1. Building

Stony corals are builders of worlds. In the chants of the Hawai‘ian Kumulipo, the first beings created out of the darkness were corals: “Hanau ka ‘Uku-ko‘ako‘a, hanau kana, he ‘Ako‘ako‘a, puka / Born was the coral polyp, born was the coral, came forth.”1 In the Marshall Islands, when Lowa (the uncreated) hummed, islands, reefs, and sandbanks emerged.2 As anthropologist Greg Dvorak recounts in Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands (2018), the Ri-Kuwajleen, the Islanders who first settled Kwajelein, “understood in their oral traditions that the entire atoll, this whole ring of islets, originated from one massive coral head in the center of the lagoon, known as Tarlan.”3 In these origin stories, stony corals are the foundation of islands and life.

A different sense of corals as builders emerges in Western scientific contexts, placing corals more as the architects of created structures than as sacred origin points. Malcolm Shick notes how the Great Barrier Reef has been described as a “gigantic and irregular fortification, a steep glacis crowned with a broken parapet wall.”4 Shick dedicates a whole chapter to “Coral Construction” in Where the Corals Lie (2018), noting the ways that coral has been imagined as an architectural form as well as used as a stony resource (coral rock) to quarry and build temples, pyramids, and other structures. Such architectural language, as Stefan Helmreich notes, also appears in Darwin’s many writings about corals and the formation of atolls. Take this quote from Voyages of the Beagle: “We feel surprise when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals!”5 Here, corals are lauded for exceeding even the pyramids in size and scale. Yet for Darwin, corals not only demonstrated a kind of agency as builders whose geologic structures that continue growing into the present; in his theory of atoll formation, he posited that corals gradually grew on top of extinct volcanoes that gradually subsided into the sea, leaving a coral ring that grew upwards near the ocean’s surface.6 In her classic 1983 literary study Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer notes how Darwin’s thoughts also drifted to coral when he diagrammed the tree of life: “the tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen.”7 Unlike the tree of life, the figure of coral could account for the organisms that had already lived (the dead coral skeleton) to arrive at the living tips of the present—an ongoing architectural formation.

In a useful conceptual inversion, Helmreich suggests that we consider the way cultural representations of corals have accreted over time, and that perhaps such representations have themselves become discursive “scaffoldings upon which reefs have already been written.”8 What is valuable about this formulation is the reversal of the architectural metaphor. Discursive patterns (not just calcium carbonate) accrete over time, and representations and descriptions of coral reefs form into a structure upon which our understandings of coral are built. Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway’s likening of crafting conversation on common reading and writing to the process of reef building, Helmreich channels attention to how densely reefs “become prefigured through the historically layered descriptions of biologists, fisherpeople, ecologists, and, occasionally [. . .] anthropology.”9 Similarly, Dvorak writes that human beings are also “reef organisms” that bring their own histories to the reef, citing Edward Said’s casual take on Antonio Gramsci’s description of culture as “coral-like.”10 Knowing the tendencies through which corals have been figured is a first step in examining processes of coralation.

A key discursive scaffolding upon which coral has been figured is empire. In Coral Empire (2019), Ann Elias notes that at the end of the nineteenth century Great Britain not only owned most of the world’s coral empires but also chose to see in coral reefs a justification for their own imperial ambitions. Coral was seen to industriously build expansive reef structures, just as Great Britain built its empire:

The imperial imaginary found in the figure of the coral reef a useful political image and a metaphorical space to assert the rightness and goodness of the empire’s own colonizing practice of expansion. Acquiring and building colonies, especially in the tropics, seemed as organic for the British Empire as the process of reef building itself. And, in an age of positivist science and Enlightenment influence, a marine animal that also built toward the light embodied a useful social symbol for enlightened Europeans.11

Elias notes that this metaphor of coral as empire builder focused on the labor of white Europeans while obscuring other figurative reef builders—Indigenous laborers. Yet in a different vein, Elias cites a 1915 headline calling the acquisition of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (now Kiribati and Tuvalu) “lumps of coral” part of a “vocabulary of domination” characterizing the people and culture of these islands as an “indiscriminate conglomerate.”12 Emphasizing the stoniness of coral in this instance framed coral as an object to be owned, rather than as a fellow empire-building organism to be emulated.

