On Touching Coral 

by Heather Davis

The shreds of the ocean’s floor passed him from corpses 

that had perished in the crossing, their hair like weeds, 

their bones were long coral fingers, bubbles of eyes 

watched him, a brain-coral gurgled their words,  

and every bubble englobed a biography, 

no less than the wine-bottle’s mouth, but for Achille, 

treading the mulch floor of the Caribbean Sea, 

no coins were enough to repay its deep evil.  


--Derek Walcott, Omeros, 46

After Medusa was decapitated, it is said that her blood spilled onto seaweed, mixed with the sea, and transformed into a hybrid organism: bright red, Precious coral. The coral slowly gathered, building, the minerals adhering, becoming larger and larger until it had spread for miles across the ocean floor. Fish swam in and out and between, bubbles in the wake creating ripples of life on the surface. The sun streamed down, refracting through the depths, shockingly illuminating the vibrant color. These were not the intended effects of Medusa’s death, this stony life emerging from spilled blood, an entire underwater world that is one of the most important ecosystems on earth. She lives on through this transmogrification.  

Corals call to people, pulling us down into the space of the ancestors. These watery worlds no longer provide the conditions to thrive; we gave up our gills when ancient relations crawled out of the sea. And now, legs and an upright posture have afforded a certain view, one that some of us, as Sylvia Wynter demonstrates, have taken way too seriously. A Caribbean scholar, Wynter carefully maps how propertied white European men came to be understood as the universal signifier of Man, and everyone was measured in their capacity, or inability, to become like them. She calls this process the “overrepresentation of Man,” meaning that it enforced only one legitimate way of being human. People and other beings were then sorted in a strict hierarchy, where some were valued and others were not, a hierarchy of humanity that remains in place today. We have been left with “our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of earth resources…[which] are all different facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.” 

Man was created through the running ashore, on top of, or next to, the coral reefs of the Caribbean. The beauty and specificity of those islands and its peoples were denied, eradicated, and rendered strange. The genocide of Arawaks, Caribs, Taino, and other Indigenous peoples, and the mass death and enslavement of millions of captured Africans were central to the creation of Man, and its overrepresentation. This “Man” wreaked havoc to all manner of beings, not only people, and harbors the death of corals. As Wynter outlines for us, the West reproduced itself as if it was all of humankind, and colonial inhabitation, specifically that of the British, re-created the land into an image of Europe, which included deliberately ignoring and replacing local flora and fauna. Colonization involved terraforming, taking “unused” or “unproductive” land and implementing systems of monocrops and plantations that, overtime, depleted the soils and waters. Additionally, this intensive method of agriculture often involved cutting down old growth forests, diverting rivers and streams, draining swamps, and other massive environmental changes that were the precursors to the types of ecocidal practices that have resulted in climate catastrophe. The “systemic stigmatization of the Earth” was central to the colonial project, resting upon a belief that matter was vile and base, opposed to the perfection of the heavens. This Man was founded upon a violence that extended outwards to all beings and the elements that we depend on for our lives. That moment of colonial encounter created the conditions “to construct a world grounded on environmental destruction.” Colonization entailed an abandonment of the world. One that began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and reverberated outward: waves upon waves of violence made their way underwater to the coral.  

The “systemic stigmatization of the Earth” was central to the colonial project, resting upon a belief that matter was vile and base, opposed to the perfection of the heavens.

Some corals can live as long as 5000 years, so they were there before, during, and after people were viciously ripped from families, kinship structures, land, language, plant and animal relations in order to be shaped into tools, as they were not seen as human. Corals were, and remain, witnesses; they lived, and live, with the bodies of the drowned. Captured Africans who were thrown overboard, as in the case of the Zong, can still be found through the circulation of bodies in the ocean, along with the bodies of those who jumped because they would rather die than continue to live in the hold heading toward an unimaginable and terrifying future and away from everything and everyone they ever loved. The Atlantic is saturated with Black life—bubbles of eyes watching, brain coral receiving these new arrivals. In scientific literature, residence time describes the transformation and preservation of human bodies in the ocean. Sodium, the salt of human blood, can last up to 260 million years. Their bodies, their worlds, mingle, blood moving into the other, as they inhabit each other—in essence, thousands of Medusas, a new kind of being, birthed through the slave trade. This happened in the touch of Africans with the watery worlds of the Caribbean, a blending of salty blood and salty ocean. It was a touch that was both tender and violent, the ocean a salve and a terror. Corals provide a record of human history. A study in the South China Sea shows that corals absorbed the excess mercury that was a result of munitions during the Opium wars. Is it also possible that corals use other bodies’ calcium to build their own, slowly leaching and forming though hundreds of years of exchange? Could this be the touch across species, uniting many bodies into one? 

