A Distinctive Disaster Literature Montserrat Island Poetry Under Pressure

A Distinctive Disaster Literature
Û¬Ü—— Montserrat Island Poetry under Pressure
JONATHAN SKINNER
I’m a survivor, a writer
Three days after1
DISASTER CAN BE AN ATTRACTIVE PROSPECT according to Susan
Sontag, for in a disaster there is release from normal obligations.2
Under threat from hurricane, volcano, flood, earthquake, one lives in
the moment by struggling to survive. It is during these frightening, but also
exciting, times that the humdrum and mundane are replaced by an edgy
hyper-realism. This essay assesses a new strain of disaster literature found in
writings from Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory in the Eastern Carib-
bean. These writings are islander reactions to natural disasters, specifically
poets engaging with the sudden disaster wrought by Hurricane Hugo in 1989
and the slow, ongoing volcanic eruption of Mount Chance since 1995. Yet
this body of work is also an exploration of island identity as it struggles with
colonial and postcolonial realities, and a cathartic social commentary on un-
fortunate events. These are narratives as product and narratives as praxis,
then, which attempt to write and to right the social realities that surround
1
Kemberley Fenton, “The Hugo Effect,” in Horrors of a Hurricane: Poems: From
Hugo With Love, ed. Howard Fergus (Montserrat: School of Continuing Education,
UWI, 1990): 43.
2
Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965), in Sontag, Against Interpre-
tation, and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967): 209–25.
A

64 JONATHAN SKINNER Û¬Ü
them. Or, to put it another way, this is “the texting of life”3
in what might be
termed a semi-postcolonial environment: that is to say, one still governed by
Britain yet a territory where debates about independence and self-identity
abound.
Writing Montserrat
The island of Montserrat is approximately forty square miles in size. It has
been populated since the early seventeenth century when English colonial set-
tlers and Irish indentured settlers arrived on the uninhabited island and intro-
duced a plantation economy supported by the exploitation of West African
slaves.4
The island has remained British, a low-key, tranquil location that in
recent times has encouraged residential tourism by appealing in particular to
American expatriates in search of a peaceful and stable Caribbean retirement
destination.5
Montserrat and its inhabitants have successively been described
according to their “African and Irish retentions”;6
as “the last English colony”
because of their enduring colonial status;7
and as a location where identity
“reverberates” due to its small-island status and the lowering presence of the
volcano.8
In the twentieth century, Montserratians threw off the yoke of the
plantocracy, fought successfully for suffrage, and established “a migration-
3
Jonathan Skinner, “Narrative on the Net: Bill and his Hyper-Lives, Loves and
Texts,” a/b: Auto/Biography 10.1–2 (2002): 22.
4
Howard Fergus, Montserrat: History of a Caribbean Colony (London: Macmillan
Caribbean, 1994); Don Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730
(Montreal, Kingston, Ontario & London: McGill–Queen’s UP, 1997).
5
Jonathan Skinner, “Modernist Anthropology, Ethnic Tourism and National Iden-
tity: The Contest for the Commoditization and Consumption of St. Patrick’s Day,
Montserrat” in Tourism, Consumption and Representation: Narratives of Place and
Self, ed. Kevin Meethan, Alison Anderson & Stephen Miles (London: CAB Interna-
tional, 2006): 253–71.
6
John Messenger, “African Retentions in Montserrat,” African Arts 6.4 (Summer
1973): 55–56.
7
Howard Fergus, Montserrat: The Last English Colony? Prospects for Indepen-
dence (Montserrat: Department of Extra-Mural Studies, UWI, 1978).
8
Jonathan Skinner, Before the Volcano: Reverberations of Identity on Montserrat
(Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak, 2004).

