Ecological Visions

ECOLOGICAL VISIONS 

The Caribbean islands and the Guyanas are, for geographical and historical reasons – and the latter not of their current populations’ making – on the frontline of ecological crisis. The region has a long-term history of biodiversity loss and soil impoverishment, and currently is threatened by the effects of global warming with rising land temperatures, rising sea levels and more frequent and more severe weather events. As David Watts shows in his classic study of Caribbean historical geography, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (1987) there has always been a tragic mismatch between images of the Caribbean islands as new Edens – without gainsaying their real beauty – and the geographic reality that the region has always been ecologically fragile because it is subject to the hazards of hurricanes, flooding, drought, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Not for nothing was “hurucane” -- meaning evil spirit of the wind -- an Arawak word. As Watts summarises, the history of the environment in the Caribbean is one where, prior to European dominance, Amerindian subsistence agriculture and fishing maintained the islands in a state of environmental balance, but from the point where the islands became enmeshed in global systems of resource exploitation – from sugar to tourism – they have suffered profound and probably irrecoverable damage to their environments. It is evident that only belatedly did sugar planters understand anything about the fragile nature of tropical soils, especially when the forests where cycles of nutrients were stored, rather than in the soil itself, were grubbed up. Watts’s book is a history of environmental degradation and a recognition that as long as the islands remain dominated by metropolitan interests that is unlikely to change – and his book was published in 1987, before the effects of global warming on the region had been recognised.

 Whilst the science is still speculative on the connection between global warming, particularly drought caused by warming, and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, it is clear on the connection with the frequency of hurricanes, drought and floods caused by violent rainfall. When Andrew Salkey wrote his classic children’s novels, Hurricane (1964), Earthquake (1965) and Drought (1966), he was telling a truth about Caribbean environmental reality and being prophetic in a way he can’t have anticipated. As Mimi Sheller’s Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (2020) makes plain, no consideration of “natural” disaster makes any sense without recognising it in the context of neo-colonial global power, and the vastly different consequences for people in terms of class, race and gender. 

If sugar production dominated the Caribbean until the mid 20th century, tourism has taken its place as no less environmentally destructive. The connection between sugar and tourism works on many levels, as Polly Pattullo’s study, Last Resort: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (1996) shows, whether the tourism of the large holiday complexes or the cruise ships disgorging visitors for a hasty shopping trip. Tourism has become as much a monoculture as sugar was, as dominant in its economic importance for many of the smaller islands, as largely metropolitan in its ownership and export of profits and as rooted in an unequal relationship between mainly white visitors and Black people delivering services. Like sugar monoculture, tourism has been vastly destructive of the Caribbean environment. In addition, given the degree of local post-independence government involvement in tourism, there has been huge scope for political corruption, notably with the Bird premiership in Antigua. To quote Patullo: The catalogue of environmental destruction directly attributed to the growth of the tourist industry is long. It includes erosion of beaches, the breakdown of coral reefs, marine and coastal pollution from watersports, the dumping of waste and the non-treatment of sewage, sandmining and the destruction of wetlands and salt ponds… (106) The drive for short term gain not only leaves lasting and sometimes permanent damage, such as the loss of mangrove swamps which have the function of being vital for bio-diversity and protection of coasts from erosion by the sea, but that drive works counter to the profitability of tourism because damaged environments makes tourists “vote with their feet.” 

But sugar and tourism have not been the only metropolitan owned (American and Canadian) and managed extractive industries. In Jamaica and Guyana, bauxite mining scarred the countryside from the 1950s on, became less vital as world prices for alumina fell in the 1980s, but recent years have seen a rising demand from the new centres of industrial production, in particular state capitalist Chinese control (JISCO) of bauxite resources, including coal-fired processing of alumina in Nain, St Elizabeth, Jamaica (reportedly with ill effects on the health of local residents and pollution of air quality and water supplies). Attempts to extend production into the Cockpit country of the Maroons is being resisted. In Guyana, bauxite mining, except for a brief period of nationalisation, has been foreign owned, currently dominated by Chinese and Russian companies. As elsewhere, Bauxite mining has damaged the Guyanese environment through loss of rainforest, loss of fauna and flora habitat, and soil degradation. 

