Untitled Article 2023-06-18 12:04PM CST

This article looks at Richard Georges’ poetry collection _Epiphaneia_, which is set on the British Virgin Islands in the aftermath of hurricane Irma. While Georges’ poems are placed amidst destruction, they go beyond narratives of devastation; instead, they articulate a poetics of livingness on the...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Barbara Gfoellner
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Island Studies Journal 2023-05-01
Series:Island Studies Journal
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.411
Description
Summary:This article looks at Richard Georges’ poetry collection _Epiphaneia_, which is set on the British Virgin Islands in the aftermath of hurricane Irma. While Georges’ poems are placed amidst destruction, they go beyond narratives of devastation; instead, they articulate a poetics of livingness on the hurricane-struck island. This paper first draws out critical debates on the coloniality of climate that show the longue durée and complexity of a history of catastrophe in the Caribbean context. It addresses how _Epiphaneia_ challenges one-sided discourses of island dependency and victimization by offering ways to perceive islands in the Anthropocene not as passive victims of catastrophes but as sites of living within what Glissant calls a chaos-world. This article then advances an ecopoetics of the archipelago in the wake of the hurricane. The various tensions held by the island after the storm will be traced through the word ‘still’: the ongoing violence of coloniality, still present; yet continuously resisted due to the island’s and islanders’ resilience and survival, still alive. This paper explores the poetics emerging from the island in the Anthropocene: What poetics are needed to sustain life after, and within, catastrophe? What does it mean to exist and move, still, on the island in the wake of the hurricane?
ISSN:1715-2593