When Hurricane Dorian hit the northern Bahamas in September, it sat on the Abaco Islands, moving at the glacial pace of roughly two kilometres per hour. Days before, when the storm was on track to hit Puerto Rico – it did not – President Donald Trump tweeted: ‘Will it ever end?’ As if hurricanes end. ‘This is no longer unusual for Caribbean people,’ Erica Moiah James wrote in The New York Times as the storm idled. ‘As I shared video footage with friends in Puerto Rico, they remarked: “I know the sound of that wind.” Is this what it means to be intimately connected by horror? Is there a new creolized language and aesthetic we have become fluent in by default?’ The Caribbean sits on the frontlines of climate change; there, and in my home city of Miami, where a typical rain shower causes obstructive and frequent flooding, we live with its immediate effects. No magical realism – just inherited adaptability, which looks a lot like continual transformation.
