“The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015)

Sharae Deckard,Kerstin Oloff

doi:10.3390/h9030086

Abstract

Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of the “Oceanic Weird”. We begin with a brief survey of Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. We explore how these tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and argue that they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], set in the Dominican Republic, as a key example of the contemporary efflorescence of ecocritical New Weird Caribbean fiction. We explore how the novel refashions Oceanic Weird tropes to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis in an era of global climate emergency with forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

Highlights

Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism
We explore how the novel refashions Oceanic Weird tropes to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis in an era of global climate emergency with forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class
The Atlantic Ocean has long been central to Caribbean literature and art

Summary

Introduction

Kamau Brathwaite “‘Je te salue, vieil Océan!’ . . . your chasms are our own unconscious, furrowed with fugitive memories.”. The past decade of Caribbean fiction has produced a noticeable efflorescence of such texts, often in gothic, SF, and Weird modes. These include Puerto Rican Rafael Acevedo’s dystopian novel Al otro lado del muro hay carne fresca [On the other side of the wall there is fresh meat/flesh] (Acevedo 2014). Indiana’s turn to the Oceanic Weird is mediated predominantly via the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, which teems with fears of deep geological time, natural immanence, and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilization. Lovecraft, which teems with fears of deep geological time, natural immanence, and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilization Her novel reworks the Cthulhu mythos and Lovecraft’s signature “monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head” We argue that La mucama’s refashioning of the Oceanic Weird is invested in revealing the legacies of colonialism and imperialism as constitutive of ecological violence in our current era of climate emergency

The Old Oceanic Weird and US Imperialism

Findings

The Condylactis Gigantea and the Long Apocalypse in La mucama de Omicunlé