Conclusion: Edges

In “A Sonnet at the Edge of a Reef,” Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez introduces a scene full of wonder at the Waikiki Aquarium in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. As parents take their daughter to a touch tank, “We dip our hands into the outdoor reef exhibit / and touch sea cucumber and red urchin,” he writes. Thus begins an intergenerational story of coral reproduction, a “galaxy of gametes / which dances to the surface, fertilizes, opens / forms larvae, roots to the seafloor, and grows, generation / upon generation.” The corals take on mythic proportions through analogies: the ocean as galaxy, and gametes as stars. This larger-than-life story could be the content of the next scene where the parents read a children’s book, “The Great Barrier Reef, to our daughter / snuggling between us in bed.” While the daughter is protected, centered between parents, the coral gametes are not. Perez ends his sonnet with the gutting volta: “We don’t mention / corals bleaching, reared in labs, or frozen. / And isn’t our silence too, a kind of shelter?” This turn introduces an instance of dramatic irony: the parents and/as the reader know of coral bleaching and endangerment, while the child does not.

This scene hits personally for me, since Coralations was drafted while I was pregnant with my daughter, to whom this book is dedicated. During this time of expectation, she was gifted a number of ocean-themed children’s books by friends and family (Figure 6). Many of these books center tactile elements, like pokable bubble-dots to practice counting, or textured flaps to peek behind. Some portray marine creatures with personhood, and all introduce a sense of wonder. These books, like the touch tank, stage moments of reciprocity where what is touched also touches back. Such pleasurable moments in books, and at touch tanks, evoke what Eva Hayward poetically calls “fingeryeyes,” or the “tentacular visuality of cross-species encounters” and “synaesthetic quality of materialized sensation.”1 And as Susan G. Davis has written, touch has been central to the way that aquariums market themselves in advertisements, bringing the distance of the ocean and its creatures close at hand, to be felt, to have contact.2 In the chapter on “Softness” I argued that not all corals are book-like, yet the medium of the book—specifically the children’s book—is significant in Perez’s poem. The children’s book appears as an object in the sonnet, but the sonnet itself is, tonally, a lot like a children’s book. The first twelve lines gently explain coral reproduction in a visually enchanting way that would be appropriate for any aquarium docent. To think with Hayward and Licona prepositionally, the form of the children’s book is both in and of the sonnet.

The children’s book also acts as a type of ecological fetish object, which I use in the anthropological sense of an object that protects against harm. For the parent who knows better, the book uses reassuring educational content to cover over knowledge of impending species extinctions, climate change, deadly ocean pollution, and—as Perez’s poem mentions—coral bleaching. What underlies the poem’s lyrical lullaby is an acute awareness of coral mortality. Like the daughter listening to a bedtime story and reflecting on a nice day at the aquarium, perhaps the reader, too, is lulled to sleep in the first twelve lines of the poem—until being shaken out of a state of wonder and into raw wakefulness of ecological mortality. The imagination of the coral bed, and bedtime story, is a refuge from knowledge of climate change and forecasts of coral death.

This awareness of coral morality is directly tied to technoscientific interventions that mediate coral reproduction, mediations that have to do with temperature and temporality. As I wrote in chapters 2 and 3 on “Softness” and “Coldness,” thermal imaginaries are central to understanding the iconicity of Coral. Consider the contrast between how Perez describes corals as “reared in labs, or frozen” and a moment earlier in the sonnet, recounted by a docent at the aquarium: “once a year, after the full moon, when tides swell / to a certain height, and saltwater reaches the perfect / temperature, only then will the ocean cue coral / polyps to spawn, in synchrony.” In both moments, temperature correlates with different modes of time. The docent’s narration of coral reproduction emphasizes ecological process, and the particularity of conditions that have to be met for the magic of coral spawning to occur. Moon, tides, and temperature all combine to alliteratively “cue coral” to “spawn, in synchrony”—synchrony being the word that is spatially placed in the exact center of the sonnet. Synchrony, the doing of things together, connects with the use of “we” in the poem—the “we” that gathers adults and children at the scene of the aquarium and the bedtime story. However, synchrony is also contingent on particular ecological conditions being met—“only then” will the ocean, almost as a musical conductor, “cue coral / polyps to spawn.” We might think of this ecological synchronicity as a type of optimization, when “the perfect / temperature” being reached. In chapter 3, the hyperbolic crochet coral reef also entailed an element of synchronicity in producing corals from the labor of many local crafters, their wooly creations timed to the event of exhibition.

