“FOR A COLONIZED [WOMAN] THE MOST ESSENTIAL [VESSEL], BECAUSE THE MOST CONCRETE, IS FIRST AND FOREMOST, THE [WATER]: THE [WATER] WHICH WILL BRING THEM [HOME], AND ABOVE ALL, DIGNITY.”  – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961.

Set in the sea, an ancestral site of mourning and grief, Cote ci Cote la, Destrukshun in Salt, A Doilie Strip, is a meditative and imaginative confrontation between colonial histories and legacies in the West Indies. The colonial situation was always one waged on land and sea. The violence of the colonist unrelenting, spilled blood from sacred Caribbean waters unto lush tropical lands. The afterlives of colonialism continue to live in our waters, through exploitative tourism industries and extractive capitalistic resource mining. Using words from June Jordan’s “Report from the Bahamas”, an image of Black women sorting cocoa beans on a plantation in Trinidad, and a colonial map of the Caribbean, we blur temporal lines and wade through time. Collage (and contemplation) emerges as a way of placing, you, the viewer, in the past, and them (and their witnesses), in the present. Each frame is a playfully pointed rewriting and reinsertion of embodied Black women’s rage and resistance; for it is joyful to honor the historical presence of (and agency within) anger as a response to the colonial situation and its afterlives. Cote ci Cote la, Destrukshun in Salt is a mixed media collage poem—doilies, ripped paper, printed film photos (of waters, my home, and trees), red candlewax, fire, and bay leaves.