Û¬Ü A Distinctive Disaster Literature 65
oriented society” on a remittance economy.9
When ninety-five percent of the
island’s secondary-school graduates left the island en masse – “reapprenticed
to the world,” in the words of one Montserratian poet10
– the social implica-
tions of such emigration were described as leaving behind the rump, “a resi-
dual population that is less innovative and more dependent.”11
It was no won-
der, then, that in 1967 the first Chief Minister of the island, the Montserratian
William Bramble, rejected the offer of Statehood in Association with Britain,
opting instead for the island to remain a crown colony.12
With this decision,
taken because Britain’s “budgetary dole” was seen to be indispensable to the
country’s survival,13
Montserrat remained “wedded to colonialism.”14
Towards the later stages of the twentieth century, Montserrat – by then ex-
hibiting the typical small-island rentier and mendicant status of offshore bank-
ing and British subsidy15
– explicitly advertised its colonial status to North
Americans and North Europeans, encouraging them to become residential
tourists, ‘snowbirds’ who would winter on the island. This brought significant
revenue to the island, but also created a white elite on Montserrat of some
300 expatriates allied with the British appointed Governor and staff who, to-
gether, appeared pitched against some ten thousand black Montserratians.
Island poet Howard Fergus pithily sums up some of the new tensions on the
island in his contentious poem “This Land is Mine.” Drawing explicitly on
9
Stuart Philpott, West Indian Migration: The Montserrat Case (London: Athlone,
1973): 9.
10
Archie Markham, “On Explaining the Result of the Race to your Mother,” in
Markham, Letter from Ulster & The Hugo Poems (Todmorden: Littlewood Arc,
1993): 41.
11
David Lowenthal, “Social Features,” in Politics, Security and Development in
Small States, ed. Colin Clarke & Tony Payne (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987): 36.
12
Jonathan Skinner, “Formal and Informal ‘Island’ Relations on Colonial Mont-
serrat and Gibraltar,” in Managing Island Life: Social, Economic and Political Dimen-
sions of Formality and Informality in “Island” Communities, ed. Jonathan Skinner &
Mills Hills (Dundee: U of Abertay P, 2006): 181–205.
13
Howard Fergus, Montserrat: History of a Caribbean Colony, 212.
14
Oliver Mathurin, “Electoral Change in Montserrat and Antigua,” in Readings in
Government and Politics of the West Indies, ed. Trevor Monroe & Rupert Lewis
(Jamaica, Department of Government: The Press, UWI, 1971): 147.
15
Godfrey Baldacchino, “Bursting the Bubble: The Pseudo-Development Strategies
of Microstates,” Development and Change 24.1 (January 1993): 40.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Fergus complains about the new locals and their
competing interests with Montserratians, warning:
Take it easy, stranger man
In your imperious drive
To build an ivory wall
In my black sand.16
In the specific context of Montserratian social interaction, these words risk
being interpreted as aggressive and defensive. Typically on Montserrat, is-
landers double up in their roles and positions throughout the day, given that
there is often neither the demand nor the finances to support solo career paths
in this small-island society. Thus, Howard Fergus is the University of the
West Indies resident tutor on the island, acts as Deputy Governor when the
British Governor is absent, and is also Speaker in the local Legislative As-
sembly when it is in session. In the same way, an island physician might serve
as a member of the Montserrat Defence Force and run his/her own real-estate
business. In such ‘organic’ societies, one frequently meets one’s contempo-
raries in a range of capacities. For this reason, islanders cannot afford to ‘get
on the wrong side’ of each other. Consequently, social critique is often muted
and veiled and indirectly expressed through poetry and calypso.17
One organization that facilitates creative social and political expression
and constitutes an acceptable outlet for explicit social and political commen-
tary is the Montserrat Writers’ Maroon. This loose collection of poets and
creative writers, founded and headed by Fergus, has “the avowed aim of
stimulating creative writing and developing a Montserratian literature.”18
Of
course, the term ‘maroon’ has specific resonance in the Caribbean context, re-
ferring as it does to the runaway slaves of Jamaica who fought the slave
owners. Fergus’s adoption of the term shows that, through creative writing,
national identity and an independent consciousness can be forged. This, in
turn, could be said to lead to collective self-belief and, inevitably, political
16
Howard Fergus, “This Land is Mine,” in Green Innocence (St. Augustine, Trini-
dad: Multimedia Production Centre, 1978): 23.
17
See Jonathan Skinner, “Licence Revoked: When Calypso Goes Too Far,” in An
Anthropology of Indirect Communication, ed. Bill Watson & Joy Hendry (London:
Routledge, 2001): 181–200.
18
Howard Fergus, Montserrat: History of a Caribbean Colony, 256.

independence.19
Fergus’s ambition for island independence is clear: “Consti-
tutional independence cannot be postponed forever; it is a continuation of the
journey from slavery to emancipation, but there has to be conscious prepara-
tion.”20
‘Literary marooning’ might describe Fergus’s tactic for bringing the island
into a postcolonial reality. However, the effectiveness, or even relevance of
such a strategy needs to be questioned. For all the Montserratian rhetoric of
independence, the islanders continue to show awareness of their need for
financial support from the ‘motherland’. Furthermore, there is a comfortable
psychological security that comes with British Overseas Territory status,
should disaster strike the island. Although a two-thirds-majority vote is all
that is required to secure independence, no Montserratian political party has
ever stood on such a platform. Interestingly, however, although this lack of
interest in an independence agenda was very much in evidence in the imme-
diate aftermath of Hurricane Hugo, the situation has evolved considerably in
the context of the Mount Chance volcanic eruptions. As this essay will de-
monstrate, this emerges in particular in creative forms of expression which,
for some, can be seen as a sort of conscious preparation for independence.
The Hugo Tempest
When Hurricane Hugo hit Montserrat in 1989 it devastated the island, de-
stroying ninety-five percent of the island’s buildings, causing in excess of
260 million dollars in damage, and resulting in the Governor’s enacting and
revising colonial emergency powers that relegated the Chief Minister to the
role of morale re-builder. This sudden invocation of emergency powers
brought home to the inhabitants the island’s colonial status, more so than the
usual pomp and circumstance associated with colonial rule. The following
year saw the publication of Horrors of a Hurricane, an expanded version of a
ten-poem pamphlet that had originally appeared in 1989.21
This locally pub-
19
See Skinner, Before the Volcano, and “Colonising Narratives, Double Conscious-
ness and Barbarian Writing: Fergus and the Writers’ Maroon of Montserrat,” in Carib-
bean Narratives of Belonging: Fields of Relations, Sites of Identity, ed. Jean Besson &
Karen Olwig (Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 2005): 245–62.
20
Fergus, Montserrat: History, 217.
21
Horrors of a Hurricane: Poems: From Hugo With Love, ed. Fergus (Montserrat:
School of Continuing Education, UWI, 1990); From Hugo With Love: Poems, ed.
Fergus (Montserrat: Department of Extra-Mural Studies, UWI, 1989).

lished volume is one of three to emerge from the hurricane, so to speak. Edi-
ted by Fergus, Horrors features contributions from thirty-one poets, although
almost a quarter of the fifty poems are penned by Fergus himself. In his intro-
duction to the volume, Fergus immediately appeals to local readers by citing
the local proverb “only who feels it knows it.”22
The islanders, then, are his
supposed audience, a group of people united by the hurricane experience,
reliving it in these Maroon poems. A sense of intersubjectivity is gained as the
natural disaster unites and brings people together before the next disaster.
Fergus continues by explaining how the writings about Hugo are a means by
which to derive therapeutic benefit and to document history:
These poems represent what Hugo did to people, the desolation it
wrought in their land, the havoc it wreaked on their property and the
games it played on their imagination. The poems imaginatively cap-
ture a long and terrible moment in our island’s history; they are
textured outpourings of head and heart.23
The religious and comparative nature of the collection is also underlined in
the introduction:
It was a good thing that people could write. By crying and laughing in
verse, by assuming the posture of sage and prophet placing the hurri-
cane in the context of divine visitation, more persons were able to main-
tain their sanity, even if this meant flattering Montserrat as another Nine-
veh, a Pompeii, the antediluvian generation. (I omit Sodom since we are
not too hot on homo-sexuals [sic]). Writing on Hugo was thera-
peutic.24
Fergus’s own poems in the volume can be seen to represent a collection
within the collection. They range from “Class” in semi-rhyming sonnet style
(“They call Hugo a communist / levelling the pews of people and priest”)25
to
the angst-filled and ambivalent lines in “Forethought” with its English nur-
sery-rhyme rhythms and challenging postcolonial word-play and misdirec-
tions:
While Hugo busted his wind
pipe
22
Howard Fergus, “In the Year of Disaster or AD 95,” in Eruption: Ten Volcano
Poems (Plymouth, Montserrat: Montserrat Printery Limited, 1995): 18.
23
Horrors, ed. Fergus, 18.
24
Horrors, ed. Fergus, 18–19.
25
Fergus, “Class,” in Horrors, ed. Fergus, 50.

