Islands of Transition: Reimagining Climate Futures in Caribbean Queer and Trans Speculative Fiction

In recent years, small islands have faced the increasing dangers of worsening natural phenomena and rising sea levels due to climate change. Several reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have recorded this (Mycoo et al. 2068) and warned about the consequences of unsustainable practices leading to ecological crises primarily affecting those who contribute least to it. Such documentation is crucial for policy-making and preparatory work. However, besides material threats, small islands also face a discursive challenge in politics and communication with the overuse of the “disappearing islands” trope, announcing that small islands will sink and disappear due to climate change. As museologist Fiona Cameron writes, “‘disappearing islands’ are operationalized as proof of climate catastrophe; as a means of concretizing climate science’s statistical abstractions and as a signifier of the urgency and uneven impacts of global climate change” (873). Similarly, environmental humanities scholar Elizabeth DeLoughrey denounces the “climate determinism” (“The sea is rising” 191) that often haunts the representation of islands, as if they only “enter[ed] the future […] via climate change” (188). Such overly reproduced images, they argue, risk ignoring local perspectives and desires, taking islands simply as tokens to better describe the climate crisis. Hence, a more critical approach to the futurity of small islands is necessary and relevant.

Although studies of this trope have been mostly connected to islands in the Pacific regions, such imaginaries also haunt the material spaces of Caribbean islands.¹ Responding to this, digital humanities scholar Schuyler Esprit affirms that “the decolonial project of home is to assert that the Caribbean is in the future, that we resist and persist” (emphasis added). In these spaces, the possible physical disappearance of islands in the future also echoes discriminatory discourses that have actively denied the future of certain bodies deemed different based on race, sexuality, or gender. Literary practices, performing and nurturing speculation and imagining otherwise, are important platforms where authors who experience these overlapping threats can articulate their concerns for the future. Notably, examples from queer and trans Caribbean speculative fiction disrupt the simplified and linear visions the “disappearing islands” trope proposes. They address how both islands and marginalized bodies face growing social and climate change challenges but still imagine these bodies and places having a stake in the future. By revisiting the histories and concerns of these spaces and their inhabitants, they project the Caribbean into a future, to paraphrase Esprit, of resistance and persistence.

In this study, I delve into how contemporary Anglophone Caribbean speculative fiction grapples with these questions, especially in two short stories: Jamaican-Canadian Nalo Hopkinson’s “Repatriation” (2020) and Barbadian Ada Maricia Patterson’s “Broken from the Colony” (2022). These texts envision a future where Caribbean islands are not disappearing but transforming and surviving, together with the flourishing of queer and trans Caribbean subjects. Hopkinson presents the return of a same-sex couple to Jamaica to take part in the reconstruction of the island with local technologies. Patterson meanwhile brings a sunken island that reemerges, allowing new relationalities where transgender subjects can feel safe. In both accounts, non-heteronormative characters play key roles in island survival and illustrate how ecological balance and gender justice are inextricably connected to achieving its mutual realization. They contest the “disappearing islands” trope by daring to imagine islands in the future as transitioning and changing rather than simply ceasing to exist. Moreover, they foreground agency and responsibility as the collective effort needed to create social ecologies of justice where land and lives can thrive.

Choosing short stories for the analysis is also a critique of gendered dimensions of Caribbean literature that traditionally have deemed the canon of male novel writers as “the pinnacle of formal achievement” (Brown and Rosenberg 22), disregarding short stories as “minor literature.” I defend that with its capacity for language subversion and deterritorialization (Awadalla and March-Russell 5), short stories also show the possibility of imagining plurally and yet collectively, as they often appear in compilations and decentralized open-access online platforms. With this in mind, attending to the diversity of practitioners of this genre in the Caribbean is also essential. Hence, this study purposefully brings Hopkinson—a multi-awarded and trailblazing figure in science fiction, with an extensive list of novels, short stories, and accolades—and her work next to the first incursion in speculative fiction of the young artist Patterson, signaling different trajectories and experiences but similar interests. Their stories coincide in the centrality of queer and trans folks in Caribbean ecologies through various examples of what can fall under the rubric of climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” However, as this term coined by Dan Bloom (Baysal viii) is increasingly popular in ecocritical studies, I emphasize that climate is an already widely present category in the Caribbean’s vast literary tradition, especially with the figure of the hurricane (Deckard) as a ubiquitous leitmotif.

