Tao Leigh Goffe ’09 Unpacks Exploration of the Caribbean

Tao Leigh Goffe ’09

Tao Leigh Goffe ’09

Photo by: Elena Seibert

carlett spike
By Carlett Spike

Published Jan. 27, 2025

8 min read

The book: In Dark Laboratory (Doubleday), readers are transported to 1492 for a historical deep dive on Christopher Columbus’s arrival and experiences on the Caribbean island of Guanahani. A land that was once seen as paradise becomes a tragic real-life example of Western exploitation and abuse. Author Tao Leigh Goffe ’09 weaves family history, cultural reportage, and social studies to document the legacy of slavery that was forced on this Caribbean community. She ties this history back to current struggles including the climate crisis. Although Dark Laboratory recounts a dark period, Goffe also offers hope in finding solutions for a better future and the resilience of communities to adapt.

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Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe ’09

The author: Tao Leigh Goffe ’09 earned her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Princeton and her Ph.D. from Yale. She is a London-born writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the U.K. and New York. She is currently an associate professor at Hunter College, CUNY, and her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories and political and ecological life.

Excerpt:

Introduction Mountain Ballads

Mountains hold the echoes of history. The vibrations and shock waves of the climate crisis are written in stone, absorbed over the course of geologic time dating back more than four billion years. These mountain ranges were once submerged underwater. If we measure the span of existence by the recent rock record, it tells a layered climate history of precious materials stolen from the earth-mountains of coral, gold, bauxite, and guano-sedimented. Time avalanches with the heaviness of histories of labor exploitation as we reckon with the overwhelming and inevitable ecological crises of the twenty-first century. Within each chapter of climate history exists a labor history, and we draw upon the energy of those who have gone before us. Those forced to extract from the land continue to be deemed disposable for the price of so-called technological progress. The racial regime determined who was forced to extract ores from the earth, and it continues to this day with unnamed millions mining cobalt to source lithium-ion batteries to satisfy the demand for the rechargeable batteries of our electric cars and smartphones.

This is our current perverse geological reality of powering so­called green technologies and clean energy solutions. Standing at the precipice of climate collapse, we feel the increasing pressure for the planet to implode with each breath we take. Yet, as a global community, we continuously fail to address the origin of the problem. Without economic and historical analyses of the origins of the climate crisis, how can we expect to understand its sedimented layers?

While it is easy to picture plumes of smoke as the primary output of global warming, we must ask questions about the global economy that preceded our dependence on fossil fuels and what remains unseen. The brutal order of plantations organized the world before there were smokestacks and factories. The economies and ideas of plantation slavery have irreparably scarred the natural environment. Before idyllic pastures, mass deforestation was necessary to clear the way for farming. Plantation owners and overseers mutilated the flesh of those they held captive under the whip. With each tree felled, carbon was released into the atmosphere. Sacred branches, hundreds of years old, that had witnessed the first European colonizers were razed in an instant. Gone with this botanical life were the multitude of medicines and materials critical to Indigenous life and traditions. Vacating the land of vast and complex biomes and ecosystems, seventeenth-century monocrop agriculture transformed the planet as new agricultural practices stripped the soil of nutrients. While precious metals and rocks-gold, silver, and quarries of marble had long been prized throughout the human history of mining, coal and oil have transformed how the world breathes. Agricultural and mining industries asphyxiate the future, the smoke emitted from fossil fuels burning our lungs as it propels a cycle of greed and disposability. Today, wind currents carry debris from faraway forest fires that irritate our airways as we inhale a sky turned a burnt shade of orange. The air is hazy and thick with the ashes of those who have been deemed disposable.

High in the mountains where the air is fresh, the land holds the memory of existential hope amid ecological catastrophes. Mountains carry messages that have been communicated across time and space. The land recalls things that we cannot. Across Black poetic traditions, mountains have held significant political, religious, and environmental meaning. “Go, tell it on the mountain.” James Baldwin returned to the lyrics of the African American spiritual for his 1953 book. “Over the hills and everywhere.” Initially, Baldwin was going to name his Jim Crow narrative Crying Holy; the sound of the Black Church in these mountain lyrics was Baldwin’s choice for his urgent articulation.

During the nineteenth century, the lines reverberated from African Americans as populations passed secret instructions about how to travel and communicate safely across mountain ranges to freedom. The message of freedom from the Christian Testament of the Bible was amplified and reinterpreted alongside the prophecy of Black hope and liberation. The good news of the Underground Railroad spread across the landscape of Appalachia and the Caribbean and the Atlantic seascape. It stretched from the Bahamas to Mexico to Nova Scotia.

