Muches escritores y teóricos caribeños han reflexionado sobre cómo se ha concebido la memoria histórica en el Caribe. A pesar de ser una región nacida a través del trauma, la extinción y la esclavitud, el Caribe es también una comunidad engendrada por alegría, resistencia y libertad. El Caribe desafía las nociones eurocéntricas de conciencia histórica, de una raíz y origen monolítico, y sirve como paradigma de innovación, creatividad y relacionalidad. A través de El Manglar, buscamos impugnar la colonialidad de la memoria histórica creando otras infraestructuras posibles desde, para, con y en el archipiélago. Mientras honramos esta tradición, somos inspirades por dos metáforas Caribeñas por excelencia: el manglar y la marea. 

Many Caribbean writers and theorists have pondered over how historical memory has been thought of in the Caribbean. Despite being a region born through trauma, erasure, and enslavement, the Caribbean is also a community engendered by joy, resistance, and freedom. The Caribbean challenges Eurocentric notions of historical consciousness, rootedness, and historical origins, and serves as a paradigm of innovation, creativity, and relationality. Through El Manglar, we look to contest the coloniality of historical memory by infrastructuring otherwise for the Caribbean and reimagining memory in, with, and from the archipelago(es). As we honor this tradition, we are inspired by the quintessential Caribbean metaphor of the mangrove and the tides. 

The mangrove and the tides have been invoked by many Caribbeanists to confront the linear conceptions of time and place imposed by Empire. Édouard Glissant, for instance, has spoken about the rhizomatic (rather than single rooted) character of Caribbean identity and history, suggesting, along with others an abysmal unity where “the sea is history” (Walcott, 1979). Brathwaite (1974) argues that Caribbean history and memory, unlike Western epistemology, is tidalectic rather than dialectic (linear and reactive) as philosopher Hegel has theorized. That is, its movement is tidal, wave-like, cyclical, sisyphean, recurrent, and resistant to colonial fixity. Glissant (1997) proposes we see Caribbean history and memory as relational, sedimented, interwoven, and networked. While Glissant did not explicitly invoke the mangrove as a metaphor, this resilient ecosystem functions as a creolized version of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thinking. According to Richard and Sally Price (1997), while the mangrove in itself was allegorized originally as something negative, murky, desolate, and swampy, it was later appropriated in a more positive manner by créolistes such as Raphael Confiant (1993), and further developed by writers like Maryse Condé (1989) and Michaeline Crichlow and Patricia Northover (2009; 2012). We aim to invoke both in a manner that reflects our Caribbean ways of knowing, being, (re)membering, resisting, and belonging. That is, “to call forth new worlds” outside of (or in between) History with a capital H and the binary of western/nonwestern (Crichlow and Northover 2012, 226). Perhaps, in this way, we can move towards the dismantling of coloniality and the (re)construction of memory capable of building our emancipatory and relational futures.