Temporalities of Queer and Trans Caribbean Chronotropics

While acknowledging the challenges of climate change’s worsening of natural phenomena, such as hurricanes, it is paramount to recognize a long Caribbean tradition of periodically dealing with disaster and restoration. These experiences reaffirm that disaster does not define Caribbean existence and propose novel perspectives for understanding and grappling with catastrophe. Considering these contexts and genealogies, multiple rich theoretical apparatuses already active in the Caribbean enable researchers to analyze future-oriented narratives. For example, Caribbean temporalities can dispel the linear and singular thinking behind the “disappearing islands” and its alienation from other notions of time.² As Cameron reflects, “constructed as both a climate front line and a microcosm of a planet in crisis, a perception has been created that low-lying islands will disappear before climate impacts manifest elsewhere” (883) (emphasis in original). By contrast, past, present, and future collapse in Caribbean narratives and bring a more capacious understanding of temporality outside conventional linearity.

This nonlinearity is embodied in the work of many Caribbean writers. Jamaica Kincaid, for example, considers how “To the people of a small place, […] an event that occurred one hundred years ago might be as vivid to them as it were happening now. No action in the present is an action planned without a view of its effects on the future” (54). Accordingly, Odile Ferly, Tegan Zimmerman, and Joshua Deckman have recently coined the term chronotropics, reframing the Bakhtinian chronotope through narratives that “actively challenge the anthropocentric and androcentric logic propelled by European capitalism according to which space is delimited, privatized, tamed, and subject to extraction and time is measured, linear, singular, arbitrarily standardized, and teleological” (2). To focus on the plural ways Caribbean people experience time and place does not respond solely to an interest of moving away from “eurochronologies,” which Eric Hayot defines as “a progressive history of aesthetic innovation in which the contributions of the non-West remain supplemental, or constitute thematic appendixes to form” (6). Instead, it emphasizes the intrinsic value of the narratives emerging from the vibrant Caribbean chronotropics.

This concept is part of a homonymous edited volume that addresses the persistent preoccupation with time and place in Caribbean women’s writings, thus providing a framework for my analysis. The concept includes time, temporalities, and gender, articulating “a new Caribbean, where bodies and imaginations come together to propose other modes of being in the world, ways that dissolve and break through the sediment of colonial-heteronormative patriarchy” (7). I argue that the chronotropics can also enable imaginative pathways toward island survival and gender justice, attending to how queer and transgender practices are deeply entangled with processes of futurity. Attesting to this, for example, Cuban-American cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz reflects that queer lives already drastically reject the constraints of a present notably marked by pervasive homophobia and dare to imagine otherwise (169). Likewise, Puerto Rican anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla concludes in her analysis of transgender performers in post-hurricane Puerto Rico that “in many ways, the postdisaster future is thus a cuir [queer] future” (160). Although deeply entangled in their destabilizing force, I must distinguish that, following queer studies scholar Heather Love’s clarifications, by “queer,” I refer to that which broadly steps out of the normative sexuality and “normalcy” narratives; meanwhile, “trans” refers to the challenge of gender identity focused on embodied experiences and transformation (172). Moreover, I inform the analyses with discussions in queer and trans ecologies scholarship to highlight the contributions from the Caribbean in deepening such ongoing conversations.³

I use “queer” and “trans” in accordance with the information the authors share in personal and literary accounts. In their writings, I find the potential of both queer and trans as verbs that actively transform the deterministic future of the “disappearing islands,” as illustrated by the two short stories. “Queer” and “trans” are terms that have traditionally participated in debates aiming to disarticulate harmful binarism by centering novel approaches to gender and ecology. As aesthetic operations, Hopkinson and Patterson use “queering” and “transing” to contribute to challenging the binary “here/not here” that the “disappearing islands” trope suggests. In doing so, they think about islands as “a model of ‘a world in process’” (Pugh 12), not disappearing but rather “in transition,” and elaborate more-than-human solidarities for the survival of islands and bodies. They furthermore integrate the archipelagic poetics of relation that foregrounds the connectivity of islands, bodies, and epistemologies (Glissant 34) while also suggesting that there cannot be a total disappearance when islands continually repeat each other in the Caribbean imagination (Benítez-Rojo 3). This does not mean diminishing climate change’s impending and material threats to islands’ habitability, and I am not implying either that these stories portray utopias in which islands are impervious. Instead, I argue that in these narratives, Caribbean islands have multiple possibilities of being in the future via creativity and transformation. While addressing the perils faced by small island and queer and trans bodies, they challenge colonial, ecocidal, and cisheteropatriarchal logics of the present with imagination, storytelling, research, and activism, mapping more capacious contours of the Caribbean chronotropics.