Elias’s diagnosis of coral empire finds echoes in contemporary data visualizations of cities. In one example, geospatial specialist Craig Taylor manipulated European city transportation networks to evoke the patterns of branching corals. Taylor took flat road maps and gave them a slight three-dimensional lift, creating coral cities that seem to grow up and outward from a dense center. Selecting the most “livable” European cities, Taylor writes that he has been, “fascinated by the concept of making city networks look like living corals,” coloring them in varied neons that evoke an undersea fantasy.13 These are not the neons of Pantone’s “Glowing Glowing Gone” campaign, which signal coral endangerment from climate change. The images are abstractions, where the environment disappears. Elements of each city’s landscape can be inferred through blank spaces, suggesting “patterns where physical features such as rivers, oceans and mountains impact the network” of the city.14 Further, what is invisible in these diagrams is the history of European colonialism, which extracted resources for the growth of these cities-as-corals from coral islands around the world.

Coral has also been part of empire building through its material use in colonialist architecture and transportation infrastructure. Across the Pacific, airport runways were created from dynamited and crushed up corals to form concrete. Dvorak notes that in the Marshall Islands, reef rocks were used to build “concrete seawalls, buildings, and the first airstrip.”15 In Coral and Concrete, Dvorak develops concrete as a telling historical metaphor:

In contrast to the coralline model of history, which acknowledges the agency of individuals in terms of the larger reef, conventional histories usually teach about the victories and losses of nations. I refer in this book to these kinds of layers of history as “concrete.” In Kwajelein and many other heavily militarized islands throughout Oceania, coral was literally used as an aggregate, mixed with cement and water to form quick-drying concrete that could be used to construct fortifications or to form roads and runways. Concrete is the pulverization, amalgamation, and flattening of all these coralline histories into one condensed and monolithic mass.16

If Darwin’s figuration of coral as a builder emphasized the glory of its enduring structures, Dvorak’s metaphor of concrete draws attention to the destruction and pulverization of living coral reefs in the service of imperial and settler-colonial building projects. Concrete implies a different figure of temporality than strata: instead of being laid down one residue at a time (like a coral secreting its skeleton), the making of concrete involves the active destruction of corals in order to form new layers of pavement. The formation of one historical layer depends on the destruction of other historical layers—if one takes seriously coral skeletons as a kind of ecological record of the climate, akin to tree rings. Dvorak writes that concrete is “the actual physical process by which colonialism and militarism in the Pacific Islands have attempted to reduce the multiplicities of coral into something that is uniform, predictable, and homogenous” or that which “hegemonizes history.”17

For anthropologist Cameron McKean, a closer consideration of coral strata offers another nonlinear figure of “melted temporality.”18 McKean recalls the history of how scientists came to read layers of calcium carbonate in the skeletons of corals for temporal significance, forming a kind of “mineral chronometer” or metric of time like tree rings. In his essay “Calcium Carbonate,” McKean notes that our ability to translate “the coral’s rhythmic carbonate growth into numerical clock time” originated from the work of three scientists who were studying the effects of radiation on reefs at Enewetak Atoll:

They laid coral slices on light-sensitive paper, and after forty days, strontium-90 hidden in the skeleton unexpectedly materialized as glowing bands in the images, revealing an annual growth pattern that transformed the fragments into “coral chronometers.” We can translate coral time today because humans—the U.S. military—drastically altered the matter inside the reefs of Enewetak Atoll. Coral time and human time melted together in the shadow of a mushroom cloud.19

The word melted is key. Rather than see the striated coral archives as the opposite of Dvorak’s concrete—separated, rather than blended—McKean shows how coral archives tell time while also ontologically attesting to melted time. In the passage above, what McKean means by “coral time” includes “the moon-linked time of coral polyps, the seasonal oscillations of sea surface temperatures,” temporalities that blur together with “jagged rhythms of technoscience” and the Anthropocene—which some geologists have found useful to date to the advent of the nuclear age, because it provides a “golden spike” in the global stratigraphic record. Yet McKean argues that the concept of a temporal rupture doesn’t make sense in the case of calcium carbonate, “a mineral compound in which temporalities melt together.”20 Both McKean’s figure of melting and Dvorak’s figure of concrete examine the ways in which coral skeletons—sliced and sampled into scientific archives, or pulverized into the settler-colonial infrastructures of air transport—attest to registers of time in which the legacies of military destruction, settler colonialism, ocean acidification, and the biological rhythms of corals themselves cannot be easily separated out from one another.21

