A Distinctive Disaster Literature ۬ܗ— Montserrat Island Poetry under Pressure J ONATHAN S KINNER I’m a survivor, a writer Three days after 1 DISASTER CAN BE AN ATTRACTIVE PROSPECT according to Susan Sontag, for in a disaster there is release from normal obligations. 2 Under threat from hurricane, volcano, flood, earthquake, one lives in the moment by struggling to survive. It is during these frightening, but also exciting, times that the humdrum and mundane are replaced by an edgy hyper-realism. This essay assesses a new strain of disaster literature found in writings from Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory in the Eastern Carib- bean. These writings are islander reactions to natural disasters, specifically poets engaging with the sudden disaster wrought by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and the slow, ongoing volcanic eruption of Mount Chance since 1995. Yet this body of work is also an exploration of island identity as it struggles with colonial and postcolonial realities, and a cathartic social commentary on un- fortunate events. These are narratives as product and narratives as praxis, then, which attempt to write and to right the social realities that surround 1 Kemberley Fenton, “The Hugo Effect,” in Horrors of a Hurricane: Poems: From Hugo With Love, ed. Howard Fergus (Montserrat: School of Continuing Education, UWI , 1990): 43. 2 Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965), in Sontag, Against Interpre- tation, and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967): 209–25. A