blubber, guts, southern leith
by Nat Raha
i & ii.
ice breaker , hold still,
a touch
shred the opportune from possibility
life from its reflexes, of the
fear & upheaval known,
lived, passed through, speared,
incarce/rated, disrupted
ecological ruin
sown in land
grabs & steam
cast violent lines out from europe,
the re/ordering of sea, land, life, ground
bitten & frost, horse, permeated,
the atlantic in wakes
& floes [1], directions
to foment colony
w/ durable hands, ships forged
on these northern shores
:: lay the ropes of the world in
your desire to control / profit on hunt,
bid lines warfaring, raw
material to sake market
all cetaceans game, in the
simplicity happening to be t/here
mind’s eye fed resolution & adventure to stumble, survey
yur wilderness of water, ice
to seek wealth & oil, heat & food
knowing your insatiable islands
every last seam as
possible industry / to carve
dominance,
iii.
ultramarine
driven polarities to align
compelled from vertigo
light cut in scope
of your buoyancy, forged in
thousands’ wet eclipse, re-
frain submerged, rich on the volume
of body , blue & humpback to black depth
motions blessed to krill
&
on the memory of vast kin
/ the century each of you might
span , air in the thrive
& for water to be known as south
atlantic / antarctic perimeter
heartland to impose human
roving harpoons & trades,,
noise, marked by royal standards for the industrial frontiers
of europe
, in pursuit of new flesh
having dredged the lives from your nearest waters
# turned other for salve/sen, to
drive extinction, fore/shadow temperate edges dulled
, the permanent day worked on as
ecology touched only into itself,
prefabric/ate an industrial harbour,
[corrugated iron & asbestos]
& minimise, later, a pelagic factory to float w/-
out regulation
iv.
repeating / resonant flesh /
call inchoate hydrophonia ,
low-
hz frequency blues
stereotyped
two lulls [2]
migration bel/lows , waves
crepuscular babble
in miles of hundreds
& carries
sub/merge
nt
atlan
-tici-
ty know &
tune ears
w/ age
& the noise [we] tune into you
& sunk mechanical frequencies
churned carbon &
life dis/possessed ,
diesel & sonar
, nuclear
& other missiles [3],
blown amplitude as modern & cut
edges & combust
⎯ logi.stical
trade noise & ice cuts known as
commodities & debt
frequencies to vibrate
oceans’ heat ,
, channel / direct the melt
v.
low price works the antarctic density
harp bold over water & ⎯
coiling, fires & hoists to flag the dead ⎯
a career body
, steam blue spots fin & wrong ‘sinks rapidly’
barrel on ties / trajectory
,, eye full ahead
spring loaded innovative line
even the catcher would recoil by the gun
⎯shoots in the footage⎯
cries when you axe it’s life
, becoming unit, becoming catch
tugged & hauled to the flensing plan
or bow, peels back skin &
blubber , & first would leave
the rest of you out to float ⎯
later, cutters worked out
guts, warmed his hands on your blood,
took the rest to the steam saw [4].
in the fordist heat, extracted, stored your oils
, boiled down, coagulated,
churned to hard fat, taken to market
to face hungry bodies mouths burners
stoves guns accounts
vi.
laying out the scope:
Named after the port that housed its parent company, between 1909-1963, South Leith housed the largest fishery to have existed in the world. Run by Salvesen’s on the island of South Georgia, it was two oceans from the continent where its produce, alongside the wealth that came from extracting so much life from the ocean, was destined. By 1914: four thousand, five hundred humpback whales hunted – producing 8000 tonnes of oil a year [5]. 1925: eight thousand whales (blue, fin, humpback, southern right) killed in a year, for £300,000 profits (≅ £100 million today). Whale oil produced from blubber was used in cooking, in margarine, and later in nitro-glycerine for explosives, primarily for European markets. 1931: forty-two thousand whales killed in a year by pelagic whaling. Over the 1930s, Salvesen’s made £1.1 million from whaling (≅ £365 million today). Taxes on the industry funded UK research into whale biology, to provide a basis for industrial sustainability, in a context that its work force understood to be unsustainable. In over 50 years, this industry pulled 1.6 million cetaceans, including three hundred thousand blue whales and seven hundred thousand fin whales from southern oceans. (Current blue whale population estimates number around 25,000 worldwide). These numbers describe the mass slaughter of–and extraction of wealth towards Scotland and the UK from–the world’s largest mammals. It is one link among many that begins with a land grab by the British Crown, and ends in near ecocide–to bottle and barrel the dwellers of the bottom of oceans [6]. While creating work for urban and island communities in Scotland, its colossal extractions of wealth primarily benefited the capitalist class.
