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  • Jamaican, Octopus*
  • Thomas Glave (bio)

The unity is submarine.

Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens

Octopus? But absolutely. The idea, or rather reality, of myself as an octopus—and indeed as what I now know myself to be, Hapalochlaena lunulata, the Greater Blue-Ringed Octopus, as opposed to what I would really often prefer to be, Octopus vulgaris, the Common Octopus—emerged earlier this year as a more or less private joke with a friend; a joke with (as that friend would understand it) a distinctly erotic center well-rooted in manifestations of a sort of intimate “queerness,” if you will, between us: a “queerness” experienced not so much as frank desire but rather as utterly intimate and tacit understanding between us of our discrete and generally verbally unexpressed most secret desires: an understanding that he, that friend, articulated between us only in the lowest and most private of tones when attempting to talk about (or, more accurately, whisper about) all of that, and more. It was in that time with him that I was able, unlike him, perhaps, to slip more comfortably into my other skin, or skins, flesh and fleshes, of octopus, order of Octopoda, a simple (but complex) well-evolved and evolving mollusk.

I proceed into this writing with a reminder to myself that I by no means, by way of the preceding more-or-less introduction, aim to be obscurantist, or abstruse. I am in fact trying very hard—and the task is, I find, difficult indeed—to work, to move, even to swim, sentence by sentence, toward a language that might in some way capture, represent, even directly (or at least figuratively) illustrate, the ways and hows of becoming the varying and occasionally connected whos whom I wish (and sometimes, depending on the day and environment, do not wish) to be: writer/artist, political activist, “intellectual.”1

And so, toward exploration of a kind—my own non-linear journey into a sort of interior—I must consider octopuses. Queer creatures. Mutable creatures. Mutable in form, to a degree, and size, although not, unlike some other sea creatures, mutable in gender; creatures that possess the ability to change shape (and thus avoid detection) and color (and so also avoid detection), and that regularly seek invisibility and camouflage, invisibility by way of camouflage. Creatures that are predacious and preyed upon, life-threatened by innumerable enemies and even by their own mating exercises and cycles of pregnancy, they seek to remain unseen, or at least largely often unrecognizable as octopuses. (Consider, [End Page 368] for example, the Amphioctopus marginatus: the octopus that, rather than jetting away from danger in a cloud of dark ink that disorients predators and slightly disables an enemy’s sense of smell, actually ambles away on two feet, or “arms,” looking very much like a moving or even swaying plant. Incidentally, octopus ink is partly composed of melanin, which also inhabits my skin and the skin of all humans, and is found in innumerable other species. Another link between all of us and this mutable cephalopod.)

And do not forget—I certainly must not forget—that all octopuses can, if the danger is dire enough and chance of escape seems slim, detach one or more of their limbs, by way of autotomy: a danger-evasion tactic exercised also by some reptiles, spiders, and lobsters. Autotomy, from the Late Greek, meaning essentially a severing or amputation of the self. Such severing obviously differs from the life-enabling process of evisceration, through which some invertebrate sea creatures may, when facing grave conditions, expel their own internal organs, and later regenerate them.

I think—and maybe anyone would reasonably think—of the dear octopus as a sort of queer subject: a creature possessed, for example, of not only two, but eight arms, in an environment in which fins, far more than arms, are common (although octopuses do also have gills); and a creature generally possessed of three hearts, as if one were somehow not enough, and not enough trouble, all told. Octopus, that is not at all a fish, really nothing like one, in an environment populated mainly—at least on the face of it—by fishes; an...

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