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The theme of my quote collection is empowering language as a tool to both foster self-awareness and create coalition. Each quote is laid over a symbol or piece of land that relates to the author or topic because one of the most powerful points that has been impressed on me in this course and these readings is that decolonization cannot be divorced from land.

I know that some of the symbols I used aren’t perfect. Some of the maps I used aren’t as precise as they should be. I did the best I could, not with the goal of perfection, but with helping myself to better link author with culture with land. And the process of creating those visuals was helpful for me. If nothing else, it shows the far-reaching extent of not only colonization, but more importantly, the decolonial theorists who rose up independently but went on to forge powerful international coalition.

I’m a white AFAB nonbinary lesbian with a car and a job and a year left to go on my degree. It’s important for me to acknowledge that I do have a lot of privilege and that I therefore lack perspective that the voices who shape this course write about. And it’s especially important for me to study writers because before I am anything else, I am a writer, too. But I write about gay mermaids and all I really want is a career writing about gay mermaids. It sounds silly, but I am 100% serious in saying it’s my whole life. As a lesbian, having seen myself in [very few] characters only to watch them die horrible deaths at an alarming rate compared to straight characters, I know that this is a problem other marginalized groups face as well, so I write diverse gay mer-heroines. Mermaids can and do come from anywhere and any-when. I try to write gay mermaids who are whole people, who are like me and unlike me in any way I can think of, who have experiences that have never been seen in a superhero backstory, but this class helped me realize where I can do better.

A while ago, I mentioned that the Lugones quote about dropping “enchantment with ‘woman,’ the universal” is probably the most profound quote of the semester for me for a personal reason. The reason is that it has caused me to re-conceptualize how I approach my own art. Gender is nuanced and means different things to different people in different cultures. A few months ago, because of this class, I started to slowly begin a process of decolonizing the Undine Isles (the home of the gay mermaids–can you decolonize a fictional place? I’m gonna go ahead and say yes) because my perhaps unattainable but no less worthwhile goal is that any reader should feel safe there. That’s what the entire project has always been about. This class made my personal art more of what I want and need it to be, so thank you to Dr. P and everyone for helping and being with me on this journey.

WORKS CITED

1. Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a Decolonial Feminism. In Hypatia (Vol. 25, Ser. 4, p. 753). Hypatia.
2. Gunn Allen, P. (n.d.). Some like Indians Endure. In Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (pp. 298-299).
3. Anzaldúa, G. (1980). Borderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
4. Pérez, E. (2006, October). Queer Subaltern Citizens: Agency through Decolonial Queer Theory: Subaltern Citizens and their Histories [PDF].
5. Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception. Hypatia (Vol. 2, Ser. 2).
6. Chrystos. (n.d.). Those Tears. In Resist racism and eat your carrots. Retrieved from https://resistracism.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/those-tears/
7. Aizura et al. Introduction. Decolonizing the Trans Imaginary. (2014). Duke University Press. (Reprinted from TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 1(3), (2014))
8. Levins Morales, A. (n.d.). Declaracion. Retrieved May 2, 2019, from http://www.auroralevinsmorales.com/declaracion.html
9. Levins Morales, A. (1998). Remedios. limited edition 2019 [PDF].
10. Young Lords Party, The. (n.d.). 13-Point Program and Platform. In University of Virginia. Retrieved May 2, 2019, from http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/Young_Lords_platform.html The Sixties Project, University of Virginia

#decolonization #fpod #feminism #indigenousfeminisms #puertoricanfeminisms

 

Melissa: As part of my project on decolonial struggles for liberation I researched and connected the art of Yasmín Hernández to said topics. Yasmín Hernández was born in Brooklyn, New York to Puerto Rican parents and she currently resides in Moca, Puerto Rico. Yasmín describes herself as a spiritual, Borikén, decolonial, artist, and writer. A large amount of her art pieces are concerned with Puerto Rican liberation. Featured in Charlotte and I’s powerpoint are paintings of hers referencing political prisoners, liberation, crimes committed against activists, and the struggles Puerto being faces as a modern day colony. Though Puerto Ricans were granted US citizenship through the insular cases in the early 1900’s they still remain marginalized racially, representatively, and politically (Malavet 10). While receiving recognition from the US the Borikén and Taino history of the island of Puerto Rico has been overlooked and rejected by US colonial presence. Puerto Rico is nothing short of a fixture of colonial rule, having been used and abused for the US imperial gain through exploitation.

