Hope at the End of the World: Lessons from the Ocean

we develop a universal translator and descend to speak with the corals. they say, ‘it will be okay’. we ask the trees, who whisper, ‘it will be okay’. the stars, the mice, the larvae in hexagonal cradles chant ‘it will be okay’. we seek pessimism and find nothing but eternalism.

(neality [@ctrlcreep], 29 March 2020) ¹

on 20 march 2020, i came across this tweet by twitter user @ctrlcreep. this particular account is in the business of tweeting tiny fragments of parallel universes. worlds in which ‘mushrooms don’t grow “on the ground” or “in the dirt”’ but instead ‘are affixed to the fabric of the universe itself’. ² neality produces miniaturised doses of speculative and fantastical fiction perfect for the twitter age. some are dismal, soulless or profoundly disturbing. others are magnificent, iridescent glimpses into worlds just out of reach. either way, they only ever open the door a crack, allowing just a sliver of light to pass. when i read ‘it will be okay’, i felt compelled to open the door a fraction wider; exploring the possibilities and promises of hope, grief and solidarity in this time of rising seas.

a few notes on format and style. first, you will have noticed i am not using capital letters. i am experimenting with this form of rebellion. i remain unconvinced by the logic behind the capitalisation of words we are obliged to capitalise—proper nouns, for instance. where some capitalise the un-capitalised, Black in the work of paul gilroy (1993) or Native in terisa teaiwa (2005), i am playing with these diminutive figures—asserting a kind of aggressive levelling. second, this author speaks for herself, therefore i will use personal pronouns. i will also use the second-person and plural personal pronouns. the plural, we, refers to those of us sitting pretty, the non-native, economically comfortable, educated, cisgender, non-disabled and light-skinned peoples of this world. we are a world of ‘i’s; the academy should not shy away from this. third, and final, this document contains two things, an essay and a speculative flash fiction piece, both on the issue of hope and revolution. they are to be read together; they are symbiotes. that’s all on style—onward.

as i write this, i am in the process of completing a master’s degree in migration studies at the university of oxford. most of my time is spent lost in a sea of oceanic poetry, most of it eco-poetry. in pursuit of a thesis on climate change, mobility and oceania, i pillage indigenous poetry for hope. and although it hurts my progressive, anti-colonial sensibility to use the word pillage i feel obliged to do so. for as i read their words and encounter their ‘sinking’ islands from thousands of miles away i struggle to transform my research into change, transforming myself from an ally into an accomplice (indigenous action, 2014). the climate catastrophe is unavoidable, both discursively and materially. it’s in the temperature records, in the rising tides and in our politics of displacement, as millions more every year leave their homes in the wake of one environmental disaster after another (foresight: migration and global environmental change, 2011). the threat is hard to write about, to think about, because it means condemning everything the status quo holds dear, condemning capitalism, imperialism in all its forms, modernity and its eternal march forward. the future seems impossible, unimaginable.

unfortunately, for those afraid of this unimaginable future, it’s already here. we are living at ‘the end of the world’ (danowski and de castro, 2017). this is almost unfathomable for those of us who have lived our whole lives at the core, at the centre of the mercator projection, in the middle of the present. nonetheless, it is our reality as much as anyone else’s. it is my proposition that listening to the coral, to the soft sighs of the ocean, might make this reality imaginable, bearable and, ultimately, open us up to the possibility of ‘living on a damaged planet’ (tsing et al., 2017). this is about more than an imprecise, fleeting ‘getting in touch with nature’—though it speaks to the same sentiment. there is unyielding hope to be found in the relentless tides, the ocean currents that guide whales and schools of fish across the globe, home to greater mysteries than the wide expanse of space. the earth and all of its ‘critter’, in donna haraway’s (2016) irreverent words, have been succumbing to the slow death of climate breakdown for decades, if not centuries, and they have been telling us as much for just as long. indigenous people all over the world have also been telling us as they watched settlers ravage land and sea. it is possible that we forgot how to listen, though it seems more likely we were never interested in the first place. it is imperative that we learn to listen so that we might learn to grieve, and one day, hope.

‘it will be okay’ is slowly picked up by every chronic optimist, by all the dreamers, the fighters, and the children of hope. it trickles through the cracks in our communications, in the whispered stories a mother tells her child as she rocks it to sleep, in the postcards from lovers separated by continents, in the poetry of eco-activists shouting from the margins. the chant is familiar to some. to those who have held their future close, living on not out of spite but out of a deep belief in the justice of time. there are some for whom ‘it will be okay’ sounds like a threat. suspended above the clouds in homes long since elevated above the rabble, above the poisonous atmosphere they created, sit the masters of earth who no longer concern themselves with its petty disputes. but slowly, the chant rises like heat or like the sun—inevitable. ‘it will be okay’ sounds too much like revolution, smells too much like power, shifting. they scramble to divide, to quash hope and faith like ants under their boot. but still, the chant rises.

when haraway (2016, p. 1) writes of the tentacular, of her chthonic arachnids and octopods, she is asking us to stay with the trouble, ‘learning to be truly present … as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, and meanings’. staying with the trouble requires a recognition of the entanglements of the present as it keeps us in suspense, caught between yesterday and tomorrow—both pressing in. of course, these entanglements are not consigned to temporalities alone. she points out that the bleached and gasping coral reefs were those who warned us of the changing tide, as the ocean turned to acid against their delicate zooxanthellae (ibid., p. 45). further north, time capsules of ice, ‘glaciers groaning with the weight of the world’s heat’, melt, pouring water that has been ice since before humans crawled out of our cradle into the world’s oceans (Jetn̄il-kijinern and niviana, 2019). now, that water threatens to gnaw at our coastlines, devour low-lying island nations as these entanglements tug at our node in the network. and in honour of the sheer magnitude of our influence on these entanglements we named the present geological epoch after ourselves, dedicated it to our footprint—the anthropocene. it seems that not only was she trying to speak with us, but the earth has also been listening. she has been absorbing our carbon, swallowing our plastics, burying our victims—burying us.