Queerness, Blackness, and Island Restoration in Hopkinson’s “Repatriation”

Such manifestations of the Caribbean chronotropics appear in much of Hopkinson’s vast literary trajectory, as documented by scholarship on her writings. For instance, critic Vivian Nun Halloran explains how Hopkinson configures a Caribbean gothic in which past realities haunt the present (160). Similarly, Suzzane Boswell demonstrates how Hopkinson’s work subverts colonial temporalities by showing that the real catastrophe for Caribbean islands is the stagnation in old regimes of colonialism and servitude instead of change (372). Colonialism projects a deterministic future that seems to bind Caribbean islands to the plantation (Ferdinand 110), as seen in the extension of its logic in modern infrastructures of tourism and extraction.⁴ It is not a metaphor that ongoing colonial logics in the aftermath of the empire are very present in both the environmental history and complex social and political landscapes of Caribbean islands since, as Caribbeanist Carine Mardorossian explains, today’s sexual discrimination in the Caribbean must be understood as a continuation of the plantation’s sexual violence (23).⁵ Hence, speculative fiction writers understand the breakage of such “inescapable” fate as a central imaginative project, performatively bidding “farewell to the old empires of sugar cane and flesh” (Lord 7). This impulse also rests behind the short story “Repatriation,” in which Hopkinson and her characters return to their native Jamaica to think about and participate in its futures, which are not defined by colonialism but built upon its ruins.

“Repatriation” was first published in the edited volume Current Futures: A Sci-Fi Ocean Anthology (2019), in conversation with other examples of speculations inspired by the world’s oceans. Nonetheless, I read “Repatriation” specifically in the context of the speculative fiction collection Reclaim. Restore. Return. Futurist Tales from the Caribbean (2020), edited by science fiction writers Karen Lord and Tobias Buckell. The stories chosen for this latter volume contribute to what Buckell calls “Caribbean Futurism,” meaning “a practical, results-oriented collaboration of literature, science and policy” (Lord 2). Hopkinson’s story responds to this call, weaving together preoccupations with ecological concerns and ongoing local research efforts. The story is narrated in first person from the point of view of one of the characters, Carlon, who reluctantly takes a mysterious cruise trip planned by his husband, Jerry. As the journey unfolds, the reader discovers the nature of the trip: the couple will return to Jamaica to support the restoration of the deteriorated island. This restoration process consists of repurposing old cruise ships through a technology called biorock that Jamaican scientists are currently developing to encourage coral reefs’ growth (Goreau).

Like the proposed restoration of the island upon the cruise ships, I begin the analysis by building on considerations of tourism infrastructures as a legacy of the plantation. The story opens with a critique of cruise ships, a mass tourism phenomenon that, although prevalent in different parts of the world, has found its primary destination in the Caribbean since the 1970s (Kasimati and Asero 37). Ironically and with visible disdain, Carlton expresses, “I just feel like I’m on a seagoing plantation” (Hopkinson 55). In a later interview, Hopkinson reflects on this mocking tone: “The story allowed me to make fun of some of the idiosyncrasies and excesses of cruise ship travel and find some hope for dealing with the damage humans are doing to the oceans. As an island girl, I think about that damage a lot” (Sorg and Hopkinson). Nonetheless, the cruise ships marked a dramatic history of “fierce competition for much-needed tourist dollars” (Hopkinson 51) from visitors oblivious of the “the pollution choking the harbour and the poverty and globalization choking the islands” (52). The author remembers this complex history of servitude, competition, and economic dependency not as a thing of the past but in connection with present-day environmental strains, such as the drainage of local resources, widespread pollution with mass-produced single-use items, and its contribution to global emissions putting pressure on the planet.

Grounded in these critical accounts of its history, “Repatriation” offers analepses and expositions describing the main ecological crises taking place in the story, which refer to how “Global warming brought super-tornados which had eroded the sand away. Polar ice cap melts had raised water levels enough to permanently flood so many of our coastal cities” (57). These extreme events made the island territory shrink by receding its coastal lines and seemed to threaten to wipe out Jamaica, but, as the story’s plot reveals, Jamaicans find innovative ways to counteract a grim vision of its total disappearance. The biorock technology allows Jamaicans to transform old cruise ships into valuable infrastructures, reversing the damage of major ecological shifts by turning the vessels into hosts of life for coral reefs: “After the electrical current lays down calcium on the steel frame […], coral and marine plants grow on it, faster and healthier than before. The coral resists bleaching, even if the water gets too warm. Oysters that grow on it are fat, their shells thick and healthy. Starfish stop melting” (58). Beyond accuracy or feasibility, what lingers after reading the story is the importance of finding methods to counteract the totalizing logics of a singular future in which Caribbean islands perpetuate the plantation until they disappear. The biorock technology serves Hopkinson as a metaphor for reworking the plantation infrastructure into futures from/for the Caribbean. This process involves arduous collaboration, requiring local innovation, creativity, and everyone’s roles, including queer folks like Hopkinson herself and her two characters, to contribute to the restorative efforts.