As Malavet elaborates in America’s Colony: The Political and Cultural Conflict between the United States and Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico individuals are second class citizens through the racialized subordination they face in the US. The view of Puerto Rico as an island colony has been normalized in the views of people in the United States. Approaching decolonial themes through visual representation is important because the medium of painting and pictures can be more accessible to non-academic and underprivileged populations. For example, there is also an agelessness of history represented in the paintings of Yasmín Hernández in her paintings of Pedro Albizu Campos and Oscar López Rivera. Yasmín’s work offers a decolonial mindset to observe different periods of a post colonial society. Paintings do not age the same way texts and essays do, paintings are timeless reminders that the fight for decolonization is not over.

***

Charlotte: Street art encompasses an element of accessibility that other forms of art may not, similar to the purpose stained glass windows served hundreds of years ago. Anyone can see them for free, and a narrative is easily ascertained from images alone that transcends language and literacy.

I found Julie Schwietert Collazo’s article, Photo Essay: Street Art Activism in San Juan, which featured Moriviví, a collective of 4 women who have created so much beautiful content. Their work strongly underlines the connection between Puerto Rican women, land, and indigenous women’s and/or Afro-Latinas’ identities. Butterflies are a prevalent motif throughout their work, and the concept of identity is represented by glowing orbs of light. The joy of the subjects in their identity reminds me of when Lugones stated that playfulness “involves… openness to self-construction or reconstruction and… of the ‘worlds’ we inhabit playfully” (Lugones 17).

Moriviví’s work is decolonial not only because street art exists in direct opposition to western traditional concepts of “owning” space, but because the art itself seems to canonize subjects who coloniality treats with contempt, erasure, violence, and genocide. Rather than centering colonization, Moriviví centers the majesty of colonized women living in Puerto Rico and the diaspora; they have worked in San Juan, on Culebra (Collazo), and NYC (Moriviví).

In class, we have talked about anti-Blackness in Puerto Rico. Moriviví’s work opposes racism and seeks to usher in a new era of racial justice with their representation of Afro-Latina women. Their mission seems completely aligned with Aurora Levins Morales’ Declaracion, particularly when she stated, “It is essential that we embrace all of the beings that make up this dispersed people” (Morales).

BASTA’s mural depicts a more truthful imagining of Columbus’ exploits in this hemisphere than American audiences are used to seeing. I thought 1492 was a particularly powerful image. In a sea of blood, Columbus’ trio of ships leaves hundreds of bodies in its wake. The gruesome image is on public view all the time because it’s on the side of a building. The artists of BASTA won’t let you forget.

I also wanted to call attention to two anonymous works in the Collazo article, Confrontation with Police and The Taínos. They spell out the legacies of both colonialism and violence and the beautiful and still very present indigenous heritage of Puerto Ricans, respectively.

What I come away with at the end of this project is that all of the work we chose to explore showcases not only the scars of colonization but the enduring identity that refuses to be erased, that fights back with strength and beauty, and that isn’t going anywhere.

***

WORKS CITED

“All-Female Boricua Art Collective Moriviví Brought San Juan’s Controversial Black Flag Piece to NYC.” Remezcla, 26 July 2016, http://remezcla.com/culture/colectivo-morivivi-black-puerto-rico-flag-mural-nyc-el-barrio/.

“Art And Liberation| Yasmin Hernandez Art.” Art And Liberation| Yasmin Hernandez Art, https://www.yasminhernandezart.com. Accessed 10 Apr. 2019.

BASTA. (n. d.) In Facebook [Page]. Retrieved April 10, 2019 from https://www.facebook.com/elbasta787

Collazo, Julie Schwietert. Puerto Rico Street Art | AFAR. 6 Nov. 2015, https://www.afar.com/magazine/photo-essay-street-art-activism-in-san-juan.