The current effects of global warming both interact with each other and with the older consequences of ecological damage that go back through the four hundred years of the region’s colonial history: principally the results of the destruction of forested landscapes to make way for sugar monoculture and the impoverishment of soils through overproduction and overuse of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. As one consequence, the continuing pace of urbanisation, the development of economies based on tourism, and the ever more regular instances of hurricanes, floods and drought has meant that 30% of degraded land in all small island developing states and 14% of degraded land in the world is to be found in the Caribbean. Much of the land available to small farmers is hilly and prone to erosion from heavy rains. Size is part of the problem. In the earliest decades of plantation capitalism, small islands such as St Kitts and Antigua were favoured for settlement and sugar cultivation because they were easier to defend from external enemies (other European powers) and from the internal uprisings of enslaved people or their escape to maroon settlements as in Jamaica and the Guyanas. But small island environments are fragile and they suffered most rapidly from soil exhaustion and erosion, including from the introduction of European animals such as goats and cattle. Even on larger islands such as Barbados, by the 1660s, as one observer bewailed, “All the trees are destroyed”. It was not until the 18th century that there was any realisation of the damage that had been done to soil fertility and to weather patterns, where cutting down forests brought about increasingly arid local climates (because the humidity of forests provides more moisture to clouds than does cleared land). There was a mix of short-term capitalist interest and ideology here. It was not just about bringing more acreage into cultivation, but clearance was equated with the civilising “improvement” of wilderness and as a proof of individual settler ownership (even if land was already occupied and cultivated collectively by the original Amerindian Arawak inhabitants). 

An awareness of climatic damage is picked up in Elma Napier’s novel A Flying Fish Whispered (1938), set in Dominica (called St Celia in the novel), the island least damaged by sugar plantation culture, where peasant subsistence agriculture dominated, and where more tropical forest survives than anywhere else in the islands of the region. In a contrast drawn with Antigua (called Parham Island) where the novel’s main character, Teresa Craddock makes a disappointed visit, she sees an island as unlike “as one island can be from another”. Superficially, Parham “has a prettiness of pale green cane fields […] But when you come close to it and touch it you find that it is dry and dusty […] There are no forests, because for centuries the land has been tilled. […] [She] realised that the landscape […] was dominated now by the twin steel chimneys of the sugar factory […] from which the wind carried a stench that came from dead fish, of minute creatures called “millions” that were drawn up out of the water into the machinery to perish thus nauseatingly in the making of sweetness” (xx) – an image of the waste of the natural in the pursuit of profit. Whilst the Caribbean has always been visited by hurricane, by drought and by flood, over the past few decades these events have grown in frequency and severity. And both in the past, when these island patterns existed before the effects of man-made climate change, and in the present, the consequences always impacted most severely on the enslaved, and now the poorest. 

In Anthony Kellman’s Limestone, an Epic poem of Barbados (2008) and in Diana McCaulay’s novel Huracan (2012), episodes describe how whilst the planters have stone buildings to shelter in, the enslaved are wholly at the mercy of the elements, their deaths noted chiefly as a financial loss. In Angela Barry’s The Drowned Forest (2022), the hurricane that splits the novel and its characters lives in two is much more than a dramatic device because it links into the implications of the novel’s title, the discovery of the roots of a tree miles off the coast of Bermuda – a reminder of the fact of rising sea levels at the end of the Pleistocene era and a warning of rising sea levels to low-lying Bermuda whose highest elevation is only 76 metres. 

In recent decades, the evidence remains that the economies of small island states are incapable of managing hurricane damage without external intervention. In Grenada, the arrival of Ivan in 2004 caused 12 deaths, damaged 90% of buildings and caused US$900 M damage, twice GDP. Grenada was still recovering from Ivan when Emily struck in 2005. Hurricane Irma caused US $3.6 billion damage to the US Virgin Islands and the long-term loss of 11% of the population. Hurricane Maria brought thousands of preventable deaths to Puerto Rico in 2017 with 11 months of electricity blackout, and losses calculated at $132 billion. The island was still in recovery because of dwindling US support in 2022 when Fiona struck. In Dominica, Maria caused 31 deaths, $930M damages and $380M losses of earnings from agriculture and tourism. It needed international aid to ensure the minimal survival of its population. According to Mia Mottley, Maria inflicted a 226% GDP loss to the island. “What premium would they have to pay to protect them from that?” she asked at Cop 27. 

Global warming and rising sea temperatures impacts on both the severity and frequency of hurricanes and on rising sea levels. And though tourist-oriented photographs offer a vision of the Caribbean as mountainous (which in parts it is) because of the islands’ volcanic origins, coastal areas, where much of the population lives, is often at much lower altitudes. For instance, Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, has most of its land at between 2 and 10ft above sea level and other inhabited coastal areas are below sea-level. How long Georgetown can survive behind its sea-wall is open to doubt. In the floods of 2005, “approximately 290,000 people (39% of Guyana's population) were affected and the economic impact was estimated to be about US$465 million, or 59% of Guyana's GDP.” 34 lives were lost. Flooding returned in 2020 and severely in 2021. In the relatively hilly landscape of St Lucia, floods in 2014 caused 6 deaths, destroyed 30 to 40 per cent of the banana crop and damaged 90 per cent of its vegetable crops. There was repeat flooding in 2016, and in November 2022, 200 families were displaced in the north of the island. 