However, to single out corals as the only builders or building material is to ignore a host of other multispecies agencies that contribute to reef formation. As Shick notes, “Other organisms of the reef community contribute to its three-dimensional structure. Some of these provide the calcareous debris of their own skeletons that forms sediments mortaring the interstices of the reef framework and strengthening it.”22 Reef-building algae are one notable force. Taiwan’s Datan Algal Reef was named a “Hope Spot” by the ocean nonprofit organization Mission Blue, given its importance to ocean biodiversity and surprising size. Such algal reefs were just starting to be scientifically studied after World War II. American phycologist William Randolph Taylor was commissioned to visit the Marshall Islands and map their baseline algae just prior to the testing of atomic weapons and their ecological devastation. Taylor waxed poetic about the calcareous red algae Porolithon, which formed massive ridges on the windward side of Bikini Atoll and other islands, which he knew would be destroyed soon after his survey. One can read his 1950 book, Plants of Bikini and Other Northern Marshall Islands, as a kind of epitaph for algal reefs later annihilated by atomic testing.

Sometimes the presence of non-coral organisms indirectly contributes to reef formation by influencing the flow of seawater through “baffling.” As Shick writes,

Octocorals such as sea fans, sea whips and other alyconaceans baffle and slow the water currents moving across the reef. Crustose coralline red algae help to cement such sediments and larger fragments of coral rubble, cohering the composite. . . . Deep inside the reef, seawater chemistry and physics, and microbial activity, gradually transform the calcareous debris into sedimentary coral rock in the process of diagenesis.23

To baffle, here, means to slow a liquid flow. It is hard to resist that other sense of baffle, which means to astound or confuse. That the architectural forms of reef organisms “baffle” flows of water feels especially poetic to us terrestrial beings, who may have ignored something: while it is common to think of reefs as the media of inscription for records of the climate, here we have an example where water is a sculptural medium of inscription for the living form of a reef, whose shape influences three-dimensional contours of flow.

Baffling is complemented by bioerosion, as reef borers like mollusks and worms, urchins and fish, burrow and scrape away at reefs, contributing to the production of debris and sand. I am compelled to mention that while diving in Oahu in 2013, I observed the marks of “pencil urchins,” echinoderms with thick spines. Their beaks had carved away at the volcanic rock in deep tracks, scraping away edible algae. I could not help but note the curious convergence of a media form (pencil) and an organism performing a kind of inscriptive work. Such marine organisms might be thought of as agents of mediation through their sculptural, inscriptive, and erosive work.

We can also find evidence of more-than-coral agencies at work in the skeletons of stony corals themselves. The authors of Biology of Coral Reefs (2009) note that “Microbial communities are not only associated with the coral surface and tissues, but with the coral skeleton too. About 98% of reef-building corals contain filamentous green algae, as well as cyanobacteria, fungi, and bacteria in their skeletons, where they form a series of distinct horizontal bands.”24 If, as Shick writes, a coral’s “skeletal foundation represents the colony’s history writ in stone and chemistry,” this is a history that includes many microbial co-authors.25 What Scott F. Gilbert elaborates as the coral “holobiont”—the organism plus its community of symbionts—is recorded in its skeleton.26

Coral skeletons are also histories of the minerality of seawater itself. Stony corals, after all, build their calcium carbonate skeletons from minerals they acquire in the surrounding ocean. To poetically convey this, Shick cites a stunning nineteenth-century metaphor: “the quarry from which they [corals] dug their masonry was the limpid wave.”27 Here, the liquid ocean is figured as a rock quarry, and seawater is the stone to be mined for building materials. To call the quarry limpid—clear, glassy, and unclouded—grates against the expected visual density of rock. It is an instance of the tendency to figure the oceanic in terms of the terrestrial, what I and others have elsewhere called a terrestrial bias at the level of language.28 And yet, the image remains a striking reminder of the minerality of seawater. Consider a moment in N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award–winning speculative fiction novel The Fifth Season: the main character, Essun, can control powerful geologic forces, but has difficulty with the “the strange slipperiness of seawater minerals.”29 Or, think of André Breton’s description of stony corals in Mad Love (1937) as a “petrifying fountain,” organisms that form hard bodies out of the liquidity of the ocean, much like the way limestone caverns form from droplets of water.30 In the context of coral architectures, seawater sustains the fleshy bodies of coral polyps and multispecies marine life, the medium from which corals glean the minerals they need to survive and grow. Seawater is the environmental precondition for coral formation, a fact that is easy to forget once coral is taken out of the ocean to become building material.

