Tao Leigh Goffe: Embrace Rejection

Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, Black British award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the U.K. and New York. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University. She lives and works in Manhattan where she is currently an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Dr. Goffe has held academic positions and fellowships at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University in New Jersey. Follow her on X (Twitter) and Instagram.

In this interview, Tao discusses how an email out of the blue led her to write her new book, Dark Laboratory, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Tao Leigh Goffe
Literary agent: Janklow and Nesbit, Ian Bonaparte
Book title: Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
Publisher: Doubleday
Release date: January 21, 2025
Genre/category: Nonfiction, Climate, History
Elevator pitch: Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis argues for radical optimism and action in the face global environmental degradation by turning to islands for answers about our survival as a planet in the future amidst increasing severity of natural disasters. Told from the vantage of coral reefs, marijuana buds, the history of botanical gardens, mongooses, and volcanoes, the book shows how solving the climate crisis requires racial justice to undo Christopher Columbus’ grand mistake in 1492.

Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

What prompted you to write this book?

A love for islands, 10 years spent researching in colonial archives of the Caribbean, and doing fieldwork in bat caves and rainforests prompted me to write this book. My process has been one of being led by climate justice advocates and activists who are Native people fighting every day for land rights and sovereignty against colonial powers. The urgency of the calamity of environmental degradation also pushed me to make this book a reality because the world needs a united vision in how to approach the future of racial justice entwined with climate justice.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The idea began in 2017, and it was originally titled After Eden. I have published over 15 peer-reviewed academic articles. I had been writing a series of articles that I realized were actually a book. A couple of the articles were written for academic journals and were rejected. I sat with the commentary from reviewer one and reviewer two and began to see puzzle pieces that fit together. It’s beautiful when the argument to answer a question that has been vexing you for years finally comes together.

I was frustrated by the lack of attention each Columbus Day to his arrival in the Caribbean—Guanahani, which is the present-day Bahamas. I was inspired by how Ada Ferrer, who won the Pulitzer Prize, powerfully addresses this fact in her book Cuba: An American History. The Caribbean is more than just a vacation paradise, and its underside shows why there are so many military bases present there. From islands, I contend the climate crisis began due to Christopher Columbus importing and transplanting sugarcane. This I argue began a warfare and violence against the soil and Indigenous peoples. From islands, I contend the solutions to the climate crisis can be born. Enslaved Africans, among them my ancestors, were forcibly brought to toil across the islands, and through the creativity of their survival an African agrarian tradition reinvented lives in the Americas.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The publishing process has been full of beautiful surprises. The first was being approached by email out of the blue to pitch ideas that would become a book proposal by my (now) agent. It was a wonderful collaborative process working with him to develop the concept for the book. Writing the book was also a rich process of collaboration with my team of editors both in the U.S. and the U.K. This is a necessarily transatlantic book from my vantage as a dual citizen of two empires in decline—the U.S. and U.K. I contend with these competing allegiances by reflecting on my inheritance as a colonial subject as a daughter of the Caribbean and Hong Kong.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

The surprises for me were the characters I met along the way, actors both human and non-human emerged as storytellers of the climate crisis in ways I had not anticipated when beginning the research. The Maroon chief I met named Colonel Sterling in Jamaica taught me a lot about letting go of the fear of getting lost in the wilderness. I listened to coral reefs underwater in Tahiti and learned about the symphony of collective action. I believe there is a lesson here in how we desperately need collaboration across fields, industries, and disciplines to solve the climate crisis. I was surprised to learn from the mongoose about motherhood and what it takes to survive. As a new mother as of September 2024 this has been a beautiful journey to discover how mongooses all give birth at the same time and collectively care for and nurse their pups to ensure survival. It was wonderful recording the audiobook, another surprise, to be reunited with the characters I have met along the way.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

Readers should be invigorated to explore their own family histories through the lens of climate and the ecological inheritance we all have. What are your ancestral mountain ballads? In Dark Laboratory I connect the folk songs of Appalachia to southeastern China to Jamaica to the Alps. We should have hope and optimism inspired by these songs to begin to devise the radical policies needed to battle the climate crisis. What soundtracks of nature, birds, and streams did our ancestors hear that are being lost each day? Prevailing will require uniting beyond the boundaries of nations, as I recommend in one of the final chapters on volcanic activity and global plate tectonics. We need to feel for one another and take action in the face of climate disasters. There should be no borders for empathy and climate relief.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Embrace rejection, especially academic rejection. Maybe like me, the rejected articles are actually the makings of a book that requires greater scale and ambition to be complete. Maybe your audience is a trade audience, and your books requires a vehicle larger than a university audience. Don’t be afraid to think big for the gargantuan problems we are facing as a world, like the climate crisis. My book is a call to rethink problem solving by challenging the notion of the scientific method, as if there is only one. I encourage us to embrace the myriad of scientific traditions, especially from non-European nations, the world over that have been ignored and discredited for centuries, from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. If we embrace the world’s knowledge, which includes the lessons to be learned from plants and animals, then there should be nothing but hope to address the climate crisis.