THE HISTORICAL IMPACT OF THE ANTHROPOCENE 

In Euro-centric versions of the Anthropocene, the beginnings of the man-made reshaping of the forces at work in the natural world tend to be located in the 19th century industrial revolution with the coal-driven energy that fired factories throughout northern Europe and later the northern USA and in the process pumped climate-changing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A truer estimate of the beginnings of the Anthropocene, from the perspective of the Caribbean, puts the era back four-hundred years to the origins of plantation capitalism, where the trade and cruel exploitation of African chattel labour (and later Indian indentured labour) matched the exploitation of soil and damage to flora and fauna. It is clear from the study of the region’s most significant geographer, David Watt, that from its beginnings, plantation capitalism brought into the islands a population that exceeded what could be sustained by local agricultural production. Only the remorseless toll of enslaved labour on human bodies and life kept any kind of balance. As Vincent Brown’s brilliant and gruelling The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008) carefully estimates, the population of Jamaica almost certainly turned over every seven years because of early death and massively high infant mortality, these losses being replaced by fresh supplies brought on the slave ships from Africa. Even after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, when the British Government expected the slave owners to manage their human capital more carefully, with populations starting to rise through natural increase, the populations of the islands, in fact, fell. They only began to increase when emancipated Africans and ex-indentured Indians began to generate their own means of life separate or at least partially separate from the estates, and when, belatedly, the colonial authorities made some improvements to welfare standards. In the case of indentured Indian labour, improvements only happened when employers recognised that they were losing so much labour power through malnourishment and endemic disease such as malaria and hookworm infestation. 

As soon as there was improved attention to killer diseases in the 20th century (such as Dr Giglioli’s campaign against malaria in Guyana) infant mortality fell dramatically, lifespans extended and populations rapidly exceeded what the islands could sustain, with, in particular, high levels (20-30%) of youth unemployment. Only the emigration of over 10% of the region’s population in the 20th century provided any – and then only a partial – solution. As Malcom Ferdinand’s important book Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022) makes clear, no thinking and action over the environmental fracture of nature can have any element of truth or equity unless it acknowledges its origins in Western colonialism, a racial capitalism that brought profits to the west from the bodies of labour from the global south. 

In addition to Ferdinand’s book, this outline also acknowledges frameworks derived from Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s Allegories of the Anthropocene (2019) which brings together scientific and literary studies of islands in both the Caribbean and the Pacific, recognising their common geographic vulnerability to climate change and other capitalist-wrought fractures of nature, their common history of colonial and imperial exploitation and repression, but also the shared capacities of their writers and artists to create literary work that enhances our understanding of the challenges, sometimes to make calls to action, and envision other possibilities. DeLoughrey brings together a focus on the specific effects of climate change and global warming with the creation of waste (both of human lives and potential and of polluting substances like the plastics that are at the heart of capitalist production); with the human breach with non-human nature and the crisis of the loss of biodiversity; and with the pollution of the atmosphere through atomic militarisation and atomic tests (principally in the Pacific but with world wide consequences, for instance Chernobyl). Both Ferdinand’s and DeLoughrey’s books, and more general studies such as Adrienne Buller’s The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism (2022) make it very clear that whilst a historical understanding of the roots of the Anthropocene is important, it is in the past fifty years that global capitalism has inflicted the most damage and that many of the powerfully embedded voices offering green solutions are precisely those forces that created the fracture in the first place and that they continue to pursue the goals of capital accumulation in the interests of the private, corporate and state capitalist elites that are wholly incompatible with achieving a viable and equitable human future in the world. 

Nor is the colonial impact something that only happened in the past, as Ferdinand records in the case of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques where the island population was expelled to make way for the toxic pollution of the testing of weaponry and bombs of all kinds, until mass political action in 2000 brought a halt to US military activities. Even so, the Vieques population were not permitted to return; the island was greenwashed as a nature reserve, much in the same way that the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe records in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007) that the environmentally virtuous creation of parks and other green spaces was a further strategy in Israeli Zionist settler colonialism to bury the evidence of Palestinian villages that had been ethnically cleansed and then physically destroyed. 

