sx salon 52

The introduction to Christina Gerhardt’s Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean opens thus: “Atlases are being redrawn as islands are disappearing. Yet many on continents are not even aware of where these islands are located, what their names are, or how climate change impacts them, despite the fact that continental land dwellers are often more responsible for producing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and sea level rise.”¹ As a response to these conditions, Sea Change provides a catalog (indicative, not exhaustive) of climate-vulnerable islands, divided into six oceanic regions and including basic physical, geographic, demographic, and historical information about each. The section for the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico contains entries for fifteen Caribbean nations and territories (plus an entry for the Isle de Jean Charles, a part of the US state of Louisiana). Of these entries, maps are provided for five—Bonaire, Martinique, Antigua, Puerto Rico, and New Providence Island (The Bahamas)—representing how the shapes of these islands are expected to change between 2020 and 2100. All the maps are sobering; some are devastating. The sequence of maps for New Providence Island shows a landmass made unrecognizable by 2100—not only chewed up at the edges but liquefied into two inland seas in the center, one where the city of Nassau currently stands.

Caribbean people are, of course, mobilizing to meet this moment across a range of cultural, technological, and political fields. Our musicians, artists, and writers have joined their peers across the globe in trying to shift the needle of global awareness about the structural injustice of climate change and the existential threat it poses to vulnerable people and nations. Educational and governmental institutions are establishing centers—including the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre in Belmopan, Belize—to study renewable energy and climate resilience.² Mia Amor Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, was declared a 2021 Champion of the Earth by the United Nations Environment Program for her passionate and sustained advocacy on the issue of climate crisis and the insufficient actions taken by the nations, corporations, and individuals most responsible. As PM Mottley said in her address to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2021, the problem is that “the faceless few do not fear the consequences [of their inaction] sufficiently.”³

That inaction continues. The European Union’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research 2025 report reveals that in 2024 global greenhouse-gas emissions were up 65 percent over 1990 levels.⁴ The United Nations’ Climate Action website notes that 2022 was the first year in which the agreed-upon funding (US$100 billion per annum) for climate adaptation and resilience in developing countries was in fact forthcoming. “However,” the text continues, “only a small share of the total went to low-income countries . . . . Loans made up the largest funding category, mainly going to middle-income countries.”⁵ Meanwhile, the Caribbean faces hurricane seasons of escalating severity, rising sea levels, eroding coastlines, soil salinization, intensifying droughts, and heatwaves, as well as a global political context in which wealthy nations are simultaneously dragging their feet in implementing the crucially necessary energy transition and increasingly (and ever more brutally) restricting immigration from the global South.

It’s a grim picture indeed; it’s hard to know what to do, or how to hope. But I remain—as I said in my introduction to our fiftieth issue—fortified by Audre Lorde’s reminder, “We were never meant to survive,” and by abolitionist Mariame Kaba’s mantra, “Hope is a discipline.”⁶ And so I present to you this sx salon special section on Caribbean ecologies, the first in a year-long cycle of issues that will—to greater or lesser degrees—attend to the contemporary state of the Caribbean environment and how our artists, writers, and thinkers are engaging with it. The section opens with Jordan Barrant’s essay on “kitchen marronage through a practice of papermaking” as a mode of connecting with Jamaica’s landscape and history. Reflecting on the work that she and two other artists—Kamala Davis and Sonn Ngai—produced during their 2025 New Local Space Seep residency, Barrant reminds us of the spiritual resonances of cooking and artmaking as sibling practices through which we can sustain intimate relationships with our environment and our human and more-than-human kin. The second essay, by Alissa Roach, ruminates on the “multitudinous, elemental” architectural feature that is the breeze block—as a visual reminder of home when away, and as an invitation to consider the breeze and its conceptual affordances (thinking about movement, stagnation, heat, breath) in the broader context of colonialism, global capitalism, and climate crisis. Finally, Pablo D. Herrera Veitia shares a framing statement for his video essay Afro-Cuban Sentimiento: A Politics of Affect in Conga Santiaguera Music; the statement and the film together solicit our attention to the physical, affective, and sonic contours of contemporary Black life in Cuba and the Americas. Herrera Veitia lingers in particular on the affordances of cynicism as a mode of navigating our collective predicament: “Cynicism keeps the door open that Afro-pessimism closes. It says, We know nothing will really change, and yet we still speak, still move, still carry, still learn to dance with the fish like Jamaica does after Melissa, as Puerto Rico or Dominica do since Hurricane Maria.”

In our reviews section: Randi Gray Kristensen on Olive Senior’s novel Paradise Once; Renée Latchman on Edwidge Danticat’s children’s book Watch Out for Falling Iguanas; and Zeus Sumra on Alejandro Heredia’s debut novel, Loca. And in our poetry and prose section, a suite of poems: by Joan Cambridge-Mayfield and Jeremy Jacob Peretz, by Jasmine Tutum, and by Ide Amari Thompson. 

In community, and with gratitude for you all,

Rachel L. Mordecai

---

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Sankofa Survivance in Olive Senior’s Paradise Once”—Randi Gray Kristensen 
Review of Olive Senior, Paradise Once (Akashic Books, 2025)

“Culture, Climate, and a Warning”—Renée Latchman
Review of Edwidge Danticat, Watch Out for Falling Iguanas (Black Sheep, 2025)

“Alejandro Heredia’s Poetics of Reclamation”—Zeus Sumra
Review of Alejandro Heredia, Loca (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Discussion

“On Jamaican Maroons, Recipes, and Papermaking as Conjure”—Jordan Barrant

“A Breeze that Stays”—Alissa Roach

“A Framing Statement on Afro-Cuban Sentimiento: A Politics of Affect in Conga Santiaguera Music”—Pablo D. Herrera Veitia

Poetry and Prose

“3 Strange Songs / chyaants”—Joan Cambridge-Mayfield and Jeremy Jacob Peretz

Poems—Jasmine Tutum

Poems—Ide Amari Thompson

---

[1] Christina Gerhardt, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean (University of California Press, 2023), 1.

[2] Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, https://caribbeanclimate.org/.

[3] United Nations, “Barbados—Prime Minister Addresses United Nations General Debate, 76th Session (English),” 24 September 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz_lDnay3H8 (accessed 25 June 2026).

[4] European Commission, Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, “GHG Emissions of All World Countries—2025 Report,” https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025

[5] United Nations, Climate Action, “Finance and Justice,” under “1. Setting a New Goal for Climate Finance,” https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/raising-ambition/climate-finance (accessed 25 June 2026).

[6] Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival” (1978), in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton, 1997), 256; see Rachel L. Mordecai, “sx salon at Fifty Issues,” sx salon, no. 50, October 2025, https://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/issues/sx-salon-50; Mariame Kaba, quoted in Jeremy Scahill, “Hope Is a Discipline: Mariame Kaba on Dismantling the Carceral State,” Intercepted, 17 March 2021, https://theintercept.com/2021/03/17/intercepted-mariame-kaba-abolitionist-organizing/.