In unrest in the nebulae , Gitan Djeli wields prose poetry to archive five hundred years of exploitative colonization, ecocide, extinction, militarization and deportation, slavery, indenture, negotiated nationhood, postcolonial plantation structures, and apologist histories. Writing in a queer anticolonial poetics, and using lines of Kreol, Gitan Djeli mines the tension that emerges between colonialism and language, disarticulating the myth-making aesthetics of the colonial world. She tells the story of the 'other slavery' in the Indian Ocean and its histories of enslavement and indenture through a subversive, fragmented poetics, and often from the perspective its geologic witnesses-a misnamed ocean or the range of mountains within it or the volcanic idea of islands. In a charge of resistance to the catastrophe of modernity, unrest in the nebulae takes seriously Sylvia Wynter's invitation to engage "a new science of the word."