For the poorest inhabitants of the Caribbean, the issue will almost certainly be about whether the interests of capital and tourism predominate. It is a sad irony that as the tourist industry grew, overloading islands with temporary visitors, emigration remains the desired option of many Caribbean people. As Mia Mottley made clear in her speech to COP 27: “We were the ones whose blood, sweat and tears financed the industrial revolution … Are we now to face double jeopardy by having to pay the cost as a result of those greenhouse gases from the industrial revolution? That is fundamentally unfair.” 

CARIBBEAN LITERATURE AND ECOLOGY 

Elizabeth De Loughrey in Allegories of the Anthropocene shows how imaginative literature is uniquely capable – if it is read, and if it is focused on material realities and not ideological dreams – of shifting the consciousness and understanding of people to recognise the imperatives of ecological action. At the very least, telling stories about the impact of the human assault on nature tends to reach hearts more effectively than any quantity of statistics. Richard H. Grove’s Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism (1995) charts how from the very beginnings of Western arrival in the Caribbean, a race began between the damage wrought by colonial capitalism and the beginnings of scientific and pragmatic awareness of the ecological harm that was being done. Grove shows clearly that environmentalist awareness is by no means new; unfortunately, like the contemporary critiques of the iniquities of colonialism itself (the environmentalists were frequently but not always critics of colonialism) both were invariably on the losing side of the argument with the ruling class and its defence of landed and capitalist interests. Those who wrote about environmental damage in the past provide us, though, both with observant accounts of what was being done and also show us how false are the arguments of those apologists of empire who argue that we should not judge the sins of the past by the criteria of our “enlightened” times. The truth is that from the beginnings of empire and colonialism there were always some who saw the injustice what was being done and in whose interests. Grove offers an astute reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1616), showing how the play dramatizes in a prophetic way contemporary arguments about the nature and merits of colonial settlement. It is the idealistic Gonzalo, smitten with the island’s beauties, who declares, “Here is everything advantageous to life”, and “Had I plantation of this isle,/ I would with such perfection govern, sir/ To exceed the golden age”. It is not only Gonzalo’s companions who denigrate his vision as gilded and mistakenly false, but of course the presence of Caliban whose enforced labour is what Prospero’s kingdom is based on. But Gonzalo’s vision, with its reference to the classical golden age, when the world was unfallen and no one had to labour, became the archetype for centuries of deceptions and self-deceptions about what actually happened on the islands. Here, literature and other arts must also be seen as, perhaps unconsciously, contributing to ecological disaster, particularly in the long history of seeing the Caribbean as a kind of Eden. 

It is there in Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Bermudas”, written in 1653, praising God for leading dissenting religious refugees from England to find a promised land in the virgin territory of the island (which was, remarkably, a fact, compared to elsewhere in the region where indigenous populations were swept away through genocide and imported disease) that offered god’s bounty without, seemingly, the need for human labour: He gave us this eternal spring Which here enamels everything, And sends the fowls to us in care, On daily visits through the air. He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night; And does in the pomegranates close Jewels more rich than Ormus shows. He makes the figs our mouths to meet And throws the melons at our feet… 

That kind of pastoral vision is less innocently present in the picturesque writings of authors such as William Beckford in his A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790) – and a host of 18th century paintings that revision plantation Jamaica and elsewhere in the region as if it was some rolling, picturesque English countryside – a vision that hid the reality of a manmade landscape, the human cruelty and waste of slavery and the short-visioned exploitation of nature that destroyed soil fertility. Beckford, for instance, wrote: “How delightful it is, when the soul appears to be detached from the body, and the cognitive powers are awake, to contemplate the sublime and the obvious wonders of creation in her more splendid as well as humble ornaments…”. For a considerable period, some plantations grew sugar without the benefit of fertilizers because the soil appeared so fertile. When planters finally recognised that topsoil was being destroyed, they evolved the technique of “cane-holing”, where enslaved workers sweated to dig separate square holes to fill with trash and manure before planting – a technique that enabled stools of cane to grow but did not improve general soil fertility. But even such investment did not survive the growing global decline but long after-life of the sugar industry. This vision of tropical Edens is what underlies the whole Caribbean tourist industry, despite the evidence that everything about tourism – long-haul air travel, the density of new coastal building that puts pressure on scarce water resources and contributes to soil erosion – is ecologically damaging – not least in that it returns many of those who service visitors into an uncomfortably colonial relationship with them. 