“Colectivomorivivi.” Colectivomorivivi, https://www.colectivomorivivi.com. Accessed 10 Apr. 2019.

“King of the Towels: The Torture and Murder of Pedro Albizu Campos.” Latino Rebels, 10 Mar. 2015, https://www.latinorebels.com/2015/03/10/king-Of-the-towels-the-torture-and-murder-of-pedro-albizu-campos/.

Lugones, M. Playfulness, “World”-Traveling, and Loving Perception. (1987). In Hypatia (2nd ed., Vol. 2).

Malavet, Pedro A. America’s Colony: The Political and Cultural Conflict between the United States and Puerto Rico. New York University Press, 2004.

Moriviví. (n. d.) In Facebook [Page]. Retrieved April 10, 2019 from https://www.facebook.com/colectivomorivivi/

“Puerto Rican Nationalist Oscar López Rivera Is Released.” NPR.Org, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/17/528787071/puerto-rican-nationalist-oscar-l-pez-rivera-is-released. Accessed 10 Apr. 2019.

I attempted to illustrate 5 phases in colonization, particularly in the destruction it wreaks, while emphasizing that colonization is still alive and well today, pervading all aspects of life. Every painting has 2 common motifs that tie them all together: a juxtaposition somewhere of red, white, and blue, and cracks forming in the surrounding land and/or structures. The cracks symbolize uncontrollable violence; the red, white, and blue symbolize America’s involvement.

Each illustration contains a line of what started to read like a poem or picture book: “(1) So often, it starts with a man planting a flag. (2) Soon, exclusionary behaviors begin and hierarchy forms. When it has to, it adapts, but it’s always there. Those on the other end of power are vilified, dehumanized, ostracized. Every time. (3) And some, I imagine, are good people. (4) Natural resources are exploited, not respected. Not that the conquerors would be caught dead in the mess they made. Still, the survivors stand. (5) Nature reclaims, but it doesn’t know quite where to draw the line. Too bad we didn’t either.”

These illustrations are so entirely from my own viewpoint as a white settler. I feel like I am witnessing so much horror – much of which is probably not going to effect me directly within my lifetime, but everyone has to try to feel these things. Everyone has to put themselves on the line. It’s so hard to know where to begin.

These paintings are supposed to show that coloniality is not over, but extant; not sporadic, but continually with us, always reinventing itself for tomorrow. It’s not always easy for people to recognize. The violence that manifested historically as genocide on this continent and still does today also masquerades as fear for cis women’s safety in public restrooms they share with trans women, as hatred and indifference toward those who attempt to cross the US border (the third image contains a direct quote from the announcement of Trump’s candidacy which quickly devolved into a rant against Mexican immigrants), in the water crisis, and in the environmental crisis.

Something I think about quite a lot: I’ve never been to Europe, but one thing that always strikes me in photos and film is that Europe seems to have a crazy amount of old-growth forests. More than a few European forests have been designated as World Heritage Sites. Which is great… for Europe’s trees. We don’t have old-growth forests around here. And it’s not because North American trees are less hardy. It’s because North American trees have to completely start over every five minutes. And it’s people of European descent who do the clear-cutting here because this land is not sacred to the descendants of colonizers. It has utterly permeated the culture that this land is disposable, a final phase in the theft of whole continents.

I feel like we are watching the planet die. Albatrosses are an easy way to show that because they are literally full of safety razors and bottle caps. Colonization is like a creature devouring itself; it has one hell of a shelf life, but eventually, even centuries in, it just isn’t sustainable.

One of the problems with the term “API” serving as an umbrella for not only Asian but Pacific Islander women and feminisms is that the Pacific Islander women in this article reject the umbrella because in the pursuit of incorporating Islander women, the term actually only serves to erase them and their history, while indemnifying their colonizers. Appropriating aloha is also a problem; it takes advantage of the centuries of generosity of the Hawaiian people to immigrants while erasing a history of coloniality, violence, murder, oppression, and usurpation.