blowing us apart
mother provident and prescient
pressure-cooked a constitution
to put us back
together like her little ones should be26
In this poem, Fergus reiterates Montserrat’s continued colonial condition, one
that was extended in 1989 as extra powers came into force during the post-
hurricane clean-up operations. Montserratians believe that the British used the
hurricane to reassert their colonial control of the island, using the promise of
reconstruction aid to negotiate greater influence over the internal economy
and to restrict off-shore banking practices. Fergus’s criticisms here are
nuanced, indirect, and veiled. In contrast, his colleague the Maroon perform-
ance poet, musician, and school-teacher Ann Marie Dewar, writes in a more
forthright manner in her poem “Fightback”:
Look how Hugo come an blow hole
Na we poor economy
Easy so ee come an strip way
All awe prosperity […]
But awee know how Montserrat neaga
Strang an proud an fightin brave.27
If we compare these two poems, it is Dewar rather than Fergus who celebrates
Montserratian solidarity and resilience in the face of adversity. Dewar writes
in the spoken language of the islanders, passionate and direct, as opposed to
Fergus’s ludic but ultimately distancing satire. Perhaps Dewar’s poetic voice
is closer to the postcolonial condition that Fergus desires?
By writing in dialect, these Maroons are addressing a local audience direct-
ly and asking to be heard in a manner similar to the oral performances of the
island calypsonians. They are celebrating their nation language,28
choosing to
write as they speak, to use Montserratian grammar and so be comprehended
by the Montserratian on the street rather than by the ‘Imperial’ British reader
who has to refer to the glossary at the back of Fergus’s usual poetry collec-
tions. This suggests that Fergus, in particular, is trying to tap into both local
and global postcolonial discourses. The Maroon writers also, perhaps, paint
26
Howard Fergus, “Forethought,” in Horrors, ed. Fergus, 61.
27
Anne–Marie Dewar, “Fightback,” in Horrors, ed. Fergus, 41.
28
See Michael Angrosino, “Dub Poetry and West Indian Identity,” in Anthropology
and Literature, ed. Paul Benson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993): 73–88.

more evocative portraits of their Hugo experiences through raw personal nar-
ratives. They have poetic licence to write and perform their pieces, when to
speak their minds would be inappropriate or unacceptable. For Jacqueline
Browne, Hugo is ironically likened to a tradesman working on her house:
Hugo was de best trades-man
I ever did see
Me a go tell you wah
Hugo do for me
Instant sunroof – no
Bother talk bout dat
He just lif off galvanize.29
Rather than appeal to the national/international politics and masked anti-colo-
nialism of Fergus’s pieces, the allusions and references in the collection’s
other poems are to family, personal survival, and home (“[Hugo] Rearrangin’
de furniture widout consent / on its own personal interior decoratin’ licence”).30
In addition to Horrors, Hugo gave rise to two other publications: Hugo
versus Montserrat, co-edited by Howard Fergus and the Montserrat-born poet
E.A. ‘Archie’ Markham, and Markham’s own poetry volume Letter from
Ulster & the Hugo Poems.31
The first volume is a charity collection (pub-
lished under the auspices of the University of Ulster, where Markham was
writer-in-residence between 1988 and 1991) in which poems alternate with
descriptions and photographs of the damage. As in Horrors, Fergus intro-
duces the volume and tries to convey to the reader a sense of the excitement
and awe that can be found in the Hugo survivor’s accounts (poetic or other) of
the event:
Montserratians who heard their parents speak of the 1924 and 1928
hurricanes with dread and awe always burned with childish curiosity
to sense for themselves the ‘blusterous romance’ of one. Hugo pro-
vided most five-year olds and upwards with harrowing experiences
of a life-time.32
29
Jacqueline Browne, “Hurricane Trades-man,” in Horrors, ed. Fergus, 30.
30
Colette Lee, “Hugo,” in Horrors, ed. Fergus, 75.
31
Hugo Versus Montserrat, ed. Howard Fergus & Archie Markham (Londonderry,
Northern Ireland: Linda Lee Books, distributed by New Beacon Books, 1989); Archie
Markham, Letter from Ulster & The Hugo Poems (Todmorden, Lanchashire: Little-
wood Arc, 1993).
32
Hugo Versus Montserrat, ed. Fergus & Markham, 7.

