The Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography special lecture at the 2022 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference delivered by Jonathan Pugh (written with his co-author David Chandler), provided a stimulating discussion and triggered a range of engagements and challenges. The plenary raised a complex geographical challenge which had the title then of Abyssal Geographies and located us in the Anthropocene. Subsequently, as one of the three discussants, I have read the revised paper, now titled Abyssal geography, and present questions relating to both versions of Chandler and Pugh's article. Here I want to provide a context which captures aspects of my relationships to spaces (the conference, the city of Newcastle, where it happened) and places (the Caribbean, as a key sites in the discussion). It is a way of placing myself in the provocation that has emerged beyond the plenary. Attending and contributing to the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference in late August and early September 2022, I had the privilege to return to Newcastle University where, many years ago with the support of a UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) scholarship, I began my PhD journey. My first year was in Newcastle upon Tyne, my second on the Leeward Caribbean Island of Montserrat, and I returned to Newcastle for my final year. Safely in the UK, I submitted my thesis on 17 September 1989, the same date that Hurricane Hugo blasted into Montserrat. Hugo was identified as the angriest storm in the island's known history, damaging 98 per cent of the houses, 50 per cent severely and 20 per cent destroyed. This date, forever etched in many minds, was the start of a deeper cementing of connections of friendship, care, support and commitment between myself and the Montserratians I lived with, interviewed, supported, and worried about during my field work and return to the UK. I committed myself to contributing in any way I could to help rebuild the devastated island. As that connection, forged in crisis, grew stronger, I returned to Montserrat four times with students from Loughborough University for field trips focusing on cultural and social geographies in a post-natural hazard crisis. Our collective spending power contributed usefully to the limited economy. My bond with Montserrat across abyssal ocean spaces remains very strong. Being part of this SJTG plenary exchange has reminded me to think and work about the Caribbean more, which was not that easy as I lived in Singapore and recently located to New Zealand—the Caribbean is a long watery way from here. The title change from ‘Abyssal Geographies’ (version one, circulated before the conference presentation) to ‘Abyssal geography’ (in the published paper: Chandler & Pugh, 2023) is interesting because the turn to the singular seems to close the possibilities of various geographies and multiplicities around the spaces, places and people of the Caribbean. However, there is some resolution here ‘At the same time, a radically different critique of modernity has also gained prominence in recent years, emerging from critical Black studies, which instead places the Caribbean at the epicentre of the development of a new mode of critical thought’ (quoted from version one). This recognition of Blackness and the Caribbean is important. However, version one did trigger me to critique the first of two suggested aspects by the authors. The first ‘is that abyssal thought is not grounded in abstract philosophical critique but draws upon Caribbean thought and practices as a resource’ (quoted from version one). My response to this was to ask, a resource for whom, where, why, and when? In many ways the Caribbean has always been constructed as resource. Whole parts of the region are stripped bare through extractions of minerals, land, trees, sand, water and of course, people and non-human dwellers. At the same time as the stealing and/or loss of resources, the Caribbean has had to fight to retain aspects of their own practices—working to stitch a Caribbean life of livelihoods, community, support, and resilience from a ‘strange’ life that they have created and worked to sustain. This notion of ‘strange’ is a recognition of the complete disorientation entrapped and shipped people (rendered as slaves) endured across the Middle Passage and how they had to work to survive, resist and rebel. So, I wonder in what way abyssal geographies can actively engage with Caribbean practices and resources which may or may not deliver resilience and survival. What support and sustainability are afforded by abyssal geographies/geography beyond the conceptual? What audacity of the abyss, the ocean, affords women a place in this provocation (Skelton, 2020)? Having read both versions of the paper I find myself thinking and engaging with elements of ‘abyssal geographies/geography’ and learning more each time I read. My introduction to Malcom Ferdinand's (2022) work on Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World made considerable