'blubber, guts, southern leith' in MAP Magazine

A long(ish) poem of mine, ‘blubber, guts, southern leith’, was published this month online at MAP Magazine. It addresses Edinburgh/Leith’s role in industrial whaling in the twentieth century, during which the largest whaling company to have existed in the world was based here at the city’s port, while operating from the island of South Georgia, nearly 8,000 miles away.  

Over six decades, the company made the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pounds in profit, in an industry that killed 1.6 million whales. The subject and content of the poem are heavy, with moments describing the violence in hunting whales and turning them into oil and food.

Hi(r)story is a crucial tool at challenging the ease with which capital believes it can flow through the world: replacing whatever forms of life are found in its way, or appropriating, hunting and ending life to service accumulation. How do we attend to and re-narrate the hirstories (of the places we make life, those we make life with), while thinking through the continuum of coloniality that pulls us all towards ecocide? What work can poetics do in this?

The poem is online here -
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/blubber-guts-southern-leith

The text is set wide across the page, so if you’re reading it on a phone, try reading in landscape.

Thanks to Camara Taylor and the Scottish BAME Writers Network  for commissioning this work.

Image: ‘capture of blue whale’, A. C. Hardy, the Discovery Oceanographic Expedition 1925-27, courtesy Dundee Heritage Trust.