but ‘staying with the trouble’ is not as simple as it seems. telos is a seductive notion and the ‘apocalyptic or salvific futures’ against which haraway (2016, p. 1) warns are just the kind of drama that numbs against the trauma of loss and the inevitable work that follows. for the indigenous poets of my research, however, they are an unaffordable luxury. so, they write and speak of the entanglements that characterise their world, living and dying well. Jetn̄il-kijinern (2017, p. 65), eco-activist and poet from the republic of the marshall islands, writes ‘tell them we [marshallese] are sweet harmonies / of grandmothers mothers aunties and sisters […] we are the ocean / terrifying and regal in its power’. ihimaera (2013, n.p.), maori novelist, playwright and poet, chants ‘we are from savage islands, far to the south / we travel through your constellations make way […] our dawn is coming’. these poetic worldings find solace and triumph in the ocean, in its saltwater currents, which had served as pathways and crossways long before they were transformed into borders and walls.

this writing in captivity is ‘a continuing refusal to be silent’, an anti-colonial howl into the wind (trask, 1997, p. 43). i find this demand to take up space, to make noise, reminds me of my poetic, prophetic heroine audre lorde, who wrote your silence will not protect you (2017 [1977]). when speaking at a ‘lesbians and literature panel’, lorde (ibid., p. 6) reminded her audience that the ‘weight of that silence will choke us’, as continents of plastic choke the ocean. the conditions for life on this, the third planet from sol, are the product of vanishing odds. which means everything on this blue, watery world of ours is a portrait of everything else, speaking to and with everything else. thus orchids mimic the sex organs of the insects that pollinate them, coral reefs host untold numbers of critters in the warm upper reaches of vast oceans and we write poetry, paint, sing, dance, teach and build in honour of these miracles. as we build a new world from the ruins of the old, it is up to us whether we drag ‘the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies’ (roy, 2020), or whether we become lighter, more just, to welcome this new world. we might dream, take up space and fight for a future in which it will be okay.

it takes years, decades, centuries. it takes patience, which we learn from the trees. it takes solidarity, which we learn from the coral. it takes light, which we learn from the stars. It takes curiosity, which we learn from the mice. it takes transformation, which we learn from the larvae. some lose patience. some never learn how to carry someone else’s burden as if it were their own, to share the weight on their shoulders. few never learn to seek their own joy, their pleasure in the small and big, every day. others never ask, never push or search. the rare individual stumbles at the point of transformation, too afraid of the future to embrace it. but the rest, those who knew it would be okay, rose like heat, like the sun and overcame.

if, as toni cade bambara tells us, ‘the job of the [writer] is to make revolution irresistible’ (bambara and bonetti, 1982, cited in tillet, 2015, p. 482), then it is the reader’s job not to resist, to take up the revolution. we have been presented with a unique opportunity, made more immediate by the ravages of covid-19, to begin to heal. it is no small task: dismantling the systems smothering and poisoning our oceans, the systems that perpetuate inequality so acute that the richest 1% currently own 44% of the world’s wealth (credit suisse research institute, 2019). so we can’t face this seemingly insurmountable challenge, walk into this unimaginable world without you (heglar, 2020). overcoming decades of trauma will not be easy, but frankly we have no other choice. those ‘salvific futures’ in which we colonise mars, that catastrophic imperial spirit writ large will not save those already drowning. all i am asking is that you ‘do what you are good at and do your best’ in this fight for our present (ibid.). be it writing for justice, eating a plant-based diet, cycling to work, not flying, consuming less wherever possible. these are all small miracles under the heavy hand of capital and although they will not turn the tide they will make you ready to embrace it when it does. because it is about those 1% who saw the fires and the flooding on the horizon and called it profit, who kept their empires propped up on planetary extinction. but, and this needs to be said, it is also about all of us who have spent our lifetimes living in the lap of luxury and privilege. our lives are unsustainable. whether the revolution comes, we are reined in or we rein ourselves in, we will need to live very different lives.

but the future need not be the hopeless wasteland some imagine. we need only look to the poetry of indigenous peoples (see taitano, 2018; marsh, 2019; perez, 2020), to the hopeful worldings in black and queer speculative fiction (see hopkinson and mehan, 2004; jemisin, 2018), to find a present-future worth imagining, worth living. look out the window, at the bees as they survive against the odds, at the rain falling during this drought, at the canals of venice as they flow clear and bright for the first time in decades, to imagine a present we might all thrive in. and once we have imagined it, it is our responsibility to fight for it. for the present, for those who can’t fight and for those who will inherit the earth. the ocean will be here long after we are gone, but if we heed her warning we might get a little more time with the wonders she holds in her embrace.

it has been a long time, longer than anyone cares to remember, since the masters of the earth tumbled from their comfortable perch in the sky, since we reclaimed the earth. we tell this story to our children to teach them humility, to teach them kindness and hope. but mostly, we tell this story because it is the story of how we learned to breathe, how we learned to let others breathe in a world we had for too long thought was hostile to us. the world was only waiting, waiting for us to come home. now our children spend their summers with the coral, in the soft embrace of the ocean. they spend their winters among the trees, encountering the wisdom that comes with age. during the spring they sing with the stars, finding their way without a map. and in autumn, when the earth teaches them how to grieve, they meet the larvae who instruct them in becoming new again, becoming you again.

this way, we hope, whoever inherits the earth will know that ‘it will be okay’.