Hopkinson brings the perspectives of two Black gay men for whom the issues of climate displacement, homophobia, and racism still affect the way they move in this journey. Carlton recounts “the usual apprehension that came with crossing official American borders as a Black, gay man was making a knot in my belly” (53). Sexuality, race, and spatiality converge in these meditations on return, as geographies are not neutral and have historically been regulated for the bodies deemed less than human in a sociogenic state of antiblackness and heteronormativity (McKittrick). This relationality presents simultaneous challenges for bodies under social and environmental pressure, as their movements are policed through digital vigilance and control with facial recognition devices (Hopkinson 54). The “people in uniforms looked down on the crowd, frowned at our papers, peered at our faces, asked intrusive questions” (53) intending to intimidate the protagonists. Such policing connects to a more extended history of oppressive practices masked as border control and military exercises. The Atlantic has seen much of the complex history of Black bodies and the sea, considering the lives lost in the Middle Passage due to the slave trade. To that history, one must add the violence experienced in migratory maritime routes toward the United States, the heavy militarization of the Caribbean Sea (DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots 30), and the impending forced displacement of millions due to climate events.

To understand how Black folks in the Caribbean are significantly vulnerable to climate change, it is paramount to revisit the story of the “crown lands” in former British colonies. These pieces of land, usually located in coastal areas, used to belong to the monarchy. However, with gradual emancipatory processes, they became the home of formerly enslaved people, free but utterly dispossessed of material support (Besson 117–119). These new settlements provided and continue to provide shelter to generations but also leave black folks exposed to the consequences of climate change (Griffith-Charles 150). As people will continue to be driven away from these homes due to meteorological events and sea-level rise, climate migration is one of the primary concerns in “Repatriation.” The narrator almost apologetically explains their status as climate migrants: “We’d had to move to America because rising water levels and global warming were destroying our region, stealing health and hope and life” (Hopkinson 55). In addition to this, although not explicitly mentioned in the story, several other accounts reveal that, after environmental catastrophes, queer folks often witness an exacerbation of discriminatory attitudes, have trouble accessing vital help, and suffer from homelessness (Bleeker et al. 25). Hence, it is relevant to consider the further pressure that climate disasters exert on queer bodies.

Aware of these dynamics, the two protagonists in this story are not heroes, victims, or mere bystanders but community members on their way to participate in the needed change in their homes, subverting the expectations of the Caribbean Black body as only moving toward the global north. Return narratives undoubtedly have a long trajectory in Caribbean traditions (Ravizza), and in this story, queer diasporic subjects participate in restoration efforts, refusing to lose the space. Returns and recovery also complicate the idea of island disappearance since, rather than an abandoned land altogether, the story emphasizes Jamaica as a place of movement and transformation, showing ecosystems and communities in constant flux without being deterministic. As essayist, poet, and novelist Dionne Brand articulates in A Map to the Door of no Return, Black Caribbean subjectivities are haunted by the severance from an African memory and by the disconnection from African land (5). Hence, rebuilding the Caribbean and its ecology as a home that has not been lost resonates with more expansive projects of Black ecological poetics.

The rich archive for the future of queer and Black Caribbean ecopoetics presented in “Repatriation” portrays a new futurity that refuses and literally re-fuses colonial infrastructures of dispossession to make a place for new and more robust ecologies. Such efforts prioritize a nature-based approach to an anthropogenic debacle by also centering queer perspectives. By this, I mean not only that queer characters are crucial in these processes but also that queerness fuels the impulses to imagine things otherwise, not succumbing to the binary narrative here/not here. Pleasure and love also play prominent roles in counteracting tropes of disappearance, as the tender moments between the couple indicate that collaborative processes reclaim being conscious of the importance of affective encounters. Contrary to the high-tech obsessions with geoengineering and terraforming by influential technocratic figures—many of them often adhering to white supremacist cisheterormative logics (Stephens), in the story, people reclaim simpler technologies that are vastly more just and attuned to local realities and their desire for the future. This desire is for a home that does not disappear, with “new, clean beaches and coral reefs” (Hopkinson 58), as the biorock technology promises.

