The Earth Remembers
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The Earth Remembers ~
This season, we take an aerial view of the Caribbean, revealing that the earth has never been neutral ground.
Our land has been mapped, extracted, monocultured, and sold before most of us arrived and after many of us were taken. This is the season we read the literature of land and consequence. The colonial extraction planted in our soil centuries ago is the climate crisis we reap today. What does environmental justice demand from us who live closest to the cost.
Mango Season:
The Earth Remembers (July - Sep 2026)
THIS SEASON’S EVENTS
4PM July 4th · Free entry · Space is limited · The RWL Library in Norwood Kingston
An evening in the RWL Library among the books, the people, and a query on ecological and colonial justice through. Library books will be on display and available to borrow.
Come for an hour and leave with a book and a reason to return for the Salon at the end of the season
The exact location in Norbrook will be sent after the ticket is booked.
Already An RWL Patron? Patron Members Attend for Free
Join us for an evening of guided conversation, close reading, and community. Each salon is built around a seasonal theme drawn from Caribbean feminist literature and thought.
Your ticket includes entry to the salon and a copy of the Season’s commissioned newsletter, The Verandah Post.
August 8th· Free entry · Space is limited · The RWL Library in Norwood Kingston
An evening exploring climate justice in Jamaica through films.
Exact location in Norbrook sent after ticket is booked.
THIS SEASON’S ANCHOR TEXT
Dark Laboratory
by Tao Leigh Goffe
Begin here.
Everything else in this season's recommended list radiates outward from it.
The Caribbean was never the edge of the world. It was the laboratory where the world as we know it was designed.
Dark Laboratory locates the origins of racial capitalism, ecological extraction, and the climate crisis not in Europe's industrial centres but in the Caribbean plantation as the original site of modernity's experiments in land, labour, and disposability. Tao Leigh Goffe's work sits at the intersection of Black studies, environmental humanities, and Caribbean intellectual tradition, and gives us the theoretical language to name what the earth in this region has always known: that the climate crisis is not a future threat but an ongoing colonial inheritance.
This is the text we read when we want to understand not just what is happening to the land, but why, and who decided it could be spent.
RWL Text for Mango Season: July - September
Dark Laboratory locates the origins of racial capitalism, ecological extraction, and climate crisis not in Europe's industrial centres but in the plantation.
Goffe defends the Caribbean as the original site of modernity's experiments in land, labour, and disposability. Tao Leigh Goffe's work sits at the intersection of Black studies, environmental humanities, and Caribbean intellectual tradition, and gives us the theoretical language to name what the earth in this region has always known: that climate crisis is not a future threat but an ongoing colonial inheritance.
Purchase Dark Laboratory from The Rebel Women Lit bookstore
Use the Rebel Women Lit Library
to move from theory to testimony to poetry to policy in a single season.
RWL Patrons receive free salon access as part of their quarterly membership
Plus additional borrowing rights to the full library collection.
Membership is US$40/J$6,500/quarter.
Recommended Library Books To Explore
The Earth Remembers
Our Anchor Text for the Season remains Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe, but here are other library texts to explore as a supplement to your reading this season.
Paradise Once by Olive Senior
Guabancex by Celia A Sorhaindo
It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World by Mikaela Loach
Sordidez by E G Condé
Huareo: Story of a Jamaican Cacique by Fred W. Kennedy
Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene by Mimi Sheller
Harvesting Freedom The Life of a Migrant Worker in Canada by Gabriel Allahdua with Edward Dunsworth
Toxic Tropics: A Horror Story of Environmental Injustice by
Every season we gather. We bring the books we've been sitting with and the questions we haven't said out loud yet. We read together, argue carefully, and leave with something we didn't arrive with.
The Rebel Women Lit Salon is that gathering. You're invited.
Become a Rebel Women Lit Patron
RWL Library Members attend every salon free as part of their membership. One membership. Four salons a year. The full library between them.
4PM July 4th · Free entry · Space is limited · The RWL Library in Norwood Kingston
An evening in the RWL Library among the books, the people, and a query on ecological and colonial justice through. Library books will be on display and available to borrow.
Come for an hour and leave with a book and a reason to return for the Salon at the end of the season
The exact location in Norbrook will be sent after the ticket is booked.
Already An RWL Patron? Patron Members Attend for Free
Join us for an evening of guided conversation, close reading, and community. Each salon is built around a seasonal theme drawn from Caribbean feminist literature and thought.
Your ticket includes entry to the salon and a copy of the Season’s commissioned newsletter, The Verandah Post.