Before we get carried away, touch is not always benign, nor is it easy. This is especially true when it comes to cross-species touch and its various implications. Even more so when the touch involves species that live in the ocean. Humans require extensive technological mediation to spend more than a few minutes with coral. Even when corals are in the shallows, they resist live flesh, protected by their sharp exteriors, which belie their vulnerability: they can snap and break under weight or pressure. Touching, then, needs to be done deliberately, carefully. A touch not without its dangers and joys, something experimental and without expectation. It’s easy to be cut, but it can also be glorious: there remains the potential of a little blood creating whole new worlds, linking people and coral.  

Echoes of this kind of touch, a touch that is potent and made under impossible conditions, which links and forms unions in an otherwise hostile world, reverberates throughout the Caribbean. On the surface world, the touch of women and men created bonds in sex-segregated holds. Black people resisted by “feeling and feeling for their co-occupants.” The running aground of colonial ships created new forms of touch, sometimes violent and sometimes tender, between new kinds of people. “The brown-skinned, fluid-bodied experiences now called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean.” This is not an origin story, the ocean obscures all origins, but it is an emergence. The colonial encounter is the emergence of new ways of being, composed through violent entanglements that nonetheless contain immense beauty. Salt of blood and salt of tears so thoroughly entangled with the salt of the ocean that “in the daytime it was indistinguishable…from air.” The co-mingling of ocean and air, earthly and watery beings, is an assertion of the sentience of bodies and of our radical dependence on each other, coral and human beings, despite the attempts to transform them both into brute matter. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s evocation of the relations of the enslaved does not reduce the term “queer” to same-sex desire only, but to the powerful and intimate love between people that marks a “disruption to the violence of normative order…connecting in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to cease to exist.” Black queerness provides lessons in interspecies connection. Indeed, there are possibilities and obligations of loving coral even as coral are predicted to cease to exist.

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s evocation of the relations of the enslaved does not reduce the term “queer” to same-sex desire only, but to the powerful and intimate love between people that marks a “disruption to the violence of normative order…connecting in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to cease to exist.” Black queerness provides lessons in interspecies connection.

Corals know how bodies became commodities, they watched and learned. Precious coral is considered of extremely high value because of its deep red color, often used for beads. Corals were, and still are, precious objects to be collected, available for purchase. In some cases, corals themselves became a type of currency. Along the coast of West Africa from the 1490s through the late 1800s coral was sometimes traded for enslaved people. “Portuguese slavers introduced red coral, harvested from the Mediterranean, to the indigenous populations of West Africa. After coral’s introduction to the region it became an instant commercial success.” Corals were there, then, at the beginning of the journey, facilitating the process of enslavement.  

While corals were transformed into valued currency, this did not shield them from their fate. Corals were extensively mined in the nineteenth century, where the fragments of their bodies became ubiquitous in the form of jewelry or other decoration. They were also removed to facilitate illicit trade, as rum runners who wanted to avoid paying taxes often plowed passages through the reefs to escape unseen. An oceanic clear cut. In the twentieth century, the forms of abandoning coral have intensified dramatically. New ships, large commercial fishing vessels, appeared in the wake of the slave ships. These new ships trawl the ocean floor, leaving it stripped, pillaged, and infertile. Massive cruise ships also appeared, ones that regularly run through and upon the reefs while emitting more carbon dioxide per passenger kilometer than a passenger jet, and more black carbon than any other form of ship.  

Amid these intensely hostile conditions, corals are changing, learning to live in refugia. Marine biologists have documented corals growing on mangrove roots off the coast of Belize, presumably to take advantage of the shade and cooler waters that the trees provide. Healthy and diverse corals have also been found in the murky waters of canals in both Miami and the Bahamas. As these canals are about sixty or seventy years old, the corals represent pockets of high local adaptation. In many places where stony corals are endangered, ‘weedy’ corals are replacing them, wavy, bendable corals that are more resistant to heat and rising PH levels. All this flexibility is a result of having to adapt quickly in a rapidly changing world.  