It is as though the young want such an experience in order to relate to their
elders, to have memories equal to if not surpassing those of their seniors. The
hurricane also appears to resemble a rite of passage in the same way that mi-
gration from and return to the island are fundamental life experiences. Hugo
versus Montserrat also brings home how profoundly people were changed by
the hurricane experience: the future Chief Minister Reuben Meade uses his
contribution to describe how the hurricane brought a “re-focussing” to the is-
landers as they returned to their former community-minded selves.33
Markham, who had left Montserrat because of a previous hurricane, found
himself in Northern Ireland when Hugo hit his native island. Letter from
Ulster & the Hugo Poems is a collection of epistolary poems stemming from
his stay in Portrush, a migrant poetry of rail stops and seaways and regional
juxtapositions between Montserrat and Northern Ireland. The volume con-
cludes with a series of poems specifically engaging with Hurricane Hugo. The
first, “Here we go again,” describes a mother’s experience of the rebuilding
taking place three weeks after the hurricane.34
While the woman is afraid, dis-
orientated, and tired, yet resigned to the maelstrom of life in Harris village in
Montserrat, she also finds herself cheered by the sounds made by birds return-
ing to the island. She is heartened when she hears familiar musical refrains
about the village and she collects herself by washing sheets alongside her
daughter, performing the ordinary when living in the extraordinary. Surviving
Hugo has given this woman a richer appreciation of the everyday. For all the
natural disasters on the colony of Montserrat, she and her family are alive and
well. And so the poem moves towards its denouement in the manner of choral
praise, generalizing the natural disasters together:
… I just found joy …
Was here in ’24
Was here in ’28
Will be here the day Soufrière
Vomit corruption back in we face.
Will be here for the Fire, the Flood …
… Just found joy I’m as happy as …
Another week: this isle is full of noises …35
33
“Perhaps [they] needed a disaster,” he comments (Hugo Versus Montserrat, 70).
34
Markham, “Here we go again,” in Markham, Letter from Ulster, 81–82.
35
Markham, “Here we go again,” in Markham, Letter from Ulster, 81–82, author’s
punctuation and italics.

Here, Markham – like Fergus – takes on the voice of black Caliban, the ‘bar-
barian poet’, to use the well-known colonial/postcolonial trope, in this case
subverting Shakespeare’s stereotype of the native cannibal.36
For Markham,
Caliban replaces Ariel with his soothing voice and local knowledge that can
be used to help the islanders. Like Fergus, Markham plays with and subverts
colonial tropes. The above poem is held up by Fergus as a juxtaposition of joy
and disaster, with the former emerging from or in spite of the latter. In this
way Hugo becomes a rich and “awesome experience” to be re-lived through
Markham’s words and poetry.37
Although written prior to the volcano crisis,
the poem retains its relevance, and a certain prophetic dimension, as Mont-
serrat faces other disasters.
Montserratian colonial citizens, politicians, and poets never seem to be far
away from the havoc and calamity nature can cause. It is as though, collec-
tively, the islanders have become habituated to trauma through a long history
of natural catastrophes (volcanic activity and eruption in 1934 and 1995;
floods in 1952 and 1982; hurricanes in 1899, 1924, 1928, 1989; earthquakes
in 1843, 1933–35 and 1974).38
In his notes on the Hugo poems, Markham ac-
knowledges that the hurricane precipitated a burst of creativity on the island,
with poets writing and expressing their trauma and hopes in texts that also
aimed to make sense of the event. Out of the bleakness, poets ‘writing Mont-
serrat’ fashioned a survivors’ disaster literature:
Hugo joined the hurricanes of folk memories ’24 & ’28, as something
of a war which had been overcome, one effect of which was suddenly
to have generated what is now seen as a Montserratian ‘school’ of
writing.39
Evidence of this school of disaster literature by survivors has continued since
1995 with the sudden eruption of Mount Chance.
36
Cf. The Tempest, III.ii.148, and see Skinner, “Colonising Narratives” and
“Nationalist Poets and ‘Barbarian Poetry’: Scotland’s Douglas Dunn and Montserrat’s
Howard Fergus,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 40.4 (October 2004): 377–88.
37
Horrors, ed. Fergus, 21.
38
Fergus, Montserrat, 220–38.
39
Markham, Letter from Ulster, 91.

Volcano Ventings
In June 1995, just as Hugo was beginning to settle in Montserratian memory
and was being memorialized again in one of Fergus’s annual remembrance
poems,40
the previously extinct Mount Chance began to erupt, leading to mass
evacuation, destruction of the south of the island and some twenty-three
deaths from the volcano’s pyroclastic mudflows. This new natural disaster
transformed over a third of the island into a moonscape and saw the capital,
Plymouth, become a modern-day Pompeii. As a natural disaster, the eruption
has eclipsed the ten-hour-long Hugo, and has prompted more than ten years
of constant vigilance and creeping evacuation; as one poet phrased it, Mont-
serrat has become “silicon glazed.”41
Two-thirds of the island population of
10,000 have left for neighbouring islands, North America, and the UK, leav-
ing behind an island deeper still in colonial debt. Even more significantly,
whereas the British emergency powers invoked by the Governor were contes-
ted and resisted by Montserratians following Hugo, the on-going volcanic
natural disaster has been of such magnitude that British development aid and
colonial authority have come to be seen as vital to the continued habitation of
the island.42
The Mount Chance eruption has given rise to five key booklets of poetry
and other writings, listed here in chronological order:
Eruption: Ten Volcano Poems,43
a locally published pamphlet of ten poems by
Fergus;
Eruption: Montserrat versus Volcano,44
a locally published collection of
poems, volcano narratives, descriptions, and reports edited by Fergus;
40
Howard Fergus, “Remembrance” (17 September 1992), “Hurricane Romance” (17
September 1993), “In Hugo Memoriam” (17 September 1994), in Fergus, Lara Rains
& Colonial Rites (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1998): 75, 76, 77.
41
Joan Meade, “Wage A Bet,” in Beneath the Bananas: Poems of Montserrat, ed.
Howard Fergus (Salem, Montserrat: UWI, 2004): 80.
42
Jonathan Skinner, “Anti-social ‘social development’? The DFID approach and
the ‘indigenous’ of Montserrat,” in Negotiated Development: Power and Identity in
Development, ed. Johan Pottier, Alan Bicker & Paul Sillitoe (London: Pluto, 2003):
98–120.
43
Howard Fergus, ed. Eruption: Ten Volcano Poems (Plymouth, Montserrat: Mont-
serrat Printery, 1995).
44
Eruption: Montserrat versus Volcano, ed. Howard Fergus (Manjack, Montserrat:
School of Continuing Studies, UWI, 1996).

