Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity

Abstract

We cannot think of a time that is oceanlessOr of an ocean not littered with wastage—T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”A Poem that Renders the Sea as Pedagogical History, Lorna Goodison's “Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean” depicts Caribbean schoolchildren learning “the world's waters rolled into a chant.” After shivering through the “cold” Arctic and Antarctic, the class “suffered [a] sea change” in the destabilizing Atlantic, abandoning the terrestrial stability of their benches to enter an ocean in which only their voices orient them in time and space as they “call out across / the currents of hot air.” In fathoming what Derek Walcott has called “the sea [as] history,” their “small bodies” are “borrowed / by the long drowned” (Goodison). While colonial narratives of maritime expansion have long depicted the ocean as blank space to be traversed, these students enter Atlantic stasis, a place occupied by the wasted lives of Middle Passage modernity. This Atlantic is not aqua nullius, circumscribed and mapped by the student oceanographer, but rather a place where the haunting of the past overtakes the present subject. Édouard Glissant has described the Atlantic as a “beginning” for modernity, a space “whose time is marked by … balls and chains gone green” (Poetics 6): a sign of submarine history and its material decay. Thus, Atlantic modernity becomes legible through the sign of heavy water, an oceanic stasis that signals the dissolution of wasted lives. After the poem's irruptive consonance of the “bodies borrowed,” the vowels lengthen to mimic a “long drowned” history of the Atlantic, and the narrative is transformed. Reminding us that the Middle Passage “abyss is a tautology” that haunts ocean modernity (Glissant, Poetics 6), the poem traps the students (and readers) in the violent corporeal history of the Atlantic. Instead of moving on to the next ocean of the lesson, the class repeats the word “Atlantic, as if wooden pegs / were forced between our lips; Atlantic, as teacher's / strap whipped the rows on.” Only in the last two lines of the poem do we catch a glimpse of other oceans, trapped as we are in “learn[ing] this lesson: / Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific and then Indian.”

Anthropocene islands: There are only islands after the end of the world

“…This point is forcefully made by work in contemporary Black and Indigenous Studies which has increasingly drawn attention to how island tropes and island scholarship can be generative for critical thinking (Davis et al, 2019; King, 2019; Lopez, 2020; Neimanis, 2019; Perez, 2020a, 2020b; Sharpe, 2016). As DeLoughrey (2010: 705) says, the oceans surrounding Caribbean islands foreground places ‘where the haunting of the past overtakes the present subject’. Such concerns are recurrent in many contemporary publications, such as Tiffany Lethabo King’s (2019) The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies , which draws heavily upon the Barbadian historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite (1999).…”

Turbulent Waters in Three Parts

“…As Elizabeth DeLoughrey writes, "Atlantic inscriptions rupture the naturalizing flow of history, foregrounding a now-time that registers violence against the wasted lives of modernity in the past and the present." 13 The ocean's materiality, however, challenges temporality and legibility in more fundamental ways. The ocean's movements suggest a non-linear time; a temporality that may be cyclical, that may drift, that may accrete in unseen ways, that may become stuck or slowed and then rapidly dislodged.…”

Mapping ocean-state Mauritius and its unlaid ghosts: Hydropolitics and literature in the Indian Ocean

“…The religious rites may indeed succeed in liberating the souls and in helping the substantial bodies at the surface of the sea to disintegrate. Yet, the mortal remains will not dissolve into nothingness, their materiality will not disappear, the body particles will render the waters denser, heavier (DeLoughrey, 2010). The waste island as well as the anthropomorphized face of the ocean confirm the Indian Ocean as Anthropocene.…”

“…In the wake of what has been termed “the scramble for the oceans” (Pardo qtd in DeLoughrey, 2010: 705), the Republic of Mauritius in 2012 lodged an application with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to recognize its rights to an Exclusive Economic Zone that comprises a large expanse of the Indian Ocean and thereafter proudly redefined itself as an ocean-state. 1 The Republic of Mauritius is comprised of the main island, Mauritius, which is situated in the southwest Indian Ocean, some 2000 km off the east coast of Africa, of Rodrigues island, and of several outlying islands and archipelagos (the Chagos Archipelago, Agaléga, Tromelin Island, Saint Brandon).…”

“…The ocean as a locus has much to impart, it is a space full of history and memory. Like the Atlantic which Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2010) describes as “a place where the haunting of the past overtakes the present subject” (p. 703), the Indian Ocean is strewn with issues of the past which impregnate the contemporary condition. In order to grasp the layers of the past which permeate into the present, I will draw upon Jacques Derrida’s (1993) concept of hauntology which perfectly captures the question of identity from a historical viewpoint as well as the interplay of presence and absence in the reworking of that identity.…”