sense, women are featured, slavery and indigeneity recognized in his book. What I am not so sure about is what specifically abyssal geographies/ geography are and how do they translate to the realities of the Caribbean? Linked to this is the apparent erasure of the complexities, diversities, and multiplicities of the Caribbean in its very being. Does abyssal thought and practice have meaning in the different linguistic, independent, colonized Caribbean entities? Are they going through the same thought and practices? Which people where are engaging with abyssal thought? Is this a Eurocentric heuristic device that focuses on another collection of islands in the Anthropocene, that is the Caribbean? I want to understand abyssal geography more which is why I persist in questioning it, but I wish to safeguard the Caribbean (history, people, places, struggles, survivals) at the same time. Abyssal is a relatively rare word, derived from the better-known ‘abyss’. It descends from the Latin word abyssus and translated means ‘bottomless’. I find the term unnerving and negative. Perhaps it is the concept of intense depth and the fear of never being able to surface again. What impact does such a term, abyssal, have on people, the readers, the authors? From this short description I have attempted to examine the word abyssal in a context connected with Chandler and Pugh's paper and the Caribbean. What is the possible value of the ambiguity or multiple meanings of the term ‘abyssal’? What does it afford us as scholars and what might it mean to the Caribbean as lived here and now? The notion of ‘bottomless’ can be something to dread and fear or something that allows myriad possibilities for new/other/past/practices and realities. For example, is there a deep gulf that is immeasurable between the scholarship forged in Europe and Britain and that of the scholarly work in the Caribbean? How can we engage productively with the many alternative possibilities and effectively explore the concept of abyssal which works in these different geographies which are at the same time entwined through history? Abyssal can mean ‘incomprehensible’, which can be expansive and stimulating but also frustrating and opaque. I keep coming back to the question in my head as I read the paper—who, what and where benefits from an abyssal approach? What can/does abyssal geography do towards greater respect, inclusion, and positive conversations with the Caribbean? What is the Caribbean Turn? Is this a language that can be productive for people actually living, struggling, fearing, labouring, suffering in the Caribbean as a place, a reality, a history and a future? I value the provocation Chandler and Pugh present—in person and in print. It has forced me to think harder and stimulated my critical thinking, especially about whiteness and Western scholarship. I am grateful the authors introduced me to the work of Christina Sharpe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Their work speaks of ‘the hold’, that horrific space of cruelty which is a form of abyss. Sharpe names ‘the wake, the ship, the hold and the weather’ (Sharpe, 2016: 16). People of politics, anti-racism, Black studies and more, determinedly won't forget, always remembering what persistent brutality has been wrought and continues. Sharpe's ‘In the Wake’ (2016) and Gumbs’ ‘Undrowned’ (2020) refuse to allow ‘slavery's denial of Black humanity’ and deliver powerful Black feminist theory and more. I close with the work of Black feminist of Caribbean descent, Patricia Noxolo, and her team's focus on how Caribbean in/securities and race connect across the abyss of the Atlantic between the Caribbean, the UK, Europe and beyond. Her Creative Approaches to Race and In/Security in the Caribbean and the UK (CARICUK, 2021) engages directly with geography, place, identities and Blackness. Noxolo's work, and Caribbean scholars I have spent time with, have a commitment to open conversations, inclusion, support and intellectual sharing. They generate concepts and theories at the same time recognizing essential and important practices. In a real-life context with Caribbean people, the practices are rich, history laden, active through memory and sustaining. Sonia Barrett's CARICUK work, Dreading the Map is a positive way to engage with ‘dread’ and its Caribbean meanings. Dreaded strips of maps twisted and woven into sculptures by the hands of Black women, their laughter filling and disrupting rooms of the Royal Geographical Society. This is an active openness, connection and hopefulness across the abyssal oceans of the Caribbean Sargasso Sea and the Atlantic. These are some of the ways forward. I thank Jonathan Pugh, David Chandler, Kevin Grove and Adom Philogene Heron for being part of this provocation which stimulated important questions and queries. I am grateful to the SJTG for inviting me to be part of the discussion. Open access publishing facilitated by University of Otago, as part of the Wiley - University of Otago agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.