Kei Miller: Ecopoetics of Relation, Resistance, and Grief

Kei Miller’s poetry has often been interpreted with reference to race and identity, with less consideration of important ecological strains in his work: the plantation system, invasive species, the naming and classification of Jamaican flora, climate change, land rights, and gay men’s relationships with nature. This chapter argues that environmental issues are a key focus of his recent poetry. ‘We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years,’ Miller said in a scholarly discussion about the Anthropocene and race, commissioned for this research project. By analysing typescripts of Miller’s poetry in the Carcanet archive, this chapter offers new insights into the way he develops setting, location, language, shifts in locality, and hybrid poetic forms. Building on Edouard Glissant’s important research on the poetics of relation, Kathryn Yusoff’s work on ‘Black Anthropocenes,’ and Karen McCarthy Woolf’s ecocritical scholarship on Miller, while mindful of the argument that Caribbean culture reflects the depredations of a ‘capitalist world-ecology’ (Niblett and Campbell 2016, 3), this chapter analyses Miller’s poetry of environmental relation, resistance, violence, and grief. I argue that Miller’s poetry illustrates ethical issues that are often unexplored by scientific research on the Anthropocene as an epoch marked by colonial transportation of human beings and other species. In Miller’s work, issues of climate injustice, racism, and homophobia are deeply bound up with the colonial treatment of Jamaica’s land and people. Storms and earthquakes symbolise earth’s volatile systems while illustrating how natural disasters exacerbate human conflict. The chapter illuminates how Miller shows that environmental issues are linked to societal questions of displacement, environmental racism, gender violence, and homophobia in Jamaica and beyond.