In unrest in the nebulae, Gitan Djeli wields prose poetry to archive five hundred years of exploitative colonization, ecocide, extinction, militarization and deportation, slavery, indenture, negotiated nationhood, postcolonial plantation structures, and apologist histories. Writing in a queer anticolonial poetics, and using lines of Kreol, Gitan Djeli mines the tension that emerges between colonialism and language, disarticulating the myth-making aesthetics of the colonial world. She tells the story of the ‘other slavery’ in the Indian Ocean and its histories of enslavement and indenture through a subversive, fragmented poetics, and often from the perspective its geologic witnesses—a misnamed ocean or the range of mountains within it or the volcanic idea of islands. In a charge of resistance to the catastrophe of modernity, unrest in the nebulae takes seriously Sylvia Wynter’s invitation to engage “a new science of the word.”
- Cover
- Contents
- shaping ground together
- ~apr. six
- lands of the unwinged biped
- rårå
- iel.and
- wrapped in a cloud
- mountains on seas
- usulu: planet in emakhuwa
- cosmic blue february twenty-nine
- ground
- pause
- makook eit
- tītī
- the captive boy and the unwinged biped
- kasuari/casuarina
- lexotik
- nautical twilight
- hide manumè‘a hide
- pijin
- mo zwazo rouz
- membered
- stay
- ~homo narrans
- language as spirit-tongue
- story of words in sound
- kreol li son avan langaz non
- unrest one
- rise of tongue
- arbre:pye
- six eight
- lalang twist
- sonic
- creation sounds
- ore oru oorile
- unrest two
- the unspirited
- unrest three
- coralground
- unrest four
- sonotopological shift
- unread
- ice pick stars
- ~smothering island
- bone-deep lineage
- cell nephology
- moonlines
- mitochondria of wounds
- the disorientation of punctuation
- rapture
- allodynia
- karmic a long interval
- curved horizon
- djinn
- blade
- of drips and saltskies
- unsafe sands
- punctured stars
- ~unmake
- kreoling the nebula
- restart
- riri
- vertigo
- skylore
- rivers of words
- petal
- holding onto
- kreoling love
- red spirit october seven
- seasonal tides
- the logic of the arc
- un-embalm
- before flight
- return to silver shores
- travelling worlds
- imagine otherwise with
Login to your account
