Natural Disaster, Cultural Memory: Montserrat Adrift in the Black and Green Atlantic

Abstract

When the Soufriere Hills volcano violently erupted on December 26, 1997 and erased two-thirds of the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean archipelago, it did, indeed, “scar people into thought.” In a matter of hours, the most green and densely populated areas of the island looked like the surface of the moon. This vast terrain, including the capital city, continues to lie under mud and ash created by the volcano’s (ongoing) pyroclastic flows. In Markham’s poetic imagination, the ecological crisis sent people to the theater: the eruption was “as if at the beginning or end of a play.” The scarring of the land, and the scarring of people into thought were mutually reinforcing, and impossible to disaggregate. Whether that play was beginning or ending, however, remains difficult to determine. If Edouard Glissant is correct in saying that “History (with a capital H) ends where the histories of those people once reputed to be without history come together” (64), then the Montserratian people are creating a new play enacted on a wide, albeit watery, stage-surface. As quickly as the debris from the volcanic explosion escaped from the mountain, it unfurled dispossessed historical fragments that were lodged deeply in the community’s collective cultural memory. As Montserratians were set adrift in the Atlantic world, they began the task of reassembling those fragments. The “play” the community continues to collectively write and perform is new, but it is reassembled out of very old routes.

Far off a mountain erupts scarring people

into thought as if at the beginning or end of a play

—E. A. Markham, “Lines Composed to Test the Idea of Montserrat” (36)

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

—Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says (69)