Re-colouring the past: openings for decolonial ecologies
A visual-poetic journey towards the hues of colonial violence in the southern Caribbean.
by María Faciolince Martina and Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik
Over this series, we have grappled with the extractive gaze — the worldview undercutting the dominant economic systems around us today. If the extractive gaze is about distance, then challenging it is about closeness and proximity.
What we have spoken about in this series is the urgent need to reforge our vocabulary. Limiting languages (written, visual and others) around ecology imprison our ability to name and imagine other relationships to nature. In this third and final piece, we wish to offer openings for new entry points to better understand and represent drastic environmental transformations. We’d like to offer two ideas that have guided our sentipensar (thinking-feeling) and a brief glimpse into the start of an ongoing visual-poetic journey into decolonial ecologies.
Lands and bodies are two names for the same place.
A first entry point is the concept of ‘solastalgia’, coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht analysing large-scale mining and drought in Australia. Combining solacium (solace), nostos (return home), and algos (pain) to describe the lack of solace in one’s home environment caused by the effects of negative environmental change, solastalgia witnesses the devastated landscape as an affective space. It is the geographic grief of losing sacred connection with a fully animate and lived place.
A second window is the idea of ‘cuerpo-territorio’ (body-territory), introduced and popularised by Indigenous feminist movements in Abya Yala (Latin America). This concept encourages us to see bodies and territories as inseparable. Our bodies are our first territories, the intimate geographies that sustain and shape us; breathing, moving, being, they are intimately entwined with the territories that surround us. Lands and bodies are two names for the same place. As we are reminded by Frantz Fanon in A Dying Colonialism, “There is not occupation of territory on the one hand and independence of persons on the other.” — or vice versa.
Both openings can be useful in helping us break a historical trajectory of separation. To follow our bodies, to listen to our territories, is an equivalent journey towards our origin. Stories take us to our roots. And this story takes us to a colonial ecocide that happened in María’s birth island of Curaçao — a soft breakwater in the southern Caribbean, a pause between the vast ferocity of the sea and the ferocious vastness of America.
A funeral for the colour of loss
Witnessing a growing wasteland covered with thick amnesia, we prepare a funeral for a tree.
The island calls us to remember the colour of the lost bark. Power, blood-red coarsed across the robes of the rich. Blood, the source, sound and story of power. Skin, the shield of blood.
Before the colonial conquest of Abya Yala, the colour red was taken from the heart of the sappanwood tree, native to South Asia and Malaya. This heart, grounded, was used to tint cotton, wool cloth, and ink. Portuguese traders called this tree brasa: ember.
When the colonial conquests of the Portuguese started, they identified similar dyewood trees — brazilwood, logwood, bloodwood — across the various Caribbean islands and Brazil’s Atlantic forest. Portuguese colonisers gave the tree the name ‘pau-brasil’, ember wood, and this tree of fire emblazoned its name on the land known as Brazil.
The island of Bonaire was initially referred to as ‘Isla do Palo Brasil’ (Island of Pau-Brasil). Lands were named after what they could be stripped of.
To re-member
the dis-membermentTo braid
the salt and colour
that broke this land.
Dyewood quickly became the centre of an extractivist frenzy, one of the first cash crops in the Americas. Like gold, silver, rubber, or cotton — it left a deadly signature. Within the first one hundred years of colonisation in Brazil, the Portuguese had deforested around 2 million brazilwood trees, damaging over 600,000 hectares of forest.
The Mata Atlântica, the unique Atlantic Forest, was devastated by colonialism: now, the forest covers around 7.3% of its original extent. The wholescale deforestation of Brazilian forests today finds its roots in the search for red.
As with all colonial projects, the destruction of ecosystems came hand-in-hand with processes of enslavement and forced labour, to make that destruction possible. Ships loaded with brasia crossed the Atlantic, where beams were unloaded, to be shaved and reduced to powder by exploited prisoners in Amsterdam’s Rasphuis.
The emptied ships would then head to Western Africa to be loaded with enslaved peoples, to be coerced to cut brasia, to be loaded on to ships to cross the Atlantic.
And dyewood red ink left the record. In red tint, Jean de Léry, one French official attempting to solidify French colonial presence in Brazil, recorded the detail: ‘As for the manner of loading [brazilwood] on the ships, take note that both because of the hardness of this wood and the consequent difficulty of cutting it, and because, there being no horses, donkeys, or other beasts [of burden] … it has to be men who do this work: if the foreigners who voyage over there were not helped by the savages, they could not load even a medium-sized ship in a year…’
The colour of loss is the colour of power that wrote our history.
Few, broken traces of this ecocide are left today.
So we mourn, or mend, which might be the same.
To seal the wounds of a tree that burns, to stitch together a drained landscape, to cover plunder with a blanket of memory.
To honor the lost bodies of this land.
We drape crimson over carcasses of forests to return the red that was taken.
History is a layer of fires. Some fires nourish, others unravel. This parching soil reveals sparks for winds to pull.
