Montserrat is the only country aside from Ireland to celebrate St Patrick’s Day as a public holiday. It’s not just a chance to go on the beer but recalls the African rebellion against Irish slavers which took place in 1768. The rebels deliberately chose the date for the uprising, knowing that the Irish overseers and planters would be getting drunk at Government House.
Tao Leigh Goffe recounts this and many other stories of black and indigenous resistance to Caribbean slavery in this trenchant account of Caribbean colonialism. Goffe contends that race, labour and colonialism are absent from environmentalist debates and suggests the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492 is not only the “ground zero of colonial conquest”, but the starting point for the modern-day climate crisis.
Along the way, the author takes a deserved swipe at western multinationals operating in the Caribbean for damage wrought on black and indigenous communities in places such as Jamaica – while strangely defending Chinese companies for the same sins – arguing that it is the “global majority” who must lead the ecological conversation.
Only by interrogating the history of western scientific and anthropological inquiry in the region, Goffe adds, will a solution be found to the climate crisis. This leads her to decry archival research – European archives and natural history museums are described as “evidence lockers full of crimes against humanity” and “death cults of colonial worship”.
Goffe unashamedly argues from a subjective standpoint, drawing much on her own family’s fascinating history, one which embraces not only the Caribbean, but also China, Hong Kong, Britain and the United States. This could have been the starting point of a more nuanced journey through those regions most affected by the climate crisis and an objective analysis of the environmental destruction wrought by European colonialism in the Americas.
[ From the archive: Meeting islanders with Irish ancestry on MontserratOpens in new window ]
Instead, while positing interesting ideas about the impact of colonial thinking on the Caribbean environment, Goffe often fails to support them, preferring to spend time on academic bunfights. Archival research may be “cold, unethical and extractive” but it’s also how one finds the bodies.