Importantly, this futurity only occurs through intra-human and more-than-human collaborations. The Jamaican community that returns—the crew and passengers sharing accents and demeanors (57)—represents the former, whereas the creation of new ecosystems together with coral species evidences the latter. Of course, this propinquity to the nonhuman also appears in the characters’ always ambiguous relation with the sea: “the giving sea, the killing sea, float[ing] under and around us many storeys below” (58). As Caribbean actors, all of them are indispensable in reconstructing the space as one of agency and survival, internalizing the challenges of collapsing environments but creating other relationalities that veer away from utter destruction and disappearance. The new multispecies proposal, ensuring island survival in collaboration with queer folks and marine environments, also implies a discussion on a multigenerational dimension. The image of sunken cruise ships remains, for current readers and the future generations of the story, as a monument to the possibilities and efforts of working with and not against the environment.

In these instances, the proposal of islands surviving and not disappearing, as I have discussed here, also participates in queer ecologies discussion on futurity. If the idea of queer time has been historically defined as ephemeral and not interested in the future (Seymour, Strange Natures 8), this narration presents instead grounded, result-oriented imaginative efforts, bringing a much-needed interdisciplinary perspective to the survival of island spaces and the flourishing of queer lives. Hence, both “Repatriation” and “Broken from the Colony,” as I discuss next, challenge the notion of reproductive heteronormative as the only viable way to imagine futurity. Instead, they rehearse survival and futures “beyond the quagmire of the present” (Muñoz 1) and recenter futurity around queer and trans characters concerned with practices of ecological care, kinship, and belonging.

Transing as Survival in Patterson’s “Broken from the Colony”

Continuing these imaginative exercises, visual artist and writer Patterson reflects on disaster through transgender perspectives in the short story “Broken from the Colony,” where she imagines the futures of islands and the survival of trans bodies. The short story is her contribution to the first iteration of the series Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors by Grist in 2021.⁶ The series features twelve selected climate fiction stories that imagine life 180 years into the future, and, in the year of Patterson’s publication, it had judges and reviewers including adrienne maree brown, Kiese Laymon, and Tobias Buckell. Since its publication, the story has drawn the attention of transecology scholars, with the recent The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature (2024) dedicating several mentions and analyses to it.

“Broken from the Colony” presents a Caribbean future in which hormone treatments enable transgender girls to breathe underwater and to merge with marine ecologies, ensuring their survival after violent natural catastrophes. Following the nonlinear journey of an unnamed transgender girl, the story revolves around the before and after of a hurricane named Dorian, following the devastating category five phenomenon that affected the Caribbean in 2019. Although the real Hurricane Dorian left pain and destruction in 2019, the story’s fictional Dorian has a more drastic outcome, swallowing entire islands and drowning many islanders. Amid various temporal jumps around the event, the story unfolds across five acts, guiding readers through three main settings: a coastal town, the sea, and the shoreline as a space for rebuilding life after the wreckage. Land and sea are simultaneously spaces of rejection, belonging, and escape, where the author reworks present-day violent relationalities, pointing out that none are perfect but complex projects full of possibilities. Patterson seeks comfort in the sea and experiments with new forms of being in a more-than-human world, yet the story’s arc revolves around the protagonist’s desire to return to land once the island resurfaces. The post-disaster scenario in the newly emerged land finally opens possibilities of creating a place for “girls like her” (Patterson, “Broken from the Colony”) by providing a space of acceptance and collaboration to reconstruct terrestrial life.

In this proposal, transgender perspectives offer a model in which the geological and corporeal unite in solidarity to envision change toward flourishing islands and bodies. This relation between Caribbean trans experiences on their island appears in studies such as Rosamund King’s Island Bodies and David Emmanuel’s “Transgender Archipelagos.” However, rather than approaching them only as intersecting topics, I propose that Patterson’s work contributes to actively “transing” the notion of the “disappearing island” by presenting a re-emerged island transiting from a space of rejection to one of inclusion and thus thinking with trans embodiments and their investments in liberation. Gender and ecology are categories explicitly and intrinsically linked in Patterson’s work, aiming to reach a decolonial “trans poetics of climate crisis” (Patterson, “Surface Tension” 319). Following her proposal, I defend the centrality of trans storytelling practices as voices that continue firmly resisting erasure and silencing.

Survival in this story represents more than just surviving an environmental catastrophe when considering the regimes of discrimination and exclusions that the island offers the protagonist before the hurricane. Although the story opens with her in the sea yearning for the surface’s breeze, the land is, ironically, where the subject “cannot breathe,” as the land’s air “chokes” and has “no place for softness” (Patterson, “Broken from the Colony”). Several elements anchor the story to Barbados as the land in question, such as references to chattel houses, breadfruit’s “yelluh meat,” and the famous volcano La Soufrière in the neighboring Saint Vincent. The scenes that expose the girl’s relationship with land mainly indicate that the terrestrial space denies her trans identity and fills her with mixed feelings, wanting to embrace the past, yet wary of what it meant for her body: “She tightened around the memory and could feel [the rock] warming in her fist. But that rock and her people stared back at her ugly, ugly, ugly. There was no love grown for girls like her.” Hence, the rock works as a metonym of land, signaling the rejection experienced by human communities.