Tourism can involve the repackaging of the sugar plantation and its great houses as mythical heritage sites – an utter denial of both the human and ecological “damage” of the reality. For instance, the St Nicholas Abbey (Cherry Tree Hill, St Peter, Barbados) Tour Guide boasts of 350 years of heritage, includes a pamphlet history but does not have one word to mention the enslaved people who laboured there. A map of the site includes small blurry images of caneworkers from some past era. And this is in Barbados, not the UK. As Ian Gregory Strachan, Bahamian novelist, dramatist and academic writes in his righteously angry Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (2002), there emerged a whole discourse of paradisal tourist brochure literature. (And Strachan has much to say about the political corruption that involvement in promoting tourism in the Bahamas.) 

THE BREACH WITH NATURE AND THE ASSAULT ON BIODIVERSITY

In “modern” Caribbean writing, one of the earliest novels to focus on the destruction of the natural world is Yseult Bridges’s pseudonymous novel (written under the name of Tristram Hill) Creole Magic (1936). It is a tragedy that its real ecological awareness goes hand-in-hand with the most appalling negrophobic racism (though it can perhaps be seen as having the virtue of revealing what many white West Indians of the early to mid-twentieth century really thought – for instance she is very concerned to limit the use of the description Creole to someone of “pure European descent”). What Creole Magic focuses on, in a way that anticipates Amanda Smyth’s recent novel Fortune (2020), is the ecological impact of the beginnings of the oil industry in Trinidad in the 1920s, (like Fortune, Creole Magic is built around the true event of the Dome explosion of 1928 in which 16 people on the drilling site were killed.) Despite its racism, Creole Magic puts the critique of ecological damage in the mouth of a Black woman… 

Amanda Smyth’s novel avoids the easy commentary of hindsight so that she allows the characters to speak from their own time, excited by the prospect that oil will bring modernity to Trinidad and shake up a society in long colonial sleep. The ironies of its ambivalently portrayed hero enjoying the novelty of speed on the country’s almost empty roads, flashing past horse-drawn carts, will not be lost on contemporary Trinidadians on their traffic-clogged roads. There is the loss of the natural world; in a scene after the previously undisturbed forest has been cleared, they come upon “an armadillo, a howler monkey and a quenk. Unafraid, the creatures squatted on rocks and stared…” (62) As in Creole Magic, it is the novel’s Black and Indian characters who are most alert to what is being sacrificed as in the foreboding that Chatterjee, the owner of the failing estate, feels when a silk-cotton tree is felled on the estate’s boundary. He berates the European workers, “How you could do this? … You ent know what the cotton tree is?...This tree sacred. Sacred you hear.” He sees among the trees’ roots “the precious shells, stones, jewels, gold, bottles of rum, and all manner of devotional offerings and treasures – the prayers and wishes of hundreds of men and women” (202). Modernity has swept away an older sense of sanctity. 

Another book not thought of as having an ecological vision (and partly missed in my own reading and essay on it published as an introduction to it) is V.S. Reid’s New Day (1949). Presented as a political novel that embraces the emergence of a new Jamaica, the novel has to be judged a failure in its assumption that the politics of the brown middle class offered any possibility of liberation for the Black Jamaican working and peasant classes, New Day nevertheless gives, perhaps despite itself, a profound vision of what the society lost in its passage from the post-emancipation peasant world into the emergence of a local capitalism (local in distinction to the centuries of racialised metropolitan capitalism). This is seen in the transformation of the narrator, a boy in the first third of the novel, set around the terrible colonial pogrom following the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865) to becoming a capitalist businessman in the early years of the 20th century. This transformation of loss is registered in the passage from a world which is body centred, deeply embedded in the natural world of fauna and flora, to one where the world that John Campbell perceives in his “counting house” is of marketable commodities, where any sense of bodily presence in the world has been lost. It is a powerful portrayal (without any commentary or even signs that Reid felt that this was important in the novel) of just what is meant about how capitalist commodity production is at the root of the loss of a human connection with the natural world that is not either exploitative or part of the heritage industries distractions from the reality of commodification. This passage from precapitalist to capitalist is bridged by a curious interim in the novel when John Campbell goes with his older brother, Davy, to become part of a utopian commune on one of the cays off the coast of Jamaica. The utopianism is sunk by Davy’s dour religious authoritarianism into becoming a feudal state that almost inevitably drifts into becoming a capitalist plantation of poorly-paid wage earners with Davy’s son as owner/manager. The other moment of insight in this episode comes when the utopians feel they have been blessed by god with manna in the arrival of booby birds and the eggs they lay. Reid doesn’t mention it, but by the time the novel was written, booby eggs had been so exploited as a delicacy in Jamaica that they were scarce almost to the point of extinction – a truth that Andrew Marvell’s poem with the fowls sent to us “in care” never sees through to its conclusion. 