To dwell with the minerality of seawater, I now turn to Nalo Hopkinson’s short story “Repatriation” (2019). “Repatriation” first appeared in the online collection Current Futures, which, as literary scholar Elizabeth Deloughrey importantly notes, was sponsored by XPrize, which in turn is funded by the oil company Royal Dutch Shell.31 While I agree with Deloughrey that Current Futures risks giving oil companies a social license to operate through the performance of environmental care, “Repatriation” nonetheless dramatizes the worldbuilding capacity of corals in a unique way. “Repatriation” follows Carleton and his husband Jerry just as they are about to embark on a surprise birthday cruise. Carleton is reluctant from the start, dwelling with the discomfort of taking a leisure cruise that evokes memories of dispossession from their hometown of Falmouth, Jamaica, which has since been swallowed by sea-level rise. At one point, Carlton grumbles,

My husband had lost his goddamned mind. We both grew up as boys watching the cruise ships dock at our island, stinking up the port with the smell of tarry bunker fuel, disgorging tourists from foreign who would party for a few hours before jumping back on their travelling hotels for the next port of call. We would stare at them, our fingers clenched in the diamond-shaped holes of the chain link fencing that prevented us locals from accessing our own port unless we were working for the cruise line and could show papers to prove it.

Hopkinson offers a concise picture of capitalist and neocolonial dispossession, portraying the cruise ships as sea monsters that “disgorge” their tourists for temporary recreation while shutting out the locals, who are left clutching chain-link fencing through “diamond-shaped holes.” If coastal access is a precious resource, then the chain-link fencing serves as a visual metaphor for that which has been extracted or taken away from local boys like Carlton and Jerry.

In face of further dispossession by sea level rise, corals become the agents of an unexpected kind of world-building. By the end of the story, Carlson finds that the ship is not a neocolonial discount cruise, but a repurposed architecture that is on its last voyage back to Falmouth, Jamaica, to help restore the climate-damaged harbor. Via the novum of biorock—an actual technique that scientists have experimented with—the capitalist architecture of cruise ships becomes a new sunken foundation for future coral growth and harbor restoration.32 The biorock works by running a current through the steel frame of the ship to encourage calcification from the surrounding seawater, enabling the growth of corals and marine plants. Here, mineral-laden seawater and rock-forming corals work together as agents of environmental remediation, or even terraforming, growing atop the encrusted forms of cruise ships. After the metal ships sink like whale falls (suggested by the ship’s name, Cetacean of the Seas), the corals transform what was an exploitative and capitalist architecture into an underwater structure to restore ecological habitat and local infrastructure. Hopkinson portrays the corals as agents in the reclamation of national sovereignty through the biological activity of quarrying seawater.

In another example of Black Atlantic futurity and corals, consider artist Ellen Gallagher’s Coral Cities (2007). As part of her longer project Watery Ecstatic, Gallagher’s works play with gothic configurations of underwater life that blur any easy division between the mineral (white bones, geologic structures) and the biological (polyps, flesh). The essays in the companion publication Coral Cities dwell extensively with Gallagher’s referentiality to the Drexciya mythos—an underwater society descended from pregnant African women who drowned in the Middle Passage—exploring the aftermath of those who survived the graveyard of the Atlantic.33 Yet neither essay in Coral Cities discusses the titular element of coral; so where does coral, in fact, lie? Perhaps Gallagher’s coral cities exist not only in the aftermath of the underwater shipwreck but also in the polyp-like appearance of human faces, ringed by the circular accretions of magazine cut-outs; or through the way she delicately carves into bone-white paper, creating atoll-shaped cuts of more-than-human life that are barely visible in its photographic documentation—an effect better seen in person, through the contrast of a shadowed lighting. Or perhaps through the way Gallagher plays with embedding faces in green strands of something seaweed-like, each face ringed by tentacle-like white hair as if it were a new kind of coral polyp. Or perhaps through her watercolor paintings of medusa-like figures—coral mythologized, after all, as the blood of Medusa dripped into the sea—their textured white hair conjoining into an archipelago above them. Coral Cities contests where we might expect to find life, offering surprising forms of hybridity and mutation, inviting us to think about soft bodies, not only about stony forms. Her cities are architectures built of and by polyps with anthropomorphic features, polyps that might reach out across time to offer an affective sting.