Dramatically, the hurricane’s forces wiped out this, her only known home: “A whole island gone. No sign of survivors, which was true. Nobody made it out the same.” For girls like her, this situation entails restarting a new life in the ocean, presented here as a shelter for outcasts, the same as evoked in the now canonical Afrofuturist story of Drexciya (Scales). The hormonal pill and the sea provide never-before-experienced protection: “Safety at the surface was never something she could rely on. The safest space she had known was in the belly of the sea” (Patterson, “Broken from the Colony”). In direct conversation with the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, who once wrote: “sea/doan have no/BACKDOOR” (qtd. in Hessler 60), the girl in the story reconfigures a relation with the element, embracing its capacity to cross to other possible worlds and reclaiming it as a medium of change: “They say the sea has no backdoor. But for girls like her, the sea was their backdoor. Girls growing soft with gills, pores, and polyps, just as they had grown otherwise. That little pill—that little piece of care—was one of the keys to their survival. Breath had been found underwater” (Patterson, “Broken from the Colony”). This metaphor highlights the importance of gender-affirming care for the survival and protection of trans bodies that have recently received more visibility while simultaneously being exposed to transphobia and violence (Gossett et al. xv).

Moreover, in conversation with trans scholarship, the story echoes the challenges to notions of the “naturalness” of bodies since bodies are always linked to some forms of technologies (Stryker qtd. by Seymour, “‘Good Animals’” 192), the same way that island survival relied on the biorock technology in Hopkinson’s story. The pill’s technology allows the protagonist to merge with coral reefs. When dwelling among submarine lifeforms, she reflects on how these marine creatures’ behavior differs from people’s unacceptance of her changing body: “Anemones protecting their tenants from harm. Coral and algae living in close quarters. Keeping each other alive. Caring for each other’s bodies like we lived in each other’s bodies. She always smiled when she saw this. It was all so foreign to what she remembered before Dorian” (Patterson, “Broken from the Colony”). This element brings another concept that trans ecology studies consider central to the trans literature’s engagement with environmental concerns: that of trans-speciation, meaning generating metaphors and kinship with the natural world (Hayward, “More Lessons from a Starfish” 76). In this form of multispecies entanglement, there are instances where the girl compares her body to ripe breadfruit, and, notably, the sea also appears as a “trans-ed” element, “so choked with plastic […]. Toxic microbeads. Hormonal plankton. Water in transition” (Patterson, “Broken from the Colony”). Thus, this account challenges the white nationalists’ heterosexual anxiety and obsession with purity (Perret).

Despite these exuberant images of multispecies symbiosis (Alexis 175), the coral offers the tethers of the “colony” as a price of acceptance, contrary to the networks and communities of mutual care the girl needs to experience freedom and diversity. The author explains: “She never wanted to be that—a colony. She wanted a family, sure, but not whatever this was. Rooted and bound to your species. Repeating and repeating an ideal body. An ideal mind” (Patterson, “Broken from the Colony”). A “trans poetics of climate change” assumes the imperative of refusal for radical transformation, as the girl represents a subject that bursts and exceeds the limits of gendered and normative narratives. In this operation, Patterson recognizes the importance of the cut—or breakage, to follow the story’s title—as a trans strategy that enables the halt of actual harm and the emergence of something new, more attuned, in this case, to herself and her environment. The cut, as trans ecology scholar Eva Hayward contends, challenges ableist notions of wholeness, as the surgical intervention and the scar enable a rebirth and the transformation of something new (“More Lessons from a Starfish” 72). Extrapolated to the context of societal transformation, the cut demands to radically change current extractivist practices that leave the future seemingly condemned to the inevitability of global collapse, and it can protect the lives of trans people of color (cárdenas, Poetic Operations 45).

