherwise. Fordlandia was abandoned and the steamboat was wrecked; their remnant architectures are more than a curiosity, but communicate the impermanence of colonial projects. The bodies, cultures, and epistemologies of colonial subjects might sometimes be fragile, but colonial projects and polities can also be revealed to be fragile in some contexts; the project of colonialism is not complete and is not uniformly successful. Scholar Petra Petursdottir, advocating the “valuing [of] ruination and decay,” suggests that “things are never innocent beings, they are never just there” and are instead “political locations,” while “ruins […] also become potential agents of disruption,” like “an anomaly within the contemporary geopolitical order” which “bears witness to alternative geographies[19]. The rusted boiler of the steamboat, stranded near the Bemejo, is not a mere novelty, despite its exceptional uniqueness. Tim Edensor finds that “[t]his kind of remembering implies an ethics about confronting and understanding otherness (here, the alterity of the past) which is tactile, imaginative,” since “in such spaces as industrial ruins, the excessive debris constitutes material for multiple modes of narration about the past” beyond “institutionazlied rhetoric” which “haunts dominant ways of seeing and being”[20] Behind hegemonic historical narratives of a fully ruined Caribbean basin, alternative ecologies and epistemologies nonetheless persisted.

Section 3: Transnational archipelagos

If imperial administrators saw (and exploited) the interconnectivity of archipelagos in distant seas, they were not alone: Caribbean and Pacific thinkers (and those from elsewhere, too) alike have perceived shared conditions of imposed colonial rule, and have approached the implications quite differently. Tongan-Fijian scholar Epeli Hau’ofa’s “Our Sea of Islands” (1994) has become a widely-read touchstone for comparable conceptions of transnational shared interests of “islanded” peoples[21]. Like the Caribbean, the archipelagos of the Pacific are sometimes positioned as having “linguistic divides” attributable to the historical divvying-up of the region by European colonial powers. And yet, again like the Caribbean, literary traditions of the Pacific have at times converged upon shared expressions relationality transcending borders.

Isolation, whether by literal demaracation for that overt purpose (as in the case of early-twentieth-century French penal colony in French Guiana), or whether by de facto function through the economic isolation and subjugation of an individual island (as in the case of eighteenth-century British dictating of Black persons’ allowances in Jamaica, for example) have, of course, been contested. To illustrate developments in transnational archipelagic thinking in the second half of the twentieth-century, scholar of postcolonial literature Michelle Keown invokes the early writing of Dewe Gordoe, who had authored “Clapotis” (“Wave Song”) and “Zone Interdite” (“Forbidden Zone”), in which she “contrast[ed] the sere, inhospitable environment of the prison exercise yard with the plentitude and dynamism of the sea beyond the prison walls”[22].Directly drawing parallels among Brathwaite’s tidalectics, Glissant’s poetics of relation, Hau’ofa’s sea of islands, and other Oceanian thinking, Keown suggests that, “[a]nticipating Hau’ofa’s model of an interconnected Oceania, Gorode posits the movement of the waves as conveying ripples of protest from Oceania’s easternmost island, Rapanui” and across the ocean in a scope that “establishes what  “that, rather than remaining rooted in individual nation contexts, engages in a horizontal, transoceanic dialogue with other cultures, languages and value systems in its critique of colonialism”[23].

This ripple effect, this wave of protest emanating outward and transcending linguistic and national borders, might reverberate beyond the Pacific, on other shores. In discussing the “resonance” of similar movements against austerity in Athens, Paris, Madrid, and Tunis from 2005-2011, Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis invoked archipelagic thought beyond the Caribbean. The two scholars were prompted by Fred Moten, who offered: “[Y]our collaboration is also a collaboration of the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. It’s a[n] […] archipelagic thing, or thinking. Y’all think by way of islands […]. You link up with a long line of thought that approaches beach, and shoal, and delta”[24]. Vourloumis responded:

I would say this non-continental “tidalectic” thinking, to cite Brathwaite, spans all the way towards the nusantara (archipelago) of Southeast Asia as well. In my research I think about the islands of the “former East Indies” and the “former West Indies” together too, and, working with Sandra, also Puerto Rico and Greece. […] Puerto Rico and Greece share a history of being ongoing debt colonies.[25]

While referencing archipelagic thinking, Ruiz and Vourloumis consistently invoke two concepts while they seek to approximate the rippling of movement-building from one region to another: murmuration (the congregating and fluid synchronized mass movement of flocking birds) and resonance. Ruiz’s and Vourloumis’ resonance bears similarities to Hau’ofa’s waves from Pacific seas of islands, and to Brathwaite’s and Glissant’s poetics of relation and tidalectics from the Caribbean.

