A Daughter’s Love Note: Decolonial Love Across the Greater Caribbean
By After the Storm
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective, After the Storm, a collective of Black and Latinx feminists, scholars, organizers, and teachers of the Greater Caribbean interrogate the teachings of the Combahee River Collective and bell hooks to make visible Afro-Diasporic bonds across the Caribbean and bear witness to the survival, restoration, and rebellion of its people.
We, After the Storm, are a collective of Black and Latinx feminists, scholars, organizers, and teachers. We are daughters of the Greater Caribbean, a term we use to describe and honor the shared struggles with legacies of colonialism and the American empire with which the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), Puerto Rico, and the Black South must contend. Our work seeks to erode colonial boundaries that attempt to inhibit global Black solidarity without undermining the distinctive, historically contingent, and particular geographies of the three places we hold dear. We construct digital archives that center the testimonies(ios) and oral histories of Black and Afro-descendant women and their communities that have survived ecological catastrophes, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. The archive is a living, breathing entity that continues to flourish as we build connections and amplify the voices of the communities disparately affected by the violence and devastation wrought by the climate crisis. As we do this work, using decolonial love as a compass, we lean on the teachings of the Combahee River Collective and bell hooks to make visible Afro-Diasporic bonds across the Caribbean and bear witness to the survival, restoration, and rebellion of its people.
Empire and Interlocking Systems of Oppression
We recognize that the roots of our “unwell society” and the contemporary climate crisis are deeply entangled with histories and ongoing legacies of modernity, colonialism, racial capitalism, and empire in the Greater Caribbean (Frazier 2020). The Combahee River Collective has long argued that Black women’s and all oppressed people’s liberation demands the dismantling of racism, colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy (1995, 235). Their critique of racial capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism facilitates an analysis of these interlocking forms of oppression that perpetuate environmental injustice. As climate change exacerbates the frequency and intensity of ecological catastrophes, we locate the struggles against environmental injustice as a critical arena upon which we must dismantle the systems of oppression that ensure Black communities are most vulnerable. By centering the experiences of Black and Afro-descendent women of the Greater Caribbean in the context of catastrophe, we emphasize the importance of access to safe and healthy environments in our fight for survival and liberation. If Black women were free of the violent experiences with catastrophe, “it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” that make environmental injustice possible (1995, 237).
“By centering the experiences of Black and Afro-descendent women of the Greater Caribbean in the context of catastrophe, we emphasize the importance of access to safe and healthy environments in our fight for survival and liberation.”
Building upon the theoretical and political offerings of the Combahee River Collective and other Black feminist scholars, including bell hooks, Audre Lorde, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Chelsea Mikael Frazier, we center Black diasporic women’s experiences and ways of knowing, particularly in the wake of environmental catastrophe. We hold that catastrophe becomes a method to understand how Black diasporic women are on the frontlines of climate injustice (as amplified through more intensive and destructive storms) and how their demands for liberated worlds forge diasporic bonds that cannot be confined with colonial mappings and logics.
As a collective, we organize against various systems of oppression, including how colonialism impacts Puerto Rico and the USVI, two twenty-first century colonies of the U.S., and the Black South. We also contend with the historic and ongoing legacies of colonialism that disrupt our connections to the land and one another. Grappling with slavery and its afterlives, which continue to shape the daily lives of Black and Afro-descendent people, we acknowledge the insidious ways heteropatriarchy actively silences the voices and experiences of Black women (Hartman 2008). With that said, we resist flattening the differences between places and people in the African diaspora, much like the Combahee River Collective. Instead, we focus on what we share as people navigating colonial, racialized, and gendered environments and center how Black women in such spaces author the survival of themselves and their communities. In a quest to heal the generational traumas associated with the ongoing legacies of colonialism and enslavement, we practice a reparation of the imagination (Figueroa-Vásquez 2020, 118). Through the practice of decolonial love, we imagine decolonial futurities and expose the absurd logic of colonialism and coloniality.
Love as a Liberatory Praxis
bell hooks (2018) emphasizes that colonialism has distorted our ideas of love and relationships, stripping us of communion and practices of care. If we want to dismantle colonial structures, we must reconstruct our perception and practices of love. We must build relationships that aspire for collective liberation. We cannot solely relegate love and care to the personal sphere because they are intertwined with social justice and political transformation. Love in times of colonization and imperialism is a radical act that empowers us to transform and reimagine our interpersonal relationships and communities.
Love as liberatory praxis urges us to depart from a colonial mindset that seeks to separate us not only from ourselves and history but also from our communities. Understanding our place within the struggles of racism, sexism, and inequality should come with an aperture to see love as a transformative tool that can aid us in our liberation. In bell hooks’ words: “Without love our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation, we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination” (2001, 123). Creating spaces where we deconstruct hierarchies and imagine new connections through solidarity allows for honest conversations needed for healing.