vii.
given today, how water as animate turbulence
cuts southern exposed shores, mountains, worlds,
where drinking water dries, historically
marked by colonial extractions ⎯
& that today, these atlantics swim with memory
living also in human workers,
industrial pillage,,
its afterlife moving as accumulated capital ⎯
& that in the desire of nations to control oceans
, pour frequencies & detonations, to service the next war,
dis/rupt planetary needs we need to trust
rush dives up to beach whales the
stress of military occupation [7] ⎯
in reply to decades, silence, neutrality
reluctance to turn wealth into a means to heal, to cede control
, what reparative relation could be
forged from here to oceanic life ⎯
melodies / absorbed by water, i
lay at sands
, weave
by your calls’ mourning,
may the war games freeze by the ice they wash from earth
may empires rust
Leith, Scotland
December 2020–January 2021
***
[1] Written during a national lockdown for coronavirus, this text is partly based on secondary sources available digitally during this time.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016.
[2] Brian S. Miller, Russell Leaper, Susannah Calderan and Jason Gedamke. ‘Red Shift, Blue Shift: Investigating Doppler Shifts, Blubber Thickness, and Migration as Explanations of Seasonal Variation in the Tonality of Antarctic Blue Whale Song’. PLoS ONE 9 (9), 2016. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107740.
[3] Numerous recent deaths of whales around the Scottish coast have been linked to military activity. For a summary, see Sophie Hadley, ‘Naval Sonar in Scotland Called Into Question After Whales Found Stranded’, Earth.Org, 5 January 2021, https://earth.org/naval-sonar-…
[4] Britain’s Whale Hunters: The Untold Story, The Rise, 23:00 05/07/2018, BBC4, 60 mins. https://learningonscreen.ac.uk… (Accessed 15 Feb 2021).
[5] Britain’s Whale Hunters: The Untold Story, The Fall, 23:00 12/07/2018, BBC4, 60 mins. https://learningonscreen.ac.uk… (Accessed 15 Feb 2021). All statistics and contemporary economic valuations in this paragraph are from this source.
[6] These thoughts are nourished by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who addresses practices of unlearning forms of kinship and ‘the systems tied to the colonial reproduction of individuality’ as a stake of planetary survival, which may include listening to non-human life. Gumbs asks, ‘[w]hat if my actions in solidarity with the ocean are a writing of the future, a visible myth unfolding?’. In, ‘Being Ocean as Praxis: Depth Humanisms and Dark Sciences’, Qui Parle, 28 (2), December 2019, pp. 335-352, p. 342. See also Gumbs’ new book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammels. Chico and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2020.
[7] On the relations between the militarisation of the ocean, war games, carbon emissions and climate change, see Elizabeth Deloughrey, ‘Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene’, English Language Notes, 57 (1), April 2019, pp. 21-36
***
Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar. Her third collection of poetry is of sirens, body and faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018). She is a Research Fellow on the ‘Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism’ project at the University of St Andrews.
This writing forms part of a MAP series curated by Camara Taylor, looking at ‘the cold’ in its various registers and realities.
This commission developed as a collaboration between the Scottish BAME Writers Network (SBWN) and 2020 MAP resident Reviews and Projects Co-editors Alison and Rosie. Special thanks to Jeda Pearl of SBWN.
