A Decolonial Ecology. Malcom Ferdinand

the history of the Earth is not limited to Western modernity and its colonial shadow – Asia and the Middle East also had their empires and colonialisms – it is here from this shadow that I wish to contribute with this work to thinking about the Earth and the world. My starting point is the Caribbean and its multiple experiences, with a particular emphasis on Martinique, the island where I was born. I speak first in my name, from my body, and the experiences of my native land. I. A Martinican Black man, I lived the first eighteen years of my life in the rural town of Rivière-Pilote and in the small city of Schœlcher, and the next sixteen in Europe, Africa, and Oceania. I will no longer speak from the usual categories of “Man” (with capital M) or “man” (with a lowercase m), as the Caribbean writer Sylvia Wynter invites us to stop doing. This term reflects the over-representation of the White man of the upper classes who wishes to usurp the human and its constituent plurality.⁸⁰ By claiming to designate both the male of the human species and the entire species as such, this word perpetuates the invisibilization of women, of their places and their actions, as well as the acts of violence that are committed against them. “Man” has never acted upon or inhabited the Earth; it has always been humans, persons, groups, hybrid human/non-human groups that act, struggle, and meet upon the Earth.⁸¹ To take the world as the starting point and the horizon of ecology is, in essence, to approach the ecological crisis with the following questions: how can a world be made on Earth between humans and with non-humans? How can a world-ship be built in the face of the tempest? These are the questions that guide this worldly-ecology.

Reaching the eye of the tempest

      These three propositions, those of thinking the ecological tempest in light of the colonial and environmental double fracture (Noah’s Ark) from modernity’s hold (the slave ship) and towards the horizon of the world (the world-ship), allow me to follow Aimé Césaire’s introductory invitation to “reach the eye of the tempest.” Reaching the eye of this storm is not the search for a temporary lull amidst the ills of the world. In the eye of the hurricane, if one lends an ear, the screams of those left behind by the hecatomb can be heard. To reach the eye of the tempest is an invitation to confront the causes of modernity’s destructive accelerations. It is a matter of sailing through the colonial winds of modernity, its misogynistic skies, racist rains, and uneven swells, in order to undo those ways of inhabiting the Earth that are violently dragging the world-ship towards an unjust course. Beyond the double fracture, I propose to patiently sew the thread of another way of thinking about ecology and the world, necessarily producing other concepts. For this ocean journey, I am accompanied by Afro-Caribbean philosophy, which, as described by Henry Paget, is anchored in the Caribbean world’s practices and discourses, in its stories and poems, in its literature and works of art.⁸²

The first part, “The Modern Tempest,” offers a different historical understanding of colonization and slavery in the Caribbean, one that holds its political and ecological configurations together, with a particular focus on French experiences. We will see how the European colonization of the Americas has produced a violent way of inhabiting the Earth that denies the possibility of a world with the non-European: a colonial inhabitation. In addition to the genocide of indigenous peoples and the destruction of ecosystems, this colonial inhabitation transformed the land into the jigsaws of factories and plantations that characterize this geological era, the Plantationocene, resulting in the loss of caring and matrical bonds with the Earth: matricides.⁸³ The turn to the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery, to confining human and non-human beings to the world’s hold, to the “Negroes,” also makes it possible to describe this geological era as a Negrocene. These stories, catastrophes, like the regular hurricanes that ravage the American coasts, reinforce the fractures of colonial inhabitation and prolong the enslavement of the dominated, turning the ecological tempest into a true colonial hurricane.

      The second part, “Noah’s Ark,” reveals how environmentalism and the technocentric approach to ecological issues lead to the reinforcement of colonial ruptures passed down from colonization. This is carried out through an examination of examples of public policy concerning the reforestation of a park in Haiti, a nature reserve on the island of Vieques off the coast of Puerto Rico, and the consequences of the contamination of Martinique and Guadeloupe by a toxic pesticide called chlordecone. Counterproductively, this approach allows for an ecology that refuses the world and reinforces colonial discrimination and social inequalities: a colonial ecology.

      The third part, “The Slave Ship,” shows the other path that is followed by those who connect protest against ecological degradation with a decolonial critique. Here, the slave ship is no longer just a historical ship but the imaginary scene from which one sets out for a shore, in view of a world made in the image of the ecology of fugitives from slavery, the Maroons. Another reading of Thoreau’s ecological writing and the actions of his mother and sisters indicates that the decolonial task is not only the responsibility of the colonized, the enslaved, and the racialized but is also the responsibility of free men and women, exemplifying a civil marronage. These two examples feature those for whom ecology is intimately linked to a search for a world, to a liberation from their condition as colonial enslaved persons: a decolonial ecology.

Finally, the fourth part, “A World-Ship,” moves beyond the stalemate of modernity’s double fracture which contrasts the refusals and quests for the world in order to suggest paths towards world-making. I suggest we conceive of ecological thinking neither as a Noah’s Ark nor as a slave ship but in terms of a world-ship whose horizon is the encounter with the other. These encounters allow us to form a body in the world [prendre corps au monde] and to renew a caring relationship with Mother-Earth. They also make it possible to forge interspecies alliances where the cause of animals and the demand for the emancipation of Negroes are seen as common problems. These encounters are only possible if a bridge of justice is built across the environmental and colonial fracture, making non-humans count politically and legally as well as seeking justice for the colonized and the enslaved. This bridge of justice opens up the horizon of a world: a worldly-ecology.

      Readers will recognize an affinity for the figure of the ship, and particularly that of the slave ship, as a political metaphor for the world. Each chapter is preceded by the names of real slave ships, their historical routes, and their contents, which I freely recount in prose. This choice is intended to give a literary sensibility to the displacement that is required for thinking from the world’s hold, while at the same time revealing the other side of modernity that adorns itself with luminous ideals, using names such as Justice and Espérance [Hope], but which spreads injustice and despair. It also allows us to see that the slave ship tells a story about the world and the Earth. Using this metaphor is above all the recognition of the capacity for ships to concentrate the world within them. From Christopher Columbus’s Niña to container ships, from trawlers to warships, from whalers to oil tankers, from slave ships to migrant ships capsizing in the Mediterranean, through their functions, routes, and cargo, ships reveal the relationships of the world. Following the extended metaphor of the slave ship gives voice to the ambition of going beyond the double fracture through a sutural writing, passing from one side to the other, in order to weave together presences and thoughts and to stretch the sails of the world-ship facing the tempest.

Notes

      1  1 Aimé Césaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), p. 2.

      2  2 Romain Cruse, Une géographie populaire de la Caraïbe (Montreal: Mémoire d’encier, 2014), pp. 50–62.

      3  3 Henry Paget, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2002); Consuelo López Springfield (ed.), Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Maryse Condé (ed.), L’Héritage de Caliban (Pointe-à-Pitre: Éditions Jasor, 1992).

      4  4 Pap Ndiaye, La Condition noire: essai sur une minorité française (Paris: Gallimard, 2009); Maxime Cervulle, Dans le blanc des yeux, diversité, racisme et médias (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2013); Nell Irvin