When, in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. famously asked, “Where do we go from here?,” he could have easily been asking a climate question. From the mountaintop there is a scale of global imagination and collaboration needed for salvation from the climate crisis. King made this speech the day before he was assassinated, perhaps prophesying that he would not make it to the Promised Land, but that God had shown him—as he had shown Moses—a view from the mountaintop. Protest songs echo across mountains as climate movements grow with the same demands for racial justice and land sovereignty.

Freedom for everyone requires a confrontation with the capitalist greed upon which Western society was founded. That sin of chattel slavery was cultivated on plantations across the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America for centuries. Stolen land and stolen life extend across the hemisphere from sea to shining sea, and so too do the freedom trails that Black and Native peoples built during the time of enslavement out of the wilderness from Vermont to Haiti to Argentina. Black runaways had long carved clandestine routes out of the forests to freedom alongside the paths of Native peoples established thousands of years earlier. Both Black and Native peoples looked to the stars, reading constellations toward routes of freedom. For centuries, nations of Afro-Indigenous peoples found sanctuary in swamps and bogs. From the Seminoles of Florida to the Garifuna of Belize, people echoed declarations of Black Native sovereignty in parallel and in unison. Over the centuries, survival has become an art form that is also an ecological philosophy; Black and Indigenous peoples understand what it means to survive multiple time lines of apocalypse. The genocide of colonial encounter is ongoing, visible in the uneven effects of climate crisis on people of color.

By the year 2050, it is estimated that one billion people worldwide will be displaced due to natural disasters. Within the next twenty years, the majority of the world’s biodiversity will have been lost due to the endangerment of key ecosystems, including coral reefs, mangroves, and mountains. Tsunamis, active volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and unrelenting heat waves abound. While I am not a climate scientist, as a professor of literature and history, I have evolved my lesson plans to face the cascade of global ecological crisis. It is the reality and the responsibility of the individual to face this crisis and our role within it. The weather is not simply changing, as climate deniers would like us to believe. We are experiencing the consequences of a centuries-long cycle of exploitation of people of color, whom European colonial powers have forced to extract resources from the earth. The archival research I undertake on the history of racial slavery feels detached without reckoning with the climate crisis as an ongoing colonial crisis.

Poring through ledgers in Caribbean archives, I return each year not knowing what hurricane season will destroy of the delicate yellowing papers, the records the British, French, Danish, Dutch, and Spanish left behind of their exploits. Academic researchers seem to care more for the humidity and climate control of such documents than they do for human life on these islands, the descendants who have survived these regimes. To conduct research in a vacuum is a cold, unethical, and extractive approach. While my career began in such dusty record offices and official state archives in tropical countries, it soon led me to the outdoors and the importance of reclaiming environmental histories for people of color. I began to hear the birdsong that we are losing. I knew these soundtracks had been there over millennia and that we were in danger of losing them note by note just as the birds lose their habitats. The research methods I learned spending a decade in Ivy League classrooms at Princeton and Yale—close reading and other forms of textual analysis—were important, but they no longer served me. Why set about the mission of trying to extract some hidden meaning that only those specifically trained and deemed sufficiently erudite can interpret?

Instead, I learned to let go, to surrender to my surroundings. I became adaptive and iterative in my approach, which led me to become the founder of my own initiative, the Dark Laboratory. My lab is a space for research on climate, race, and technology, and, more important, it is a philosophy. We at the lab understand that climate crisis cannot be solved without solving racial crisis. The two are inseparable. With over thirty members worldwide, from Helsinki to Hilo to Portland to New York, we collaborate on a wide range of creative storytelling projects centering on Black and Indigenous ecologies.

Once I realized that European colonial archives are evidence lockers full of crimes against humanity, I began to stop arguing the case in court, as it were. As it often occurs with genocide, there is simply too much evidence. Those who have benefited from the crimes of colonialism refuse to be convinced. The weight of transatlantic history and its impact on our current climate crisis is overwhelming. The evidence is so proudly and meticulously preserved. It becomes liberating then to evaluate not what lies enclosed within the walls of colonial architectures, but to begin to comprehend the significance of what is outdoors. What was stolen from the natural environment and can still be salvaged. Ways of life, scientific traditions, philosophies of environmental coexistence. The magnitude of what was stolen in the past is only a small fraction of what can be restored in the future. There are unborn worlds of scientific possibility from multiple traditions with answers, strategies, and solutions for tackling the climate crisis. Denial of the colonial condition, denial of the origins of the crisis, limits our imagination and how to live after. Denial clouds our memory of the thriving world markets that functioned before the advent of modern capitalism.

Excerpted from Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe. Copyright © 2025 by Tao Leigh Goffe and published by Doubleday. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Reviews:

Dark Laboratory is a gargantuan, soulful work. It obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean’s utility to Western Wealth.” — Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy

“Goffe’s ear is tuned to songs of resistance, to what it looks like to make life amid (and after) colonial subjugation…noble and necessary.” — The New York Times Book Review

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