Here there is a resonance with the plasticity forced onto enslaved people, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson formulates it. Black people became experimental sites for the limits of embodiment, for what the body could do, or endure. The project of slavery was also a project to bend the human body into terrifying new shapes. Black people, as Jackson argues, were understood to be both sub- and super-human, malleable to the depraved imaginations of their white owners. Corals are also becoming moldable, their bodies shaping into previously unknown forms under the pressures of unprecedented environmental change. With this analysis in mind, might we approach the questions of climate change adaptation, and the leaps that organisms are making, through a lens that does not erase the violence of acclimatization to unliveable conditions, despite its necessity? What does it mean for the stoniness of coral to give way, to dissolve through acidification, to become more pliable and bendable as a strategy for adapting to a hotter world?  

Corals are also dying, the extinction of coral reefs worldwide has become a distinct possibility. Local conditions including poor water quality, at-best dubious fishing practices, and large ships threaten coral life. Recently, Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, a devastating disease of unknown origin, has been spreading rapidly across the Caribbean and decimating coral populations. Expectedly, however, the largest and most abiding threat to corals is from climate change, as oceans become much warmer and more acidic. The most dramatic of these effects are the mass bleaching events that have been occurring since the late 1990s. Likened to a kind of fever, the sustained rise of sea surface temperatures can cause corals to expel their symbiotic algae.The algae are what give coral their color and how they gain nutrients from the world around them. Without these algae, the polyps, or coral “animal,” slowly die. If conditions aren’t reversed, they starve. They become white, a ravaging whiteness, turning a deathly pale.  

In the wake of the massive decline and devastation wrought to reefs through extreme heat, effluent from sewage and agricultural systems, intensification of hurricanes, and damage due to ships, scientists have tried to find ways to keep open the possibility of corals’ ongoingness. Where once corals were mined, often by small-scale skilled divers, that diving knowledge is currently being utilized to fragment corals as a method of regeneration. The process involves cutting corals, which provokes a dramatic increase in their growth rates. After growing in nurseries on land or in the ocean, corals are then “outplanted” onto damaged reefs. The work of coral restoration is repetitive, painstaking, and slow. The divers return to the site day after day to check on growth, and then meticulously and by hand epoxy the larger corals to the ocean floor. This is a kind of touch that enacts a love of coral, despite a world that creates the conditions for their decimation.  

Marine biology under these conditions is a practice that establishes itself as a “disruption to the normative order,” by lovingly rebuilding coral when they are supposed to cease to exist. In a world currently organized by reducing all living beings to their exchange value, where the profits of a few extremely wealthy businesspeople prevail above all else to create conditions that are less and less liveable, rebuilding corals by hand becomes an act of resistance. It is a refusal to abandon the world, a refusal of the kinds of logics that were put in place by colonialism. It is a deep recognition that people are intimately entwined with coral, that our lives are dependent on their survival. Love and touch are complicated embraces. Scientists break coral to provoke their reproduction, their regeneration. Piece by piece, they attempt to rebuild a world that is dying from abandonment. They are also forcing coral to continue, in these different forms. Colonial inhabitation has turned the independent relation of coral into one of dependence upon the actions of scientists, corporations and governments, as they decide their fate.  

Colonial inhabitation has turned the independent relation of coral into one of dependence upon the actions of scientists, corporations and governments, as they decide their fate. 

In building the reefs by hand, for example, a process that is slow and local and seems radically under-scaled to the extent of the threat of global warming, the scientists nonetheless refuse to give up this touch. There have been small but substantial improvements to reef health through these gestures, “flowing together unexpected erotic linkages even, especially, in spaces of global violence and inequity.” This is a building and rebuilding of worlds that insists on an anti-colonial inhabitation, recognizing corals as vital to the well-being of people in the Caribbean and elsewhere, a taking care of ancestors and the witnesses of ancestors. A blood-based linkage between coral and people that simultaneously shows the necessity for connection and records the violent history that created it.  

One species of red coral, Corallium rubrum, is listed as endangered. Too much touch was part of what led to its demise. The coveting of the red-blood color has transformed Medusa again, leaving in its wake oceans that are more and more populated by seaweed that slowly take over where once reefs had been.