Notes on Dark Laboratory by Saint-Sean Asli
Saint reads Tao Leigh Goffe's Dark Laboratory in three movements, from 1492 to the coral reef, and arrives at her question for the region: what changes when the small places that have always carried the big ones are treated as the authority, not the experiment?
[Dark Laboratory is in our bookstore and on our library shelves.]
Tao-Leigh Goffe, in “Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean and the Origins of the Climate Crisis”, charts a rhizomatic relation between colonial contact, contemporary capitalism and the worsening climate crisis. Goffe’s position is that colonialism and the groundwork it laid for ensuing centuries of violence and extraction are manifesting today as plagues onto Caribbean people and space. Among stringent, pseudoscientific lenses of race, and wealth extraction from the region by whiteness, Goffe identifies climate disaster as a pre-eminent method of decimation, should the root causes remain unchecked.
Goffe’s writing and research is vast, interdisciplinary and bookended by literary prose that draws upon historical past and sociocultural present in order to speculate about an anxious future. In her deposit of lessons from rainforests in Dominica, the Cockpit Country in Jamaica and her ancestral investments in the coastal city of Hong Kong, Goffe brings to the climate discourse polychromatic methods of accountability and repair. These ideas are explorable through standout selections from the text.
I.
“The West is a project, not a place.”
Paraphrasing Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant, Goffe espouses this idea in “Dark Laboratory” to encompass the metatextual epistemology which undergirds her approach. Early in the book, Goffe details a disagreement she had in an undergraduate History class. Upon being asked when globalisation began, Goffe’s assessment of 1492 was deemed incorrect. Holding this assertion alongside Glissant’s evaluation of the West as an ongoing material realisation of colonial worldmaking, Goffe posits a new way of evaluating the climate crisis. If the West (specifically, the Caribbean) is a site of violent experimentation, Goffe requires that the disrepair the region was left to fall into after Emancipation is evaluated as a failure by the colonists that considered themselves “naturalists” and “explorers”. Goffe demands reparation include the re-integration of the people with the land, both the indigenous people that welcomed genocidal colonists and the Black people that were forcibly made into land stewards. For Goffe, and prospectively, for Glissant, the “project” of the West must be held to account for its poisonous and deadly results.
II.
“The Caribbean often isn’t recognised as ground zero of colonial conquest …”
In a criticism of the lauding of colonists as apolitical figures in history, Goffe points out the irony of the imposition of Columbus Day onto a land and a people with which Columbus never interacted. All of Columbus’ voyages to the “Indies” spanned the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola, Xaymaca and Guanahani (modern day Haiti, Jamaica and the Bahamas). As a Caribbean-descended British immigrant to the United States, Goffe occupies the unique position of being able to discern the ways that American exceptionalism obscures the lessons to be learned from resistance and climate solutions originating from the Caribbean.
III.
“The water spirits of the Black disapora are the maestros of the coral symphony teaching lessons on symbiosis – teaching us how we will breathe beyond the apocalypse.”
Referring to Afrofuturist concept album Drexciya by the techno musicians of the same name, Goffe invokes a shared origin story also built upon by noise music outfit clipping. as well as novelist Rivers Solomon. In “The Deep”, a cross-disciplinary project made into a shared concept album and novella by the two artists, the Black Atlantic cosmology of Drexciya becomes the setting for a story about a reluctant historian debating the worth of individuality versus being an essential part of a collective. In “Dark Laboratory”, Goffe invites the reader to think about Drexciya, the timeless alternate underwater space, as an instructive space where humans plagued by rising sea levels are forced to learn from coral, anemones and the myths of Black mermaids who chose the sea and freedom over bondage how to live in the “After” of climate collapse.
Ultimately, Tao-Leigh Goffe and the real Dark Laboratory, a climate-responsive, ecologically integrationist think tank based out of Manhattan, are asking major, worldmaking questions of the zeitgeist as well as historians and scholars that try to divorce race from climate. Goffe deliberately does this by elevating places most vulnerable to climate collapse to positions of authority on the topic of sustainable degrowth and adaptability. Jamaica, Dominica, Tahiti, Montserrat: Goffe looks at these places and their shores and their vegetation and their terrain and scours the natural environment for lessons that can be adapted by people most vulnerable to repeated climate disaster. She sees this as a microcosm of the relation that ought to take place between large nations in the global north and the small island developing states they plunder for resources and space; in the same way humans ought to learn from the natural world whiteness has subjugated, so too, should metropolitan nations turn to lessons from the global south islands and colonies with which their relationships have only been extractive and unaccountable.
“Big places have always depended on small places. How can we expect meaningful climate policy without a federation of the global majority?”