Moreover, cutting in the context of the story means recognizing that while human/nonhuman hybridizations re-examine human and animal embodiments,⁷ such entanglements can also be problematic, considering how they have been used as an excuse for the dehumanization of many nonwhite bodies (Jackson 672). Race also participates in this account of Caribbean ecologies, as the profound transformation of the land that took place on these islands was only possible with the extraction of labor of millions of Africans forcibly brought there. Patterson understands that a lack of historicity is detrimental to any new reconfiguration of forms of living on land. Therefore, she strongly critiques historic effacements when this new land seems to be one “razed of any and all memory. Like no blood had ever spilled here. Like no cane ever grew” (Patterson, “Broken from the Colony”). The description of these specific relations is fundamental to understanding the island’s reemergence since her narrative, like Hopkinson’s, emphasizes the importance of intersectional perspectives when rebuilding life on islands that are not disappearing but now transing. Patterson reaffirms that islanders must keep a critical vision of what islands are transing toward.

In “Broken from the Colony,” the reemerged land emphasizes the creation of new and safer spaces. She describes that “after so much death had risen from the water, people didn’t much care what you looked like, who you loved, or what bloomed on your body or between your legs.” This coincides with a longer tradition of understanding the paradoxical role of hurricanes in the Caribbean, as the hurricane here is understood as both a disaster and a force of change to restructure unjust worlds. As Patterson explains: “Crisis and redistribution—a hurricane promises both.” With the new opportunities it offers, islanders can create a community in the process of restoration with no place for discrimination. There is a call for making this not a distant scenario but a reconstruction of current societies emphasizing ecological resilience and inclusive and just communities of care.

Consequently, the story does not veer toward individualism after the protagonist separates from the coral colony that threatens to dissolve her agency. Instead, she finds new opportunities for community-making, especially with the only named character of the story (besides Dorian), Keona. They are a Black nonbinary character who intimidates the protagonist at the beginning while at the same time attracting her and inspiring tenderness. Together they discuss expanding new trans-communities with other girls who share the same experience. The rebirthed island becomes then a space of hope, not only as an emotional projection but as hard work and actions (Grain) for the betterment of the future. I read this position in the light of decolonial conversations that place land relationality at the center,⁸ as aspirations to join the embrace of islands and trans bodies submerged in transition processes. The girl hopes that this time she can be held and accepted in this new old land before the coral consumes her. In the final scenes, Patterson engages in actively transing islands toward sustaining and sustainable communities with newer and safer materials and affective infrastructures. In times of alarm for the future of the world and its small islands, Patterson’s praxis invites to consider the preoccupation with islands’ disappearance close to the relations nurtured in those spaces as a path for archipelagic futurity. Transing means, in this context, advocating for changing what needs to be changed, becoming a model of radical and critical transformation, and a fundamental operation for the survival and flourishing of everyone and everything.

Queering and Transing for Ecological Repair

The two pieces of contemporary Anglophone Caribbean speculative fiction discussed in this article challenge the apocalyptic image of the “disappearing islands” by depicting islands as spaces in processes of flux and change. Hopkinson’s “Repatriation” and Patterson’s “Broken from the Colony” perform narratives of restoration and repair that break Caribbean tautologies as sites of violence and extraction (DeLoughrey, “Island Ecologies and Caribbean Literatures” 307; Muñoz Martínez 171). To do so, they articulate intricate narratives of gender and climate, describing and putting forward critical considerations to grapple with climate and social issues through narratives of futurities grounded in the now. Importantly, they describe operations of “queering” and “transing” the “disappearing islands” trope by approaching ecological healing with a more capacious understanding, encompassing the end of oppression based on gender or sexuality. Their proposals encourage the consideration of environmental collapse in tandem with a critique of gender inequalities, sexual discrimination, and racism.

Considering queerness and transness at the core of transformational narratives is paramount for understanding and designing a truly just and sustainable future. Technologies of survival—be the intimate connections with politics of care and respect, the hormone pill, or the biorock method—play central roles in these narratives, always presented in opposition to predatory and harmful infrastructure, such as touristic and policing ones. Moreover, they reframe co-creation as an essential path for protecting islands and bodies. The cut is also a technology that highlights the capacity of transing to other possible worlds, thereby setting a revolutionary tone that demands dignity and reclaims taking control of Caribbean technologies and, by extension, its fate. These narratives reconfigure imaginative practices that serve truly just futures for everyone who will exist in them by revisiting tropes of the disaster, with memory becoming a central element. Disaster, as they present it, is not just ecological debacle but also the policing and discrimination of Black, queer, and transgender subjects. Thus, a post-disaster future must address and redress such injustices, emphasizing the processes of healing bodies and environments from colonial traumas. This healing is possible by embracing the unique convergence of knowledge and cosmologies on the islands, pointing toward outcomes that respond to locals’ needs and differ from imperial demands.

