Atlantic exchanges: The poetics of dispersal and disposal in Scottish and Caribbean seas

ABSTRACT

This article offers a series of readings of poets from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean whose works make visible the otherwise invisible and offshore narratives of marine waste that currently circulate within the world’s oceans. Through a comparative archipelagic reading of Scottish and Caribbean poets, this article examines the different forms of cultural and material exchange that proliferate through what Elizabeth DeLoughrey has called the “heavy waters” of the Atlantic. From stones and bones to plastic dolls and rubber ducks, the poetic encounters with marine waste in the works of Édouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Kei Miller, Jen Hadfield and Kathleen Jamie provide a means through which to access and critique transoceanic networks of colonial and capital exploitation. The manifestation of waste across these works gives rise to a poetics of salvage and recycling that corresponds with a distinctly environmental ethics of relation as driven by the ocean.

KEYWORDS:

• Archipelagic studies
• Blue Humanities
• marine plastics
• Caribbean poetry
• Scottish poetry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term includes the islands of “Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales), Ireland (Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland), the Isle of Man, the Hebrides, the Orkney Isles, the Shetland Islands, the Isles of Scilly, and the Channel Islands” (Oxford English Dictionary).

2. For a more in-depth discussion of the “forgotten history of Scottish involvement in the Atlantic slave trade”, see Morris (2015).

3. “Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari criticised notions of the root and, even perhaps, notions of being rooted. The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (Glissant 1997, 11).

4. Bloomfield (2016) notes how “Brathwaite has often been positioned – and has positioned himself – in contrast to the poetic stance of St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott. The well-worn dichotomy of Brathwaite, cast as the iconoclastic vernacular creole poet, and Walcott, seen as the ironic mimic of traditional literary forms, as the polar opposites of Caribbean poetry has been quite rightly contested by recent criticism” (152).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexandra Campbell

Alexandra Campbell is an early career researcher and teaching fellow in English literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her research emerges at the intersection of several critical discourses, including critical ocean studies, the environmental humanities and world literature perspectives. She is particularly interested in ecologies and poetries of the sea and is currently working on her first monograph which examines poetic responses to oceanic resource exploitation in North Atlantic writing, focusing on discourses of extraction, disposal and transmission at sea.