Keown, again exploring Gorode’s simultaneous criticism of French imperialism and the Chilean governance of Pinochet, notes how Gordoe’s writing “extends its poetics of relation not just to francophone and Hispanophone cultures elsewhere in Oceania, but also to the internal politics of Chile in the 1970s, making reference to the deposing of Salvador Allende […]. Chile’s internecine violence, enacted on its own nationals, is shown to be redolent […], and resonates, in a tidalectics pattern of ebb and flow, with the waves of French colonial violence rippling out from New Caledonia, via French Polynesia, […] and back again”[26].

Here, as resonance explicitly joins poetics of relation and Oceanian waves, Keown refers to another aspect of maritime ecologies: ebb and flow.

Scholars might corroborate this persistence of Early Modern Caribbean-esque border-making tendencies on other more-contemporary shores. Describing shared qualities “[f]rom the Black Atlantic to the Black Mediterranean,” scholar Iaian Chambers posits that in “[r]egistering the marine world as central to the making of modernity—from slave ships and sea-borne empires to container logistics […]—we encounter the constant of colonialism in the haunting racism that produces the violent grammar of inhospitability, today etched on the body of the contemporary migrant”[27].

Moten’s reference to “a long line of thought” concerning “beach, and shoal, and delta”; Keown’s reference to a “transoceanic” “ebb and flow”; and Chambers’ invocation of borders-as-violence are all at play in scholar Hi’ilei Julia Hobart’s description of shoreline theorizing. Hobart, from Hawaii, proposes that “[s]horelines, indeed, do much to trouble the neat boundaries, borders […] of the colonial imaginary,” and that “[f]or Kanaka Maoli, the muliwai, or estuary, best theorizes shoreline dynamics” as a site where the ebb and flow of the tide “is where we are reminded that places are never fixed or pure or static”.[28] In addition to the estuary’s demonstration of fluctuation in landscape as consequential for the understanding of boundary-delineating, Hobart also highlights how attention to the shoreline provokes contemplation of cohabitation and other-than-human life: “And so thinking about shallows [and tides] necessitates attention to the multiplicity […], the ways that tides, rivers, storm clouds, tide pools, and aquifers converse with the ocean to produce […] archipelagic thinking”[29].

Section 4: The Global Indies

By the late eighteenth century, imperial administrators seemingly perceived that distant islands had great bearing on each other’s social and environmental worlds; indeed, colonial policy sometimes made these ideas explicit. Celebrated botanist and president of the Royal Society Joseph Banks, the de facto founding leader of Britain’s premiere botanical gardens at Kew and a friend to the royal family, was petitioned (beginning in 1772) by planters in Jamaica to orchestrate the transplantation of breadfruit from newly-surveyed Polynesia to the Caribbean, with the intent that the breadfruit could be cultivated as a cheap crop to satiate plantation laborers and stave off budding recalcitrance (when the mission was finally dispatched to Polynesia in 1789, the ship itself fell to a rather famous-still-to-this-day rebellion, the mutiny on the Bounty, and hopes of averted slave rebellions in the Caribbean were undermined less than two years later when the Haitian Revolution erupted)[30]. Banks, referring to the breadfruit project, made the connections between the islands of different oceans explicit. His words were: “Ceres was deified for introducing wheat among a barbarous people. Surely, then the natives of the two Great Continents, who, in […] this work, will mutually receive from each other numerous products of this earth as valuable as wheat, will look up with veneration at the monarch […] & the minister who carried into execution, a plan […].[31]” Banks, at least, perceived the entanglement of “the two Great Continents,” despite British familiarity with Tahiti only dating back two decades to the 1767 voyage (on which Banks traveled as a botanist).