Beryl Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico (1996) goes further back in history to the 17th century to observe the break between man and nature and locates it very clearly in racial capitalisms enterprise of the plantation. The island world into which Thomas Inkle is shipwrecked among the Caribs is one where the young merchant is bemused by its different values, its being attuned to human existence as part of the natural world, but grateful that being taken as a lover by a young Carib woman, Yarico, saves his life. When Inkle is rescued and is taken to Barbados with Yarico, he reverts to type and sells her. 

Cyril Dabydeen’s novel Dark Swirl also explores the breakdown of connections between the human and animal world. Set in a community in the remote Canje region of Guyana of mainly Indo-Guyanese villagers whose original Hindu sense of the interconnectedness of all living things has in part been broken by the experience of indenture and plantation labour, is expressed in a confused mix of hostility towards creatures like the alligator they torment and burn to death and an inchoate sense that the mythical massacouraman that a visiting European naturalist wants to capture from the river and take back to the zoos of Europe belongs to them and the naturalist must be resisted. It is through the relationship between a young and psychically vulnerable Indian boy, Josh, and the naturalist that Dabydeen addresses the split between a wholistic vision of the natural world and the rationalistic, classifying, pragmatic enlightenment focus that the naturalist has brought with him. Experiencing what feels like a breakdown but what he comes to see as a cleansing of his vision, the naturalist abandons his mission of capturing the massacouraman as increasingly his fight against his unbidden feeling that there was an “infinite spirit of objects – organic and inorganic”… a “quality of life which was present in all things” (73) grows weaker though he dismisses it as “all metaphysics! And he was a scientist.” Here Dabydeen perhaps consciously echoes Wilson Harris in Palace of the Peacock (1960), who is perhaps echoing Coleridge, when Da Silva berates Cameron for pelting a bird, “Da Silvs muttered wildly – ‘I tell you when you pelt she you pelt me. Is one flesh, me flesh, you flesh. She come to save me, to save all of we. You murderer!’ (115)” And so enraged is Da Silva that he stabs Cameron to death. 

That same sense of being marooned in a hostile natural world is conveyed in a number of novels that deal with the plantation experience as one which separated Africans and Indians from ancestral visions of a natural world of which humans were an integral part, to one in which the natural world is uniformly hostile to the human presence. It is there in Harold Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body (1972), in David Dabydeen’s Slave Song (1984) and in Rooplall Monar’s Koker (1987), in each of which the scorpion becomes a symbol of plantation malignancy. In No Pain Like This Body, Pa, the sadistic persecutor of his wife and children, is like a snake, “watching with poison in his eyes”, pelting the snake holes in the rice bed with stones to make his son, Balraj, come out of the water, so he can beat him (16). A scorpion bite kills one of the children, sick with fever, who has been put inside the rice box as the only dry place in the hut. (See for this my essay “From Ancestral to Creole: Humans and Animals in a West Indian Scale of Values” in Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities, ed. A. James Arnold (Virginia: The University Press of Virginia, 1996), 204-229.) The gulf between vestiges of an indigenous sense of the sacredness of all forms of life and a white capitalist consciousness that sees the natural world as another commodity to be exploited is at the heart of Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch. 

Like Cyril Dabydeen’s child, Josh, the “hero” of Roffey’s novel has the distinctiveness from the novel’s island society of being a Rastafarian fisherman. It is he who rescues the mermaid, Aycayia, from her capture by the American big game hunters and he who restores her to the sea when there is no other option. When the Black Conch fishermen crewing Thomas Clayson’s boat realise what they have caught, they instinctively want to cut the lines to the mermaid, feeling there is a boundary that cannot be crossed, but they nevertheless obey Clayson’s order: “Don’t do that… DO NOT do that. She’s worth millions […] We could sell her to the Smithsonian… Or the Rockefeller Institute. For research” (22, 23). But that motive is a lie. What Clayson wants to do is violate the woman in the mermaid, a desire going all the way back to Sir Walter Raleigh’s urge to take Guiana’s maidenhead, though his best effort is to piss “copiously on her flanks, waving his thing as if to hose her down” (34). Later, he is insistent that he will not leave Black Conch without what is his; they had caught her with a licence from the very rumshop he is getting drunk in. 

