Crossing the Mangrove: Über Wälder als Schauplätze öko-politischen Wissens

Crossing the Mangrove: On Forests as Venues for Eco-Political Knowledge
Keynote speeches, followed by a discussion
Stéphane Martelly, Malcom Ferdinand, and Jason Allen-Paisant

The opening event ofBwa Kayiman: Crossing the Mangrove. On Forests as Sites of Eco-Political Knowledgebegins with keynote addresses by two decolonial thinkers: environmental engineer and political scientist Malcom Ferdinand and scholar and poet Stéphane Martelly. Ferdinand has extensively explored the connections between colonial history and environmental issues in the Caribbean context. He proposes understanding the catalyst for the Haitian Revolution—the Bwa Kayiman ceremony—as the founding moment of a Caribbean decolonial ecology. In his view, a return to this politics of emancipation—which was carried forward by Haiti’s enslaved people and Maroons in the subsequent revolution—can help us move away from a more technicist environmental narrative of the current ecological crisis. Ferdinand formulates a response to the widely accepted Gaia hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Accordingly, the Caribbean offers a radically different approach, which he terms the “Haiti Hypothesis”: A political ecology can both reconnect with the Earth and embrace the world through decolonial struggles for justice, equality, and reparations.  

From a Haitian perspective and using poetic means, Martelly explores mangroves and mountainous landscapes as liminal spaces of liberation within the imaginary world of Bwa Kayiman. Drawing on the works of various Black poets from the Americas, she examines the extent to which these specific ecologies can exist only through the formation and action of a radical Black liberation movement. Through this movement, an “outside” emerges in opposition to all colonial and supremacist systems of exploitation and destruction—an ongoing process historically represented by Bwa Kayiman, but which has since been endlessly repeated and further developed in Haitian cultural productions. In this sense, poetry becomes yet another form of creative power and of thinking about liberatory ecologies.

Part ofBwa Kayiman: Crossing the Mangrove.

Venue: Safi Faye Hall
In French with simultaneous translation into German and English