Notes

1. 1. Holumua Marine Initiative, “Coral Life Cycle,” https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/holomua/coral-life-cycle/.

2. 2. Pacific Islands Education Partnership, “Marshall Islands,” http://pcep.prel.org/locations/marshall-islands/#:~:text=Marshall%20Islands%20Yokwe&text=In%20ancient%20times%2C%20when%20there,to%20constantly%20circle%20the%20sky.

3. 3. Dvorak, Coral and Concrete, 19.

4. 4. Shick, Where the Corals Lie, 189.

5. 5. Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1839), as cited in Stefan Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 50.

6. 6. Haley Dunning, “Darwin’s Coral Conundrum,” https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/charles-darwin-coral-conundrum.html.

7. 7. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 261n12.

8. 8. Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life, 49.

9. 9. Helmreich, 49.

10. 10. Dvorak, Coral and Concrete, 22–23.

11. 11. Elias, Coral Empire, 18.

12. 12. Elias, 19.

13. 13. Craig Taylor, “Coral Cities: An Ito Design Lab Concept,” https://towardsdatascience.com/coral-cities-an-ito-design-lab-concept-c01a3f4a2722.

14. 14. Taylor.

15. 15. Dvorak, Coral and Concrete, 26.

16. 16. Dvorak, 25.

17. 17. Dvorak, 26.

18. 18. Cameron McKean, “Calcium Carbonate,” https://culanth.org/fieldsights/calcium-carbonate.

19. 19. McKean.

20. 20. McKean.

21. 21. As Marion Endt-Jones notes, it is this evidentiary sense of coral that contributes to its connection to another kind of building and institution, the zoological museum; for nineteenth-century naturalists like Ernst Haeckel, coral colonies not only appeared in museum dioramas but could each be thought of ontologically as “a small zoological museum.” Quoted in Marion Endt-Jones, “A Monstrous Transformation: Coral in Art and Culture,” in Oceans, ed. Pandora Syperek and Sarah Wade (London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Press with MIT Press, 2023), 108.

22. 22. Shick, Where Corals Lie, 30.

23. 23. Shick, 30–31.

24. 24. Charles R. C. Sheppard, Simon K. Davy, Graham M. Pilling, eds., Biology of Coral Reefs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 123.

25. 25. Shick, Where Corals Lie, 30.

26. 26. Scott F. Gilbert, “Holobiont by Birth: Multilineage Individuals as the Concretion of Cooperative Processes,” in Arts for Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2017).

27. 27. “Coral Rings,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 74 (July–December 1853): 371. Quoted in Shick, Where Corals Lie.

28. 28. Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020).

29. 29. N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (New York: Orbit, 2015), 384.

30. 30.. André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (1937; New York: Bison Books, 1987), 10–12. This description comes on the heels of a passage exploring his fascination with crystals. I am grateful to an anonymous peer reviewer of the manuscript of this book for pointing me to Breton’s image.

31. 31. Elizabeth Deloughrey, “Mining the Seas: Speculative Fictions and Futures” in Laws of the Sea: Interdisciplinary Currents (Taylor and Francis, 2022), ed. Irus Braverman.

32. 32. Gemma Conroy, “Can Sculptures Help Coral Reefs Bounce Back?” https://hakaimagazine.com/news/can-sculptures-help-coral-reefs-bounce-back/.

33. 33. On the gothic aesthetics of the underwater shipwreck and its atmosphere, see Margaret Cohen, The Underwater Eye: How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021), 11 and 120–21. Focusing on the documentaries of Jacques Cousteau, Cohen shows how their visual qualities—slanted camera angles, haziness, and Ann Radcliffe’s articulation of “almost roofless walls”—were made possible by “by the physical qualities of the ocean environment” (121–22) such as buoyancy and opacity.