Hope: Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology of Poems,45
an edited collection com-
memorating 50 years of the University of the West Indies (including a
poem by Jonathan Skinner);
Volcano Song – Montserrat: Poems of An Island in Agony,46
a collection of
thirty ‘volcano poems’ plus ‘occasional poems’ by Fergus published in
Great Britain;
Volcano Verses,47
an anthology of approximately twenty ‘volcano verses,’ and
some twenty ‘people poems’ and ‘occasional poems’ by Fergus.
With its stark title, Eruption, and concise subtitles – Ten Volcano Poems and
Montserrat versus Volcano – Fergus’s collections of poetic social commen-
taries are a scarcely veiled criticism of colonialism. Furthermore, whereas the
Hugo poems drew comparisons with previous hurricanes, the volcano poems
tend to link back to earlier earthquakes on Montserrat: “Soufriere ’95,” for
example, dates the volcano, its initial eruption on Montserrat, and is dedicated
to Fergus’s fellow poet Archie Markham and his own disaster poem “Here
We Go Again.” It even repeats some of Markham’s imagery and appeal to
previous natural disasters:
In ’35 earthquakes won the ashes
when many wickets tumbled
this is the season of volcanoes
we look up to them like primeval gods
growing on the mountains. They look
like giant trees drawn by children
to mark the August circumstance
in another Savage competition.48
The rich, compact allusion to the quintessentially combative Caribbean pas-
time of cricket (here it is the volcanic cloud that triumphs over man: i.e. wins
‘the Ashes’, and the blast that levels everything standing) is followed by the
mention of “August,” which both plays with the notion of imperious severity
and refers to the month when the volcano was confirmed active but also when
emancipation from slavery is celebrated. The poem also plays ironically with
45
Hope: Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology of Poems, ed. Howard Fergus (Manjack,
Montserrat: UWI School of Continuing Studies, Montserrat, 1998).
46
Howard Fergus, Volcano Song – Montserrat: Poems of An Island in Agony (Lon-
don: Macmillan Education, 2000).
47
Howard Fergus, Volcano Verses (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2003).
48
Fergus, “Soufrière ’95,” in Eruption: Ten Volcano Poems, 5.

the term “Savage,” which is the name of the British Governor on Montserrat
and also qualifies the way in which the volcano, a new master of the island,
treats the people of Montserrat. This anti-colonial subtext is continued in yet
more thinly veiled poems such as “Scientists know” where the volcano is seen
to act more independently than the Montserratian people who typically place
their trust in colonial scientists and in God, and “Volcano Watch” where Fer-
gus considers the enforced evacuations to the north of the island as revealing
the way in which Montserratians, unlike the volcano, obey the colonial au-
thorities. Fergus recalls the Governor’s colonial emergency powers that are
summoned into action with each natural disaster, further subjugating Mont-
serratians and reiterating their dependent status:
We have come by faith just beyond Belham river
in obedience to God, Government
and the Governor’s emergency powers
which do not govern earthquakes and volcanoes49
Later in the poem, Fergus imaginatively suggests that the chatter throughout
the island comes from officials quoting scientists’ reports. With their sirens
and broadcasts and “[c]hoppers […] cutting through the Queen’s / peace”
they have created an “isle […] full of noises” again.50
“Volcano Watch,” “Eruption,” and “Scientists Know” are all reprinted in
Fergus’s edited volume Eruption: Montserrat versus Volcano. Whereas pre-
viously Hugo was seen to attack Montserrat, here the more deliberate and
combative subtitle pitches Montserrat against the volcano thus framing these
different natural disasters in contrasting ways. The volcano is a menace from
within, a part of mother nature (“naked and bare,” “strong; proud; defying”
and “beautiful […/…] in nakedness,”51
“Mudder Volcan” erupting alongside
Montserratian day-to-day life52
). There are other differences characterizing
responses to the volcano as opposed to those dealing with the hurricane, as
Fergus explains in his introduction:
49
Fergus, “Volcano Watch,” in Eruption: Ten Volcano Poems, 9.
50
Fergus, “Volcano Watch,” in Eruption: Ten Volcano Poems, 11, author’s italics.
51
Karney Osborne, “Volcano’s Gift,” in Eruption: Montserrat versus Volcano, ed.
Fergus, 96.
52
Yolanda Audain, “Mudder Volcano,” in Eruption: Montserrat versus Volcano,
ed. Fergus, 81–82.

I found Montserrat Versus Volcano to be a book waiting to be written.
The inversion of the words in the title is deliberate and symbolic.
Montserrat has not succumbed to volcanoes in the manner of Hugo as
far as physical damage is concerned and the island very much hopes to
be the victor in its response to seismic turbulence and rise rapidly from
the ashes, so to speak.53
While Montserratians hid from the hurricane and could not accommodate it,
they have re-orientated their lives against and alongside the unexpected
“nature” and “silent vandalism” of the volcano.54
Eruption, the edited volume, features a large number of new poets, school
children and Montserratians frustrated by the incessant uncertainty of living
with the volcano. Their works are graphic and personal testimonies of disas-
ter. The government, the British and the colonial condition are absent from
these cathartic narratives. In her poem “Volcano,” Chanelle Roach puts her
anger and rage at the volcano on a par with the volcano’s own fury:
Slowly splitting
my mountains of dreams
burning my hopes
to ashes
I’m smouldering
with molten rage
as great as yours
losing sleep as you are awakening
clouding my future
with your smoke55
In ‘venting’ herself like the volcano, Roach is able to continue her island life.
Furthermore, expressing herself through writing becomes a salve for main-
taining her sanity. Reading this volcano poem, or hearing it read in perform-
ance or across the radio, islanders are able to identify with her, to share the
struggle and to feel that they are not facing the unexpected natural disaster
alone.
53
Eruption: Montserrat versus Volcano, ed. Fergus, 7.
54
Nerisa Browne, “Awakening of a Fiery Mountain,” in Eruption: Montserrat
versus Volcano, ed. Fergus, 66.
55
Chanelle Roach, “Volcano,” in Eruption: Montserrat versus Volcano, ed. Fer-
gus, 97.