Decolonial Love in Practice
Putting bell hooks in conversation with Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, we utilize love and care to envision and work towards Black women’s well-being and liberation. For Figueroa-Vásquez (2020), decolonial love aims to rupture “systems of coloniality and ongoing settler colonialism which fragment humans by creating hierarchies of difference” (120). Love, which bell hooks describes as an intention and action, “sustains humanity, kinship, and community in the wake of colonialism, dispossession, and enslavement” (2001, 5; Figueroa-Vásquez 2020, 118). Our ethic and practice of loving each other, as well as taking seriously Black and Afro-descendant women’s testimonies and oral histories, have allowed us to reconfigure Caribbean geographies. Indeed, if settler and colonial logics aim to highlight and define the differences between us, then a practice of decolonial love seeks to fashion new possibilities for solidarity across our differences. We are intentional in how we listen and learn from the testimonies that often detail experiences of loss, destruction, and grief and how our acts of bearing witness translate into action (Figueroa-Vásquez 2020, 121). For us, it is our ethic to archive these stories because these are the un(der)told herstories that have authored the restoration of the Caribbean in the face of environmental and colonial catastrophe.
Through our work, we come across the constant question: “what do we gain when we think relationally, as opposed to arguing across differences?” Putting this in practice and thinking with J.T. Roane and Justin Hosbey, we can “conceive of futures outside of destruction” and engage in freedom dreaming, which activist Tourmaline describes as facing hardships with “the deep knowledge that these conditions will change,” to envision worlds in which Black women are well and free (Roane and Hosbey 2019; Tourmaline 2020). In this, from the Combahee River Collective to Figueroa-Vásquez and Tourmaline, we see hooks’ invitation to revolutionize love, not as a romanticized practice but rather one deeply rooted in the project of Black liberation.
Beyond naming the violence that brings us together, we choose to center the ways Black women are first responders, organizers, leaders, caretakers, doers, and rebels in their communities before and in the wake of catastrophe. In taking up hooks’ offering on love and liberation, we witness how radical love for one another, their communities, and their homes became the very seeds that motivated Black women to rebuild in the aftermath of catastrophe, sprouting mutual aid movements following Hurricane Betsy, Irma, and María. In the aftermath of disasters, the oral testimonies reveal how Black women band together to care for their communities. Such women helped clear roads, shared food, provided shelter to those in need, and took to the streets and media to expose the negligence of their governments. In doing so, they resist the erasure of their communities and struggles by the U.S. empire, a white supremacist colonial state that constantly exposes them to precarious conditions and premature death. Black women of the Greater Caribbean also stand in solidarity with one another, transcending geographic barriers to care for each other, as we see in the exchange of essential resources between Puerto Rico and the USVI following Hurricanes Irma and María. Their actions exemplify the liberatory praxis hooks gestured us towards when discussing the power of love and highlight Black women’s ways of knowing that ensure survival.
“Beyond naming the violence that brings us together, we choose to center the ways Black women are first responders, organizers, leaders, caretakers, doers, and rebels in their communities before and in the wake of catastrophe.”
As a collective, we are committed to bringing these stories and the testimonies of the women into the rooms we occupy, whether at majority-white conferences or in spaces solely centered on the experiences of people in the continental United States. Rather than speaking over them, we amplify the voices of the women at the frontlines of environmental disaster. For us, this entails creating transcriptions and translations that are faithful to the audios in our archive, properly citing the women and their knowledge systems, centering the concerns that are most salient to the women and their communities, and being open to criticism (Combahee River Collective 1995, 239). Our commitment to revolutionary love and Black women’s liberation is at the core of these practices.
Daughters of the Greater Caribbean
As a collective, we work to preserve and archive Black women’s survival stories in the wake of devastation. We are indebted to our ancestors, predecessors, and mentors, including the Combahee River Collective, bell hooks, and Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, the women we have interviewed, and all the women whose stories have yet to be told who have taught us, cared for us, and provided space for us. To dismantle the systems of oppression that shape our lives, including white supremacy, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy, we must sustain a reparation of the imagination that is contingent upon an ethic and practice of decolonial love. We think with M. Jacqui Alexander when she says: “We are not born women of color. We become women of color…[we] have to unlearn an impulse that allows mythologies about each other to replace knowing about one another…we cannot afford to cease yearning for each others’ company” (2006, 269). Decolonial love is the basis for our praxis that facilitates the process of faithful witnessing and action, as we cannot separate love from the fight against oppression and the pursuit of a just world. In this world, Black women and their communities will no longer bear the brunt of devastation in the aftermath of catastrophe. In this world, Black women have the space to heal, dream, transform, pursue, live, and love free from all that weighs us down.
As daughters of the Greater Caribbean and students of the Combahee River Collective, “we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform, and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us” (1995, 239).
With love,
After the Storm (Lauren, Anais, Kiana, and Teona)
Works Cited
Alexander, M. Jacqui. 2006. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. London: Duke University Press, Combined Academic.
Combahee River Collective. 1995. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall. The New Press.
Figueroa-Vásquez, Yomaira C. 2015. “Reparation as Transformation: Radical Literary (Re)Imaginings of Futurities Through Decolonial Love.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 4 (1).
Figueroa-Vásquez Yomaira C. 2020. Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literatures. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Frazier, Chelsea Mikael. 2020. Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto. Atmos. Accessed 15 March 2024. https://atmos.earth/black-feminist-ecological-thought-essay/.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
hooks, bell. 2018. All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Perennial.
hooks, bell. 2001. Salvation: Black People and Love. New York: Harper Perennial.
Roane, J.T., and Justin Hosbey. 2019. “Mapping Black Ecologies.” Current Research in Digital History 2. https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2019.05.
Tourmaline. 2020. “Filmmaker and Activist Tourmaline on How to Freedom Dream.” Vogue, July 2. https://www.vogue.com/article/filmmaker-and-activist-tourmaline-on-how-to-freedom-dream.