Historian Sujit Sivasundaram, advancing scholarship concerned with a pointedly global imperial history, has also articulated the connections among different archipelagos through “the geographical ‘circuit’” of imperial exchange, notably in his Waves Across the Sea (2020) and “Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific” (2020)[32]. By the eighteenth century, Britain maintained botanical stations at Barbados and Jamaica while simultaneously establishing similar stations in Singapore, Calcutta, and Bombay, where the outposts operated to naturalize and circulate tropical commodity crops. The association between the two regions was significant enough that Ashley Cohen proposed that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century “British imperialism’s imaginative geography” likely understood the West Indies and East Indies to constitute a “Global Indies,” which yoked together their Caribbean and North American holdings with South and Southeast Asia in both colonial administrative policy and also domestic metropolitan literature and popular culture[33].Examining this yoking together of distant colonies in imperial policy through a multidisciplinary lens, Lisa Lowe has proposed the concept of “the intimacies of four continents,” a yoking together of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, in which imperial administrators understood the global interconnectivity of their tropical and island holdings. Lowe identifies a rather jarring admission from 1803 by administrator John Sullivan of the British Colonial Office in a letter sent to the Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, regarding how to maintain labor supply in the British Caribbean amidst the technical legal abolition of chattel slavery by importing East Asian laborers. It reads:

The events which have recently happened at St. Domingo [Haiti] necessarily awakes all those apprehensions which the establishment of a Negro government in that land gave rise to some years ago and render it indispensable that every practicable measure of precaution should be adopted to guard the British possessions in the West Indies as well against the danger of a spirit of insurrection being excited amongst the Negroes in our colonies [....].[N]o measure would so effectively provide a security against this danger as that of introducing a free race of cultivators into our islands who from habits and feelings could be kept distinct from the Negroes and who from interest would be attached to the European proprietors. The Chinese people unite the qualities which constitute this double recommendation.[34]

Section 5: Postcolonial temporality

Finally, the ebb and flow--of both imaginative theorizing and material seas—returns the tide to Haiti, the focal point of that revolutionary shock-wave at the turn of the nineteenth century. Paravisini-Gebert, while lamenting local extinctions of endemic species of amphibians and birds, animates a tale of (post)colonial disavowal:

In the Caribbean region, an archipelago that Edouard Glissant once described as “fissured by histories,” resilience has been wrought out of the ebb and flow of intellectual and physical currents [...], [...] mercurial - a fluid ecology […] - yet one rooted in […] shared historical markers: a fateful European encounter […], the plantation, […] slow violence of environmental mismanagement […]. In the discourse of Caribbean resilience, Haiti has emerged as a symbol of a nation in environmental crisis, an ecological revenant […]. I cannot think of one single frog species in the Caribbean not under some sort of assault. Think, for example, of the plight of the critically endangered Dominica and Montserrat crapauds (Leptodactylus fallax or mountain chicken), gathered and airlifted to zoos […]. We can tell this story alongside that of the efforts to save Puerto Rico’s endangered endemic parrot species, the Amazona vittata.[35]

Was this a “natural” disaster? The degradation of Caribbean forests and the extinction of endemic species, as emblematized by a pitiable Haiti so apparently worn down by hurricanes and soil loss? Paravisini-Gebert cautions:

[There was] intensive coverage of the 2010 earthquake and the cholera outbreak that followed from television, blogs, commentators, magazines, photojournalists, and celebrities [...]. The ubiquitous references to the resilience of the Haitian people rarely included any context [...]. Coverage did not extend to the analysis of how the Haitian people found themselves in their present predicament. In what Elizabeth McAllister called “the dehistoricization of the victims and the depoliticization of the disaster,” audiences learned little or nothing about Haitian poverty as the result of the United States-supported policies [...], or of “international debt and inequitable trade deals,” or “the international banking institutions’ neoliberal structural adjustment programs and the subsequent collapse of the Haitian agricultural sector that stemmed from US imports.” The media’s discourse on resilience stemmed from a […] notion of the Haitian people’s ability to recover [...] from the multiple misfortunes fate had inflicted upon them [...] relegating their poverty to a natural condition. [...] As Haiti goes, so does the rest of the archipelago.

Citing Yarimar Bonilla’s assessment of post-Irma Puerto Rico as having suffered a decidedly unnatural disaster, Caribbean scholar Mimi Sheller notes that “[m]any in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters” in which “the past history of the violent, coercive transatlantic system of plantation slavery” and “present global […] border regimes […] shape human vulnerability,” and which “continue to influence who has access to resources, safety […] and who will be relegated to” archipelagos of foreclosed futurity[36]. Echoing Sheller, fellow Caribbean scholar Leniqua Wellcome also highlights the temporally-resounding legacy of historical arrangements in disproportionate harms. Wellcome offers:

The spate of not-so-natural disasters in the Caribbean […] [including] the 2005 Guyanian floods, the 2010 Haitian earthquake, Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 […] [ought to be contemplated alongside apparent] violent foreclosures throughout the twentieth century of Caribbean, Latin American, and African states’ attempts to implement alternative political forms. […] To draw on David Scott, the region exists in a temporal afterness of postcolonial […] time—an unyielding present […]. As in bad dreams, Dionne Brand writes, “[we] are constantly overwhelmed by the persistence of the spectre of captivity.”[37]

Engaging Pacific epistemologies and Hau’ofa’s theorizing, perhaps we could draw another parallel with this Caribbean perception of an imposed temporal afterness, a forestalling, a kind of limbo. Discussing twentieth-century US nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, scholar Rebecca Oh cites how narrative and rhetorical maneuvers of US administrators adopt “assumptions of, and thus work to construct the Pacific as, a place and a peoples with no future” by distinguishing “possible from impossible” juridical and political potentialities and by referring to the region’s fragility and isolation; the Pacific was imaginatively constructed as “empty space” and as “exotic, malleable, and […] dispensible” from “the prevalence of […] narrative in fin de siècle writing about the Pacific” to “Kissinger’s dismissal of the Pacific: “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?””[38]. However, invoking Achille Mbembe’s description of “time in the postcolony,” Oh proposes that Oceanian poetry and other “Pacific texts […] destabilize inadequate presents […] by contesting linear and teleological Western time” while asserting “the possibility […] of Pacific worlds in spite of Western temporal closures”[39]. Thus, a case is made that literature itself can be a vehicle for assertion of autonomy in postcolonial spaces, and that the eco-poetics of archipelagic thinking are not empty reflections, but vibrant and agential.

Conclusion: Turning over stones in el monte

This persistence of the spectre of captivity in seemingly-forestalled futures recalls Paravisini-Gebert’s analysis of Beuze’s art exhibition in Martinique: a giant spider, fashioned out of derelict sugar refining equipment, sits suspended above the whole island, looming, ready to descend and crunch cane again. This “afterness” of “postcolonial time” also suggests that waves of violence, and waves of rebuttal and refusal, reverberate temporally, from the past, and not just in space.

Invoking Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememories,” scholar Avery Gordon addresses haunting and social abandonment, as she describes the “utopian margins” and the importance of recalling unheralded histories and voices in the Early Modern era; Gordon has repeatedly emphasized the imperative of “calling up and out, naming what’s missing,” that “the point is rather to show what is living and breathing in the place blinded from view”[40]. Specifically referencing the turbulent historiography of the Caribbean, Gordon suggests that scholars might try to “pick up […] those ‘historical alternatives’ that ‘haunt a given society,’” and to invoke “’the many-headed hydra of the seventeenth-century revolutionary Atlantic’” by recalling the experiences of those “who challenged” dominant European formations with their “often illegible, illegitimate or trivialized forms of escape, resistance, opposition, and alternative ways of life”[41]. If the text of an interpretive placard glosses the narrative, then where might we look to perceive this submerged iceburg of experience? This recalls Sylvia Wynter’s encouragement to seek out “secretive histories” that detail the “plot against the plantation,” which McKittrick framed as resisting the “teleological underpinning” of much of colonialism’s imperatives.

The turn of the twentieth century seemingly partially resolved at least one anxiety among European national power-brokers, as 1896 marked a resolution of the lingering depression following the Panic of 1873. In that context, “[i]n all of western Europe” and among “their North American cousins […] these years (1896-1914) live on in memory as the good old days—the Edwardian era, la belle epoque”; and yet “[f]or most non-Europeans […], on the other hand, the turning of the century was a dark age of colonial war, indentured labor, […] forced migration, famine and disease” constituting an “epochal crossroads” when “planters and labor contractors were exploiting the global subsistence crisis […] to harvest workers for the rubber forests of Para, the deep mines of Witwaterstrand, the sugar plantations of Hawii, Fiji, Guyana and Natal, and the tea estates of Assam and Ceylon”[42]. While upper classes of New York and London might’ve reflected fondly on the fin d’siecle, whole worlds of people—in the metropole, too—experienced those years quite differently. 