By contrast, the corals “reared in labs, or frozen” suggest coldness as a moment of unnatural stasis—embryos frozen in time, for later use, taken out of the lively flow of seawater and into the artificial space of refrigeration. In this frozen storage, they are un-coralated from the rhythms of seasonal spawning. Even though such refrigeration might be well-intentioned by coral conservationists—part of a last-ditch strategy to increase or at least preserve coral populations—refrigeration is a technology with a long history in Pacific contexts that is directly tied to settler colonialism. As Hi‘ilei Hobart writes in Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (2023), technologies like refrigeration and air conditioning have been “part of a larger set of strategies employed by settlers to calibrate thermal environments to the aims of territorial expansion, resource extraction, and settler habitation,” making warm tropical places across the Pacific more comfortable to Western tastes, and providing the preconditions for local dependency on imported foods.3 Yet in the context of the sonnet, the refrigeration of coral embryos has an implied coralation with heat. “We don’t mention / corals bleaching” alludes to extreme ocean warming events as the cause of coral bleaching in the first place (Chapter 2), warming that has been exacerbated by the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere, largely from nations that historically have been the most active colonizers. For coral reefs, the stress from ocean warming and the response of genetic freezing are both caught up within the global effects of settler colonial histories.

“A Sonnet at the Edge of the Reef” leaves us a final question: what are forms of shelter? The last line, “And isn’t our silence, too, a kind of shelter?” uses the adverb “too” as an open signifier; nowhere else in the poem does the word “shelter” occur, so the reader is left wondering not only how silence is a kind of shelter, but what other forms of shelter exist in the poem. To wonder about other forms of shelter might prompt a rereading: perhaps shelter exists in the educational space of the aquarium, in being caught up listening to a story, or for the child, being nestled between parents. The laboratory is also a shelter, preserving frozen coral embryos. Perhaps we (the reader, the parents, the author) are all too aware that such shelter can only ever be temporary. For Perez, the question of shelter is locative: where is one safe and protected? The title of the poem, too, is about location. The sonnet is not about a reef, but at the edge of the reef—at being a preposition that locates and conjoins—a graft, if you will (chapter 3).

As chapters in Coralations have explored, the edge of the reef is a site of articulation—in the double sense of being conjoined and of being spoken—across varied media forms: sonnets, photographs, books. Games like NeMO-NET are obsessed with defining edges, especially edges for the boundaries of individual coral colonies. Teaching a neural net how to look for significant edges is the entire reason for the game—enlisting the labor of citizen scientists to play at marking them. In Nadia Huggins’s photography edges are extendable, open to new and surprising coralations of form. Soft corals expand and contract their edges with the flow of the tides, inflating in response to the lunar movements of seawater. Cold-water corals have their edges sensed remotely with sonar, through a primarily sonic rather than visual regime of surveyal. In chapter 3, I discussed how cold-water corals thrive on the edges of continental shelves, the same places that coincide with petroleum seeps and infrastructures. Yet the edges of coral reefs are also living, and made—as in the crochet fabrications of the Helsinki Reef, where crafters looped petroleum-based yarn into fantastical forms.

My hope for Coralations is that it refreshes curiosity about particular corals against the homogeneity of Coral, an icon that belies a multiplicity of lifeforms and, by implication, media forms.4 Un-coralating corals from Coral creates the space for surprise, a mode of defamiliarization that serves as an opening for other connections to emerge. Not all of these connections fall in the binary of utopia/dystopia; the example of Lophelia pertusa growing on oil rigs into artificial reefs, for example, prompts us to attend to a new coralation, a new environmental narrative, that links petroculture with corals—different from the all-too-common association and critique of corals with tropics and tourism. Chapter 2 on “Softness” offered another broken coralation, destabilizing the sense of corals as iconic builders and instead emphasizing a sculptural attention to currents and hydroskeletons, as well as unarchivable conditions of mediation. The goal of attending to coralline “ecologies of comparison,” to draw on Tim Choy’s phrase, is to better address what slips outside media analogies; not all corals are book-like records, not all corals lend themselves to photomediations.5 As I wrote in Wild Blue Media, “a zoological comparative media studies addresses not only differences in media materiality and form but also the species specificity of media under particular environmental conditions.”6 There is not one reified set of “coral media” for scholars to decode; an analysis of the multispecies necessitates a consideration of multimedia.

Corals can introduce moments of hesitation that ask something of us. They can unsettle habits of the sensory, and in so doing, invite us to engage with reef ecologies beyond the tired refrain that they need to be saved. My hope is that readers will proliferate ways of relating to corals beyond imagining themselves as saviors, and generate new environmental narratives that refresh public attention. This means taking up the ongoing work of tracing and contesting coralations, a project that is ever in motion.

Notes

1. 1. Eva Hayward, “FINGERYEYES: Impression of Cup Corals,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 580.

2. 2. Susan G. Davis, “Touch the Magic,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon, 204–17 (New York: Norton, 1995).

3. 3. Hi‘ilei Julia Kaweipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2023), 6.

4. 4. For a history of the term lifeform, see Sophia Roosth and Stefan Helmreich, “Lifeforms: A Keyword Entry,” Representations 112 (Fall 2010): 27–53.

5. 5. Timothy Choy, Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).

6. 6. Jue, Wild Blue Media, 26.