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fatehbaz · 4 years

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The opening lines of The Tempest, in which the Boatswain proclaims that the tempest overturns the authority of the monarchy – “What cares these roarers for the name of King?” – capture the carnivalesque conditions opened up by storm-events, during which ordinary mores and hierarchies are suspended [...] a time of occasion and opportunity [...]. The storm-event in The Tempest thus enfolds these various dimensions: crisis in the social order, rhetoric in the service of action or change, the manifestation of obscured histories or realities, the temporary dissolution of existing structures [...] and the implication of extra-human natural agency [...]. Since the Ur-text of The Tempest, imagery of tropical storms has reverberated throughout representations of the Caribbean, not merely as thematic content and setting, but as plot, trope, noise, rhythm, syntax, diction, structure, political ecology and geopoetics [...]. [S]torms served throughout the imperialist imaginary as an intertextual, transhistorical metaphorics for rebellion, mutiny, and colonial insurgency [...]. In real life, hurricanes disrupt the space and time of the human everyday, interrupt social patterns of labour and recreation [...].

To interpret the literary uses of storm aesthetics is not to romanticize the human suffering that tropical storms can cause. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that tropical storms are not ‘disasters-to-nature’, but rather serve ecological functions, lowering seawater temperatures, maintaining the global heat balance [...]. Hurricanes such as Katrina, Hugo or Ivan are ecological disasters only when social conditions cause them to be experienced as such, exposing the hidden geographies that attend environmental crisis. The most vulnerable, disadvantaged populations often live on reclaimed or coastal land [...].

Storm-impacts are differentiated across the Caribbean archipelago according to the specific histories of deforestation and desertification through which plantation agriculture and ‘development’ projects have unfolded in particular islands. The destruction of barrier reefs by shipping lanes and by coral-bleaching due to pollution, poaching and rising sea temperatures has greatly increased the vulnerability of islands that rely on reefs to buffer storms before they reach shore. Deforestation of mangrove swamps by mass-aquaculture in tidal zones denudes natural barriers to ocean surges and leads to increased flooding. Coastal development – the building of paradise hotels and beach resorts [...] further erodes the vegetation and substrates which absorb the shock of tidal surges.

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With its periodical cataclysms punctuating fair weather, the cyclone [...] manifests a distinctive sense of geopolitical space, initiating a dialectic between here and there, since its winds come from the coasts of Africa, from elsewhere [...]. Because the cyclone is experienced across the whole of the Caribbean basin, it produces an archipelagic consciousness (“cette conscience archipélique”) engendered by the circulation of the elements, an ethic of care for neighbouring isles subject to the same destructive passages and hazards [...].

The hurricane as [...] revolt against the depredations of capitalism is a trope with a long history in abolitionist and imperialist discourse. [...] In Maximin’s more subtle reading of nature’s revolt, the cyclone has [...] significance for the slaves who must endure its intensity and violence [...]. Furthermore, the cyclone that destroys the installations of the oppressors also destroys their victims without prejudice. Instead of reading nature as revenge, Maximin argues that cataclysms make visible “modalities of revolt”: “C’est en ce sens que les modalitiés de révolte des quatre elements on servi de modèle élémentaire pour le combat des opprimés. La géographie a permis d'en revenir, pour cet homme nu, à la puissance de l'élémentaire” (93-94, emphasis original). The transcendent, uncontainable power of meteorological events demonstrates the vulnerability of European colonial hegemony and serves to model forms of resistance (94). Maximin is quick to point out that modalities of revolt [...] should not be read as desperate acts (as of suicide), but rather as the expressions of political consciousness and deliberate strategies of resistance calibrated to particular historical conditions (95). These acts are historical eruptions (“eruption historique”). [...]

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Leaf Storm and 100 Years of Solitude (1967) apocalyptic images of “magical realist” hurricanes are used to figure the violent penetrations of multinational capital and the forcible incorporation of societies and ecologies into modes of production. [...] [L]ater Caribbean texts link hurricane events more optimistically to historical possibility [...]. Thus, Trinidadian poet Indrani Rampersad conceives of the hurricane as an event which disrupts ideological semblance and awakens collective resistance: “Cold winds / Strong winds / Impending hurricane / For the people of the sugarcane / A suppressed people! / An oppressed people! Awake / And activate!”

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Sharae Deckard. “The Political Ecology of Storms in Caribbean Literature.” 2016.

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