These texts propose reconfiguring human and more-than-nonhuman communities for their mutual benefit. They foreground queer and trans interconnections with their surrounding ecologies that subvert any expectations, showing coral growing from cruise ships and communities of marine creatures providing more comfort than human ones. In both texts, the sea constitutes an ambivalent agent that can give life or take lives but also provides an epistemological ground for explorations into Caribbean pasts, presents, and futures. Other nonhuman actors, such as the islands themselves, also confirm these agential ontologies in the narrations. Hopkinson’s story shows that a multispecies collaboration can speed its recovery if land degradation is an impending risk. By contrast, Patterson presents an island that, after being sunken, naturally starts to emerge. In both processes, land is never a terra nullius, as humans and nonhumans constantly write histories on it.

More than simply fitting into labels of queer, trans, Caribbean, or Afrofuturism, these stories are examples of place-based futuring praxes centered in queer and trans ecological systems, creating new cartographies in the face of discursive and material erasure. The islands here present connective nodes of rhizomatic environments to evoke Glissant’s poetics of relation and enable their reemergence through complex human and more-than-human networks. Such endeavors are important to conceptualize vibrant contemporary speculative work and recognize storytelling practices as other technologies indispensable for survival. Adding to a rich tradition of speculative writing, the authors so far examined here demonstrate that such a genre continues thriving, like unruly weeds, in the interstices of queer, trans, and Black imagination. Additionally, storytelling becomes a medium for bridging gaps in understanding how seemingly distant elements such as gender and ecologies are intrinsically connected in the configuration of sustainable futures. Adding these reflections to climate research is key to envisioning archipelagic futurity not solely based on data and calculations but also on imaginative and cultural practices. Fortunately, these practices are nowadays more available through a growing number of decentralized digital platforms that offer free access and encourage the democratization of future-making praxes.

In moments of environmental and social crisis, the collective imaginaries of futurity must expand to embrace the oblique perspectives queer and trans narratives offer, embracing non-normativity, complexity, and justice. Caribbean speculative fiction visibly places emphasis on the affordances of thinking about climate change through gender and vice versa, bringing forward queer and trans narratives to reimagine the Caribbean in the future. Nonetheless, whereas my analysis has praised the numerous contributions of such texts, I must emphasize that these do not offer savior narratives, and I do not claim that queer or trans authors are more prone to or “have to” participate in ecological projects. I intend to highlight that queer and trans stories often respond to inner and outer landscapes, reclaiming futures denied to them through cisheteronormative discourses. Consequently, as seen in the case of these two short stories, they can articulate new relationalities that serve as blueprints for the constructions of futures otherwise.

Another important consideration is that although they re-seize land from discursive and physical disappearance, this action neither limits the authors’ transnational identities and communities nor pretends to romanticize the Caribbean space, which remains open to returns, restorations, and re-emergences. By intersecting aspects of gender and ecology, “Repatriation” and “Broken from the Colony” imagine futures where Caribbean spaces and subjects survive and find different ways of living in collaboration with their ecological surroundings.

Notes

1

From the Caribbean archipelago of Guna Yala (also known as San Blas), the Gardi Sugdub island, for example, has recently appeared in numerous headlines as a “disappearing island” (Salido).

2

Among the challenges to linear Western time, the work of Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomoi) discusses Potawatomi conceptions of spiral time and reflects on how Indigenous peoples have already experienced the crises of climate change since the debacle of colonialism (226).

3

C.f. Seymour, Strange Natures; Seymour, “‘Good Animals’”; Seymour, “The Future Is Eco-Trans;” Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, Queer Ecologies; Bedford, “Transecology”; Bates, “Queer Affordances”; cárdenas, “Poetics of Trans Ecologies.”

4

In the context of extraction and futurity, Jamaica critically embodies the paradoxes of these discourses. The nation has historically contributed to the United States’ futuristic ambitions in the space race by providing raw materials such as aluminum for aeronautical industries. However, places like Jamaica are often excluded from the idea of the future and the so-called progress. The documentary Fly Me to the Moon (2019) by filmmaker and activist Esther Figueroa provides an account of this fact. The denial of such covalence is present in several manifestos of futurisms, as discussed by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay.

5

A painful reminder of this is a recent headline announcing that, although rarely enforced, St Vincent and the Grenadines opted for upholding colonial-era laws that criminalize same-sex relations, surprisingly disregarding activists’ campaigns (Coto).

6

The story is also republished and available in the online magazine Atmos, featuring striking visual compositions by Austrian-Nigerian photographer David Uzochukwu.

7

The epitome perhaps of this relation appears in Hayward’s “Transxenoestrogenesis,” concerning the uses of pregnant mares’ hormones in gender-affirming treatments.

8

For the implications of decolonization in connection with the land, c.f. Tuck and Yang.