Again in the Caribbean and Latin American context(s), musing on Blackness and opacity, scholar Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo also extends the impact of the ethical gravity of engaging with ruination:

In various trans-American imaginaries, the boonies are raced as nonproductive land inhabited by people who are not fully part of the Western episteme. [...] Caribbean(ist) people are familiar with el monte, the hills, or les mornes. El monte is always just around the corner, encroaching, sprouting persistently […] amid the rubble of hurricane disasters or abandoned plantation and industrial sites. […] The hills, like much of our hemisphere, are sites of damage containing the residual energy of violence, [...] the “places of irresolution.” [...] I turn over rocks and push thorny vines to the side to find wet dirt, small creatures, and, perhaps, delightful hidden treasures [...]. What can we make possible when we make room for the unexpected in the midst of ruin.[43]

The voice of the hegemonic historiographical narrative celebrating Late Victorian metropolitan prosperity, this “hegemony of a European world clock,” is countered by the language of storms.

In 1968, Haitian poet Franketienne, “father of Haitian letters,” presented his translation of this language:

Every day, I use the dialect of lunatic hurricanes. […]
Every evening, I use the patois of furious rains. I speak the fury of flooding waters.
Every night, I speak to the Caribbean islands in the tongue of hysterical storms. I speak the hysteria of the roaring sea.
Dialect of hurricanes. Patois of rains. Language of storms.[44]

Bibliography:

Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Duke University Press, 1996.

Brathwaite, Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. New Beacon Books, 1984.

Campbell, Alexandra. “Atlantic exchanges: The poetics of dispersal and disposal in Scottish and Caribbean seas.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55 (2019), no. 2: 195-208.

Chambers, Iaian and Tiziana Terranova, “Technology, Postcoloniality, and the Mediterranean.” e-flux Journal 123 (December 2021).

Cohen, Ashley L. The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture and the Reshaping of the World, 1756-1815. Yale University Press, 2021.

Collins, Merle. “Tout Moun ka Plewe (Everybody Bawling).” Small Axe 11 (2007), no. 1: 1-16.

Davis, Mike. “At world’s end: Drought, famine and imperialism (1896-1902).” Capitalism Nature Socialism 10 (1999), no. 2: 3-46.

Deckard, Sharae. “The Political Ecology of Storms in Caribbean Literature.” In The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics. Edited by Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett. Liverpool University Press, 2017.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 8 (2007), no. 3.

D’Oleo, Dixa Ramirez. “Mushrooms and Mischief: On Questions of Blackness.” Small Axe (2009).

Edensor, Tim. “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23 (2005): 829-849.

Franketienne. Ripe to Burst. Translated by Kaima L. Grover. Archipelago Books, 2014.

Glissant, Eduoard. Caribbean Discourse : Selected Essays. University of Virginia Press, 1992.

Gonzalez-Ruibal, Alfredo. “Ruins of the South.” In Contemporary Archaeology and the City: Creativity, Ruination, and Political Action, edited by Laura McAtackney and Krysta Ryzewski (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Gordillo, Gaston. “Ships Stranded in the Forest: Debris of Progress on a Phantom River.” Current Anthropology 52 (2011), no. 2.

Gordon, Avery F., Katherine Hite, and Daniela Jara, “Haunting and thinking from the Utopian margins: Conversation with Avery Gordon.” Memory Studies (2020).

Gordon, Avery F. “Revolutionary Feminisms: Avery F. Gordon.” Verso Books (Blog), September 2, 2020.

Harney, Stefano, Fred Moten, Sandra Ruiz, and Hypatia Vourloumis. “Resonances: A Conversation on Formless Formation.” e-flux Journal 121 (October 2021).

Hau’ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific 6 (Spring 1994), no. 1: 148-161.

Hobart, Hi’ilei Julia. “On Oceanic Fugitivity.” Ways of Water – Social Science Research Council (September 2020).

Keown, Michelle. “Waves of destruction: Nuclear imperialism and anti-nuclear protest in the Indigenous literatures of the Pacific.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2019).

Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press, 2015.

McKittrick, Katherine. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe 17 (2013), no. 42: 1-15.

Oh, Rebecca. “Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hulme’s Stonefish.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 66 (Winter 2020), no. 4.

Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “Caribbean Archipelagos and Mainlands: Building Resistance against Climate Change.” The Black Scholar 51 (2021), no. 2: 51-62.

Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “Bagasse—Caribbean Art and the Debris of the Sugar Plantation.” In Global Ecologies: Postcolonial Approaches to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Didus, and Carrigan (2015).

Petursdottir, Petra. “Concreate matters: Ruins of modernity and the things called heritage.” Journal of Social Archaeology 13 (2013), no. 1.

Sheller, MiMi. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe 25 (2021): 169-170.

Sivasundaram, Sujit. “Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific.” In Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture: World Perspectives, edited by Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Carter (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Walcott, Derek. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993.