In 1998, three years into the volcano crisis and celebrating fifty years of
the University of the West Indies, Fergus edited Hope. Many of the thirty
poets included in this volume were associated with the Montserrat Maroons.
Because of the volcano crisis, however, a number of them had migrated from
the island and were writing from Scotland, England, France, and Egypt. Thus,
while the volcano again dominates the poems in Hope, themes such as migra-
tion and memory also emerge in the disaster texts. A number of poems deal
with “Exodus”:56
the Muslim convert Jamaal Jeffers takes this concept lite-
rally with an account of his pilgrimage to the Middle East in the poem
“Luxor” describing how the Montserrat disaster propelled him to the land of
his dreams;57
and Archie Markham finds his poetry reflecting his own physi-
cal oscillation between his homeland Montserrat, an impermanent hinterland,
and his temporary homes in Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Northern Ire-
land. Markham has left Montserrat just as generations before hundreds of
Montserratians also left to dig the Panama Canal (“Not like uncle George, /
back from Panama in the ’50s with his friend Rodney, / before we knew men
loved men”58
). But now it is those who remain on the island who are the new
transient homeless, living in temporary shelters in the north of the island, and
watching their homeland being eaten away before their very eyes:
Now home is a
Test:
hurricanes and volcanoes have checked our progress,
exxing
our certainties: this friend, well-housed in another’s
home laments
life in the shelters.59
Montserratians are now “strangers in their land,” living among other islanders
in a makeshift community building or hurricane shelter.60
In this sense, they
are likened to the “children of Israel,” living in “hope” for “the promised
land.”61
They are also living on “classic […] black and white” memories of
56
Elcia Daniel, “Exodus,” in Hope, 39–40.
57
Jamaal Jeffers, “Luxor,” in Hope, 75.
58
Archie Markham, “Nearing Sixty,” in Hope, 83.
59
Markham, “Nearing Sixty,” 84.
60
Karney Osborne, “The Custodians,” in Hope, 94.
61
Osborne, “The Custodians,” 94.

Plymouth and life as it was on the island before the natural disaster.62
Where-
as life can be rebuilt and regrown after the annual hurricane season and ex-
ceptional hurricanes such as Hugo, the volcano eruption is different, changing
the shape, texture, and size of the island (a dusty moonscape over forty square
miles in size with magma plumes reaching into the sea), destroying all before
it, and leaving behind super-heated ground temperatures that will take more
than a hundred years to cool.
Fergus’s maroon contribution to Hope reiterates his anticolonial position,
and his poems are just as political as those in previous collections. He reprints
a favourite poem of his, “Class,” which likens Hugo to a communist indis-
criminate in his levelling of all before him.63
In another poem, “Keeping The
Vineyard,” Fergus’s attention is centred on the recent Hurricane Munoz and
the failings of Britain, motherland and protector of Montserrat, to defend the
islanders from natural disaster. It is an opportunity for him to remind the
reader of those lost in Hugo:
Eleven of Her Majesty’s loving subjects
choked by winds and floods;they had survived slavery ancient and modern
fighting fit to brave the Sainsbury chain
but not Hugo.64
Fergus goes on in characteristic fashion, criticizing the post of Governor for
which he occasionally deputizes, and highlighting the irony that the Montser-
rat hinterlands are in many ways more civilized and sophisticated than their
colonial status would suggest. For it was a Montserratian farmer who divined
the hurricane and sounded the warning, not the Governor with his weather
teams and technologies back home:
And did you most excellent Caesar
Governor of much: civil slaves
Bobbies, banks and Calibans
Listen to you own siren or heed
Imperial cannons booming from England65
Colonial tropes and colonizer poems are repeated in Fergus’s two main
UK-published volcano poetry publications, Volcano Song and Volcano
62
Chadd Cumberbatch, “Plymouth,” in Hope, 38.
63
Fergus, “Class,” in Hope, 54.
64
Fergus, “Keeping The Vineyard,” in Hope, 52.
65
Fergus, “Keeping The Vineyard,” 52.

Verses.66
The cover of Volcano Song describes the volume as “a poetic diary
of Montserrat’s Soufriere Hills volcano […] the awesome beauty and terror of
ash plumes soiling the sky, and the inferno that killed […]. The rhythms of
the volcano [that] parallel the rhythms of people’s lives.”67
As with the later
Volcano Verses, this volume is structured with a set of volcano poems fol-
lowed by sections of ‘Occasional Poems’ featuring island personalities (some-
times as poetic obituaries) and island events. Both volumes also reprint poems
from Fergus’s Montserrat-published small collections and edited volumes. In
Volcano Song’s “At Tar River,” Fergus marks the time that the volcano
reached Tar River in an “avalanche of fire.”68
He then goes on to liken the
volcano to a “bad overseer” from the plantocracy. In further comparisons, and
with a touch of self-irony, Fergus describes the cacophony of noises in Mont-
serrat, the human chatter feeding off itself with intensity:
Soufriere is roasting with fever, temperatures
are smoking, the eruption has gone to our heads
infecting the entire body
politic and everyone talks without season;
the peaceful isle boils over in a pot-
pourri of noises and the air is high on gas:
poets, paper men and prophets
speak between the lines69
In other poems, Montserrat is “this sceptred isle”;70
and in “At Sea” Montser-
rat is again likened to Caliban’s Caribbean island: “this isle / though full of
noises seems ripe for easy pickings,” adrift and buffeted by hurricane and
other natural disasters.71
The “sceptred isle is colony” is how Fergus again situates Montserrat in his
latest volume Volcano Verses, a curious mixture of poems about the minutiae
of life, development work and the volcano, colonialism, T-shirt pictures and
island characters, volcano anniversaries and Hugo reminiscences.72
Despite
66
Fergus, Volcano Song – Montserrat: Poems of An Island in Agony (London: Mac-
millan Education, 2000); Volcano Verses (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2003).
67
Fergus, Volcano Song, back cover.
68
Fergus, “At Tar River,” in Volcano Song, 10, 11.
69
Fergus, “Noise,” in Volcano Song, 51.
70
Fergus, “New Year’s Day, from St. George Hill,” in Volcano Song, 53.
71
Fergus, “At Sea,” in Volcano Song, 49.
72
Fergus, “Truce,” in Volcano Verses, 40.