One of the things that stuck out most to me in this reading was the pair of powerfully worded quotations from Haunani-Kay Trask, but specifically one word that I will highlight later: “Hawai‘i is a society in which the indigenous culture and people have been murdered, suppressed or marginalized for the benefit of settlers who now dominate our islands” and that “[settler colonialism] has as one of its goals, the obliteration rather than the incorporation of indigenous peoples” (115). The latter quote strikes me as extremely powerful, the word “obliteration” so absolute it only ever seems to be utilized by writers as a last resort. We use the word “fuck” more than we use the word “obliteration.” “Obliteration” is a startling word, more startling and terrible than any expletive.

The other page that I dog-eared while reading this was the section where the authors discuss what hula actually is, deconstructing the reductionistic, exoticized, sexualized way it’s considered through an American lens. I thought it was beautiful how the authors articulated hula as exemplary of Hawaiian culture on many levels, encompassing all of their art, science, literature, and history (123).

I visited two of the Hawaiian Islands about 10 years ago, Kaua‘i and Oahu, when I was 18 (these photos are mine, that’s why I didn’t cite them). The difference between those two islands at the time was profound. Honolulu is way overdeveloped; being there is basically like not being in Hawai‘i. It’s a city, like a slightly cleaner New York. Public signage is written in English and Japanese. I remember our hotel room being like 50 stories up. After four days on pristine Kaua‘i, called the “Garden Isle,” I found all of this incredibly depressing, although we did stumble upon a very beautiful memorial to Queen Liliuokalani in Honolulu, and that’s when I learned about what happened to her during the overthrow of her kingdom.

On Kaua‘i, we met and befriended an indigenous musician named Mike Young. He gave me a copy of his CD. One of the songs is called “Kaua‘i, My Home” and it’s basically a highly descriptive lullaby (I would link it but the one YouTube account that posted it isn’t his, but feel free to look him up). Listening to it a few years later, I realized that the song has a lot more dire implications than I’d originally thought, that it’s likely an attempt at closure with a place that is still being ravaged and will likely eventually succumb to capitalist colonization, just like Oahu.

To me, the word colonial denotes the imperial paradigm as it is centered around white, privileged bodies. Coloniality is, in terms of a global Earth history, eurocentric. It reflects more than a history of stolen land and erasure and genocide. Coloniality even shows up, for example, in the clothes worn and the languages defaulted to in international discourse. It shows up in the names we give to places and non-human creatures, particularly those encountered on stolen land.

Anticolonial seems like a broad term to describe theory and knowledge that criticizes colonialism and is generated by scholars from colonized groups or echoes, while following the lead of, scholars from colonized groups. The word “anticolonial” itself feels like an umbrella encompassing within it all theory that is oppositional in relation to colonialism, especially that which we might call “decolonial” and “postcolonial.”

The word decolonial reads (to me) more like a verb than either anti- or postcolonial does. It seems to have more to do with the action and work that is called for in anticolonial feminist discourse. The decolonial demands restorative justice and will do what it takes to achieve it. Decolonialism’s status as an action word makes it the natural birthplace for coalition.

We don’t live in a postcolonial world yet, but I see postcolonialism as the end goal of anti- and decolonialism, and I think what is important to remember about all of these terms but especially “postcolonial” is that it might validly mean something slightly different to each person. To me, postcoloniality is a utopian concept. What seems to me like the most universal definition I can give is that in a postcolonial society, the horrors of the past will no longer be hidden, but openly acknowledged. Genocide, slavery, land theft, capitalism and the prison industrial complex, racism, and all that is uncomfortable but necessary to talk about will no longer be erased, though they won’t happen anymore. A postcolonial world is a world without these evils. We have to fight to get there, even if we never do quite get there, because imagining that world causes us to work to improve this one. For instance, environmental justice will be the law of this stolen, ravaged continent. A postcolonial world would be another step toward a world that doesn’t privilege one group over another.  There wouldn’t be eurocentrism because all spaces would exist for everyone.

Environmental Justice Button Design by Ricardo Levins Morales