The clash between the metropolitan capitalist world and a proto-indigenous consciousness is also the theme of Anthony Kellman’s The Coral Rooms (1994) where Percival Veer’s breakdown from the corruptions of work as a career civil servant in the multi-storeyed Federal Bank of Charouga (an island resembling, but not Barbados). In this crisis, Veer has recurrent dreams of the limestone caves he explored with his friends in his boyhood. It is a double image because the caves signify not only some sense of lost freedom but also memories of their boyhood cruelty to the bats in the cave, a breach with nature his later visit must repair: Out of sheer boredom, he recalled, they would corner frightened bats, knock them to the ground with the short sticks they carried and then, in the truest spirit of democracy, elect one of them to unplug his bottle lamp, bathe the helpless creature with kerosene, and set fire to it… The bat writhed like a demon on the fetid floor, scarfed with fire and shrieking in the most terrible way… They could hear the other bats flapping with what seemed like concern (22-23). When he does return to the cave under the guidance of his Virgil, the old man Cane Arrow, Percival makes a dreaming return through the imagined past to a ritual of quasi-Amerindian purification in which he vomits out the accumulated waste of the island. His body becomes the duct “releasing “all the fat black-bellied heads of corporations, political animals, newspaper publishers, lawyers, all scrambling for a piece of the earth to plant a flag in the name of the king of the I” (p. 89) In reference to the “truest spirit of democracy”, Kellman echoes Charles Kingsley (At Last, A Christmas in the West Indies, 1871), who reports that “The free Negro, like the French peasant during the first half of this century, held it to be one of the indefeasible rights of the free man to carry a rusty gun and to shoot every winged thing (107)”. That hunting spirit evidently survived long after as Jacqueline Bishop’s poem, “Trophies for the Mantelpiece” (Fauna, 2006 – a collection that celebrates the oneness between women and nature): "They would go by my grandmother’s house,/ past the guava patch where lazy white cows grazed,/ climbing higher and higher into the dense tropical mountains,/ local boys paid to carry their guns./ Then, for days, there would be an intense shooting;/ at night, the squawks would be terrible:/ cracked mandibles, grazed crowns; green-feathered parrots/ bound and hung by the feet; struck dark-hazel eyes/ covered in their own blood./ Now the yellow-billed and black-billed parrots, native to/ Jamaica, are endangered species./ The Jamaican blackbird’s home: a coffee plantation./ The Jamaican pauraque, black capped petrel, golden swallow – all gone. For weeks – an unearthly silence./ No cacophony of woodpeckers breaking bark,/ no white-breasted dove emerging from the underbrush, asking, in its plaintive wail:/ 'Who cooks for you? What’s that to you?'/ Feeding on the fallen fruits."

WASTE 

DeLoughrey in Allegories of the Anthropocene, uses Orlando Patterson’s novel The Children of Sisyphus (1964) as an exemplar of writing which sees waste – human and material – as being at the heart of capitalist production, as being, along with climate change, threats to biodiversity, the toxity of plastics and other manmade materials and nuclear hazard as being the apocalyptic enemies of the survival of the natural world and a natural world hospitable to humankind. She puts Patterson’s novel in the context of the work of artists such as the Dominican Republican, Tony Capellan, who has created art installations out of the mountains of plastics that wash up on Caribbean shores. Whilst the volume of rubbish waste of Patterson’s mid twentieth-century novel is very modest by 21st century standards, Daphne Ewing-Chow’s article, “Caribbean Islands are the Biggest Per Capita Polluters in the World” indicates that in addition to the externally brought dumping, there are major internal problems. Irrespective of its source, much ends up in the sea, and quoting National Geographic, “the Caribbean Sea’s $5 billion annual trade, its 200,000 direct jobs, its 100,000 ancillary services, food security for 40 million coastal inhabitants, and over $2 billion in dive tourism [are] at risk.” 

The Black Jamaican who eke out a verminous existence on the Kingston rubbish heaps, named with Kingston wit as “the dungle” are quite literally representatives of the descendants of those who were snatched unwillingly from Africa and then abandoned as surplus to the requirements of the decaying sugar industry as part of a growing population for whom emigration (to the city, to other islands, to Panama and then Britain and North America) became the most rational option in a society where the remnants of the plantocracy held onto the best land and where around 30% of the “working population” could obtain no paid work or at best short-term seasonal employment. This is the acute perception of the Rastafarians on the dungle, who cannot regard Jamaica as home, and long and are prepared to sacrifice everything to go back to Africa. The novel begins with the nervous passage of the Kingston refuse collectors on their donkey carts to deposit the day’s rubbish, including spoiled food sprayed with disinfectant to make it inedible but nevertheless fought over by the dungle dwellers. Patterson’s refuse collectors are nervous men, hardly the politicised Third-World garbage collectors of Jean-Luc Goddard’s film Weekend (1967) made three years later, but their role in the novel points to the same vision of garbage and inequality at the heart of consumer capitalism, and prophesises the time where now the West exports its rubbish to the global South and rubbish picking has become the occupation of the most marginalised poor around virtually every city in the global South. 