certain similarities with Volcano Song where structure and thematic focus are
concerned, Volcano Verses is ultimately a more upbeat expression of “the
confidence that island life and folk will outlast volcanic tantrums, that though
‘Tonight Chances pique still grows / […] But cattle low and egrets ride / In
spite of fire from mountain tides.’”73
Most of the poems in the volume are
dated so that the reader can identify the events to which the poems refer. Fer-
gus’s “Preface” serves two purposes: first, it is a brief account of the vol-
cano’s eruption, its “beauty and ugliness,” “glowing like a city at night,”
“awesome as well as awful.”74
And second, Fergus situates this volume as a
continuation of the ‘disaster literature’ that came out of Hugo. In this way, the
volcano can be given an “active future” as a spur to creativity.75
Moreover,
throughout all the political poems there are positive references to the struggle
for ordinary life and the persistence of Montserrat’s beauty: “Montserrat nice
/ Still paradise” though “Life is a struggle” and “the volcano dances to its own
music.”76
In sum, these poems chronicle Fergus’s life, his feelings, his island rela-
tions and political goals. They represent a single-minded and determined
voice, one that brings others into his literary fold as he spreads his anti-
colonial nationalist agenda. Whether or not his political ambitions are
realized, Fergus’s poems are a life in print, the texting of life in a predomi-
nantly oral and performative environment. The verses provide access to the
recent past, giving the poet longevity in the island’s folk memories: when the
Governor has gone and the volcano has settled, the former Deputy Governor
– Fergus is now retired – will remain to be read. For Fergus, Hugo and the
Mount Chance eruptions are opportunities with which to build foundations for
an afterlife.
Literary Consciousness and ‘the Disaster’
The Montserrat Maroon poets live through their writing. Their writing is an
ordering of living under conditions of extreme disorder. They use their poetry
to connect and publicize their inner voices and outer experiences, scripting
73
Fergus, Volcano Verses, back cover.
74
Fergus, Volcano Verses, 9.
75
Fergus, Volcano Verses, 10.
76
Fergus, “Nice,” in Volcano Verses, 39; “The Charcoal Man,” in Volcano Verses,
49; “Openness,” in Volcano Verses, 44.

their world-view. Fergus, Markham and other Maroon poets write themselves
a new reality, be it from colonialism, from insularity, or from island-wide
natural disaster. Before the volcano, and before and after hurricane Hugo,
these same poets expressed themselves in a conservative and muted colonial
climate in a small-island society. Fergus, for example, is able to attend the
opening of the law courts in his formal capacity as Speaker, and to satirize the
colonial attire and procession in his poem “When Justice Came To Church.”
Fully aware of his ambiguous position on the island as poet, academic obser-
ver, and commentator, but also dignitary, distinguished guest, and participant,
Fergus concludes the poem on a reflexive note:
I hope his Lordship does not indict me
for contempt. I will plead innocence
and retain a Queen’s big wig to cite
poetic licence, licence to indite77
It is as though there is a schism between Fergus the public figure, a member
of the British colonial establishment, and Fergus the poet who expresses a
postcolonial desire for independence. In writing about himself, others, and
island events and catastrophes, Fergus is distancing himself from them, and
taking control of the unexpected in life. Fergus is also writing for posterity,
writing with licence, using word-play that some islanders feel to be at odds
with the honesty of Maroon poets who have chosen to write in dialect. Yet
Fergus does speak the Queen’s English, and he has internalized the Latin in
which he was educated. He is an ambivalent colonial of Montserrat using
poetic licence to reify his point of orientation in an uncertain time. While
Montserrat physically shifts and unsettles, poetry remains Fergus’s bedrock.
If anything, then, Fergus the poet has done well by the natural disasters that
have plagued the island of Montserrat. This is in addition to his non-volcano
writings, which press for a postcolonial Montserrat, an island independent
from Britain with islanders fully emancipated politically, socially, and psy-
chologically. Fergus’s poetry becomes a history of Montserrat in verse that
complements his prose histories of the island. This ‘disaster literature’ is truly
a poetry of the extraordinary, but also one about daily life on the island. Fer-
gus’s ‘obituary’ poems can thus be considered another example of island life
and island lives memorialized.
77
Howard Fergus, “When Justice Came To Church,” The Montserrat Reporter (17th
March 1995): 8.

The Maroon disaster literature emerging from the volcano and the hurri-
cane are like refined calypsos for readers both on and off the island. The poets
render their condition lyrically. They imbue the natural disaster with agency,
referring to it as The Beast. Only Fergus and Markham engage consistently
with a postcolonial politics and psychology. In their creative counterpoint to
colonialism, they are national poets with the potential for an international
audience with every nationalist verse. Theirs, too, is a poetry inflected with
international travel and an international literature of Shakespeare (the Tempest
tropes) and Walcott-styled (Omeros) comparisons. Although both writers can
be considered part of the collective Writers’ Maroon, the other writers such as
Cumberbatch, Roach, and Irish do not quite share their written “subjectivity
of oppositionality.”78
Thus, if the postcolonial is what Stuart Hall refers to as
a double consciousness, a “double-inscription,”79
or what Barbor Hesse has
defined as a highlighting of the culture of colonialism and as polarizing the
space between the metropolis and the colony,80
then Fergus and Markham are
the only two postcolonial writers in the Maroon collective. Indeed, writing
about Fergus’s poetry in the “Introduction” to his collection Calabash of
Gold, Markham expressly discusses this explanation of an uneasy and
perhaps even ‘maternal’ relationship:
How does the poet deal with the fraught business of our relationship
with the metropolitan centres? We’ve long got past the imitative
phase. In the last thirty years or so our arguments have centred, vari-
ously, on our being invisibilized, or, perhaps most recently, earning the
right to ignore the ‘other’ and address directly those who are not
antagonistic towards us.81
78
Jorge Klor De Alva, “The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience:
A Reconsideration of ‘Colonialism’, ‘Postcolonialism’ and ‘Mestizaje’,” in After Colo-
nialism: Imperial History and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Prince-
ton NJ: Princeton UP, 1995): 245.
79
Stuart Hall, “When was the ‘Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” in The Post-
Colonial Question, ed. Iain Chambers & Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996): 242.
80
Barnor Hesse, “Diasporicity: Black Britain”s Post-Colonial Formations,” in Un/
settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, ed. Barnor Hesse
(London: Zed, 2000): 96–120.
81
Archie Markham, “Introduction” to Howard Fergus, Calabash of Gold: Selected
Poems (London: Linda Lee Books, 1993): iii.