Welcome, Leniqueca A. “The Infrastructures of Liberation at the End of the World: A Reflection on Disaster in the Caribbean.” Small Axe 24 (2020).

Thanks for reading.

Sorry for the excessive length of this text.

Iliana Capozzoli

iliana.capozzoli@umontana.edu

[1] Merle Collins, “Tout Moun ka Plewe (Everybody Bawling),” Small Axe 11 (2007), no. 1: 1-16.

[2] Collins, 2007.

[3] Collins, 2007.

[4] Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (New Beacon Books, 1984).

[5] Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Duke University Press, 1996).

[6] Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993).

[7] Eduoard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse : Selected Essays (University of Virginia Press, 1992).

[8] Glissant, 1992.

[9] Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17 (2013), no. 42: 1-15.

[10] McKittrick, 2013.

[11] Alexandra Campbell, “Atlantic exchanges: The poetics of dispersal and disposal in Scottish and Caribbean seas,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55 (2019), no. 2: 195-208.

[12] Campbell, 2019.

[13] Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Bagasse—Caribbean Art and the Debris of the Sugar Plantation,” in Global Ecologies: Postcolonial Approaches to the Environmental Humanities, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Didus, and Carrigan (2015).

[14] Paravisini-Gebert, 2015.

[15] Walcott, 1993.

[16] Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal, “Ruins of the South,” in Contemporary Archaeology and the City: Creativity, Ruination, and Political Action, ed. Laura McAtackney and Krysta Ryzewski (Oxford University Press, 2017).

[17] Gaston Gordillo, “Ships Stranded in the Forest: Debris of Progress on a Phantom River,” Current Anthropology 52 (2011), no. 2.

[18] Gordillo, 2011.

[19] Petra Petursdottir, “Concreate matters: Ruins of modernity and the things called heritage,” Journal of Social Archaeology 13 (2013), no. 1.

[20] Tim Edensor, “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23 (2005): 829-849.

[21] Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6 (Spring 1994), no. 1: 148-161.

[22] Michelle Keown, “Waves of destruction: Nuclear imperialism and anti-nuclear protest in the Indigenous literatures of the Pacific,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2019).

[23] Keown, 2019.

[24] Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Sandra Ruiz, and Hypatia Vourloumis, “Resonances: A Conversation on Formless Formation,” e-flux Journal 121 (October 2021).

[25] Harney, et al., 2021.

[26] Keown, 2019.

[27] Iaian Chambers and Tiziana Terranova, “Technology, Postcoloniality, and the Mediterranean,” e-flux Journal 123 (December 2021).

[28] Hi’ilei Julia Hobart, “On Oceanic Fugitivity,” Ways of Water – Social Science Research Council (September 2020).

[29] Hobart, 2020.

[30] Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 8 (2007), no. 3.

[31] DeLoughrey, 2007. [Banks correspondence to Yonge, May 1878 in Chambers 89, 90.}

[32] Sujit Sivasundaram, “Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific,” in Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture: World Perspectives, ed. Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Carter (Oxford University Press, 2020).

[33] Ashley L. Cohen, The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture and the Reshaping of the World, 1756-1815 (Yale University Press, 2021).

[34] Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015).

[35] Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Caribbean Archipelagos and Mainlands: Building Resistance against Climate Change,” The Black Scholar 51 (2021), no. 2: 51-62.

[36] MiMi Sheller, “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures,” Small Axe 25 (2021): 169-170.

[37] Leniqueca A. Welcome, “The Infrastructures of Liberation at the End of the World: A Reflection on Disaster in the Caribbean,” Small Axe 24 (2020).

[38] Rebecca Oh, “Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hulme’s Stonefish,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 66 (Winter 2020), no. 4.

[39] Oh, 2020.

[40] Avery F. Gordon, “Revolutionary Feminisms: Avery F. Gordon,” Verso Books (Blog), September 2, 2020.

[41] Avery F. Gordon, Katherine Hite, and Daniela Jara, “Haunting and thinking from the Utopian margins: Conversation with Avery Gordon,” Memory Studies (2020).

[42] Mike Davis, “At world’s end: Drought, famine and imperialism (1896-1902),” Capitalism Nature Socialism 10 (1999), no. 2: 3-46.

[43] Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo, “Mushrooms and Mischief: On Questions of Blackness,” Small Axe (July 2009).

[44] Franketienne, Ripe to Burst, trans. Kaima L. Grover (Archipelago Books, 2014). [Orig. publ. 1968, French.]