In John Robert Lee’s poem “Uprising” in Belmont Portfolio, there is moral ownership of outer and inner creation of waste, in “all our garbage throttling oceans” which are the external symbol of “hearts & minds … choked with junk”, contrasted with the sacred spaces of the natural world, “like deep-sea/ coral, pearl-making oyster, supple divine dolphin […]// that we throttle with careless plastic capital”. Here the uprising called for is to “rise up over our ravaged, sorry earth.” 

CLIMATE CHANGE 

Diana McCaulay’s Daylight Come is the most explicitly climate crisis novel from the Caribbean to date, but it achieves what good fiction does by putting characters who have some depth and complexity, who readers will recognise and care for, into the speculative but all-too-believable post-disaster world she creates. It’s set in 2084 on an imagined Caribbean island called Bajacu and focuses on two main characters, Sorrel, a teenager of 14, and her mother, Bibi, who at the age of 40 is facing the threat of being treated as redundant by the island’s fascist rulers, the Domins. Sorrel can no longer bear the restrictions on daily life where the heat is so excessive that people can emerge outside and work only at night. She has just heard a story about the exploits of a Tribal girl, a member of a group living outside the control of the Domins, and though this has not ended well for the tribal girl, the story stirs all her restlessness, her urge to try their luck by leaving the city, despite the Domins and the ferals, the dogs and pigs that have gone wild and feed on unlucky humans they encounter. This urge is reinforced when her mother comes home with the news that they have been ordered to leave their house because it is likely to be flooded as have other parts of the city by rising sea levels. What Sorrel hopes is that if they leave the city and head for higher land, where she has heard there is group called Toplanders who have found more hospitable terrain and grow crops. Although they have the advanced technology of the PlAK, though access to the machine’s different levels of information is severely limited, which gives them some information about what is going on (they learn for instance that shiploads of elite persons from north America are heading towards the island), they are at risk not only from the ferals, Domin guards, the killing heat of the daytime sun but also down bursts of rain (“rain bombs”) that destroy and kill. In the course of Sorrel and Bibi’s escape up into the hills, they meet Tribals (an all-female groups who have a very understandable hostility towards strangers but are trying to evolve a life that harks back to the islands original Amerindian inhabitants, but in a natural world that offers less and less) and others seeking their own salvation in a world where social empathy can seem dangerous to have. McCaulay’s novel is both all too plausible in the climatic world it creates and the vision of social breakdown that accentuates the gulf between the powerful and the weak, but that social solidarity is the only means of survival. 

Inspired by Bob Marley’s line, “the Earth vex”, Geoffrey Philp’s poetry collection, Archipelagos (2023) roots his Jamaican-Miami alarm over the threats of climate change, which has visited floods on coastal Miami in a deep awareness of the colonial origins of ecological hazard to the region. 

REPAIR 

Whilst there is darkness in Nii Ayikwei Parkes, novel Azúcar, its tone is optimistic in its focus on the capacity of people to remake themselves and their circumstances. The protagonist’s lover dies with their unborn child and the energy of the island’s peopleist revolution is being dragged down by the ageing bureaucracy of the country’s leadership, and less seriously, the island’s famed sweet rice is refusing to grow. But the capacity for renewal is portrayed in the unbreakable optimism of Yunior, the Ghanaian musician and agricultural scientist who, after winning a scholarship to be educated in Fumaz, makes his life in there. In one of the professional challenges Yunior faces in Fumaz, Nii Parkes draws on the actual crisis of food security that confronted Cuba after the Soviet Union collapsed and the country ceased to have a market for its sugar and lost the export revenues it used to import food in a distorted monocrop economy. This happened in 1990 and has happened again in 2021 during the covid-19 epidemic, the interruption of oil supplies from Venezuela and the reimposition of the severest, punitive USA sanctions by Trump. In Parkes’s novel, Yunior is one of those who brings the skills and knowledge of organic vegetable gardening to the urban (and rooftop) farms and gardens that sprung up in the city. There is also a counter-point in the novel between the fortunes of sugar and rice. The former was the export crop of the first Spanish settlers and later of the American colonial period (and state controlled export in post 1956 period), whilst rice was a crop brought by enslaved West Africans for their own consumption (which became a key part of Cuban cuisine) but which struggled for investment and labour against the demands of sugar export. In Azucar, symbolically and literally it is sugar that is poisoning the production of sweet rice (because its presence is what has made the rice sweet). It is Yunior’s final task in the novel to achieve some solution.