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

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis 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.