This is postcolonial rhetoric as Montserratian poets feel that it is within them
to write and engage with other peoples and places without having to go
through the UK. Markham continues this postcolonial line in his “Introduc-
tion” by celebrating Fergus’s poetry for establishing a “parallel history” to the
colonial records of Montserrat. Further, he adds that the Hugo survivors de-
monstrated an emancipated reaction after the hurricane onslaught when they
“rushed to speak into tape-recorders; they recorded, re-recorded and re-inven-
ted themselves.” In short, Montserratians found the voice to articulate per-
sonal narratives in a manner that contrasts with the reaction of the typically
subjugated British colonial.
Conclusion
Clearly, the Montserratian Maroon ‘disaster literature’ is a developing corpus
of work, some of which expresses a postcolonial consciousness. Most signifi-
cantly, the writings identify a cognitive calendar of how islanders think and
react to extraordinary events and to living under pressure. The Maroons’ is-
land poetry is contemporary history, social commentary, and coping mech-
anism. It can be read and understood by all islanders, all sympathetic readers,
all those living in the same circumstances with the same view of the sea and
of the Soufriere – indeed, all who have suffered a natural disaster. In a piece
of creative writing published in Beneath the Bananas, the librarian and poet
Jane Grell broaches this disaster-shaped concept of time:
All this set me to thinking how time used to be signposted by recalling
royal events like the year when the Queen or Duke visited. This kind
of labeling was much fresher in the years closer to the sunrise and
noon tide of the British Empire rather than in the sunset years. Royal
timelines also crumbled before the mightier marches of hurricanes and
volcanoes, more powerful markers of years than the mere visits of
monarchs. The mind constantly battles with did so and so happen ‘be-
fore Hugo’ or after the ‘volcanic crisis.’82
Those facing the unpredictable have a cognitive need for order, stability, and
control. While this is not necessarily provided, as we saw, by the ‘colonial-
ism’ found on Montserrat – a political rather than an ontological kind of order
– it can be partly achieved in the creative responses of the natural disaster
82
Jane Grell, “Navel String Ramblings,” in Beneath the Bananas: Poems of Mont-
serrat, ed. Howard Fergus (Salem, Montserrat: UWI Montserrat, 2004): 71.

poem or the prose responses to hurricane and/or volcano. The anthropologist
and ethnographer Anthony Oliver–Smith suggests that the response of re-
ordering or restructuring people’s cognitive understandings or “mazeways”
thrown out of kilter by disaster is a precondition for being able to move for-
ward.83
Oliver–Smith was writing about the human capacity to recover from
disaster in the Andes – the death and rebirth of a city and region in Peru fol-
lowing a tragic and massive landslide in 1970. Back on Montserrat, the
Maroon poetry serves the same purpose. It is an important “means to reduce
raw experience of life to some form of comprehensible order.”84
Susanna Hoffman found similar narrative responses to ‘natural’ disaster
when she researched the Oakland–Berkeley firestorm of 1991. The symbolic
expressions of, and metaphoric solutions to, this calamity – inventive shrines,
creative disaster writings and photographs and firestorm art85
– were, she ar-
gues, fictions with which to “defang” the environment.86
Controversially,
while Hoffman found the firestorm survivors working and writing through
their recovery, she also witnessed scores of visitors attracted to the disaster
sites, some of whom expressed a desire to have experienced it themselves.87
The Montserrat volcano now attracts voyeur visitors – disaster tourists88
– to
all its zones of devastation and reconstruction, visitors who take home souve-
nirs such as ash, volcano-melted debris, and perhaps a booklet of Maroon
poetry.
A catastrophe or natural disaster leads inevitably to cognitive disorien-
tation. Living with the unexpected, many of the Montserratians on the island
or recent exiles, émigrés, and refugees have reacted and managed their new
uncertain condition by writing – poems in the examples considered in this
83
Anthony Oliver–Smith, The Martyred City: Death and Rebirth in the Andes (Al-
buquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1986): 267.
84
Oliver–Smith, The Martyred City, 267.
85
Susanna Hoffman, “The Monster and the Mother: The Symbolism of Disaster,” in
Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, ed. Susanna Hoffman & An-
thony Oliver–Smith (Oxford: James Currey, 2002): 113–42.
86
Hoffman, “The Monster and the Mother,” 119.
87
Hoffman, “The Monster,” 130.
88
Jonathan Skinner, “Voyeurs, Voyagers and Disaster Tourism from Mount
Chance, Montserrat,” in Niche Tourism and Anthropology, ed. Donald Macleod (Glas-
gow: U of Glasgow P, 2003): 129–44.

essay, calypsos as I have examined elsewhere.89
In these ‘writings’, Montser-
ratians write to restore what was lost, to write and re-right the present, to
integrate events into a grand narrative, and to make sense of their lives. And
they write to continue the pursuit of postcolonial status, to become indepen-
dent, active agents of their destiny, not controlled or dictated to by Governor
or Fire in the Mountain. By so doing, disaster literatures such as this – narra-
tives of past events written with present meaning – hold the key to a liberated
future.
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