Oceanic Decolonial Ruination

Arnaldo Rodríguez-Bagué

The passing of Hurricane María in September 2017 across the Puerto Rican archipelago has re-centered natural disasters across Puerto Rican political thought’s decolonial discursive fields. Although natural disasters are a fundamental part of Caribbean long anti-colonial histories, Caribbean political thought’s recentering of Hurricane María across its discursive fields have left natural disasters’ geophysical forces out of decolonial critique. One example of this is the book edited by Puerto Rican scholars Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol Lebrón titled Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (2019). In the book’s introduction, titled Introduction: Aftershocks of Disaster, Bonilla and Lebrón “examine both Hurricane María’s aftershocks and its foreshocks” to propose a “coloniality of disaster” that seeks to articulate “the way the structures and enduring legacies of colonialism set the stage for Hurricane María’s impact and its aftermath” (Bonilla and Lebrón 3, 11). In the book’s afterward, titled Critique and Decoloniality in the Face of Crisis, Disaster, and Catastrophe, Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres probes Hurricane María’s colonial staging by engaging with terms such as “crisis, disaster, and catastrophe” as a way to “obtain a more precise sense of the extent and depth of various forms of devastation and destruction, as well as of different ways of responding to them” (Maldonado-Torres 332). As he argues, “one of the ways of responding to events such as Hurricane María is critique” (Maldonado-Torres 332). For MaldonadoTorres, responding to natural disaster from “critique is important because it indicates a shift from considering a crisis, disaster, and catastrophe as a natural event to approaching it instead as connected to human intervention or sociohistorical forces” (Maldonado-Torres 332). That is, “understanding and explaining colonialism’s sociohistorical forces requires the consideration of ideologies, attitudes, and social, economic, and political systems, among other factors” (Maldonado-Torres 333).

The Caribbean decolonial thought that emerged in response to Hurricane María’s devastating impact on Puerto Rico’s colonial territory clearly privileges the social, economic, and political forces animating the hurricane’s deadly aftermath. Natural events’ geophysical forces don’t seem to make a meaningful critical impact in analyzing such a natural-colonial catastrophe. Maldonado-Torres’ sociohistorical articulation of ‘critique’ as a critique that shifts away from considering “a crisis, disaster, and catastrophe as a natural event” leaves out any possibility of politicizing the geophysical forces that animate not only any natural disaster but the Caribbean’s colonial natural history within Caribbean political thought’s discursive fields (Maldonado-Torres 332). Concealing a natural disaster’s geophysical dimension as something incommensurable to the analysis of a natural disaster’s sociopolitical aftermath wouldn’t necessarily allow neither for a “more precise sense of the extent and depth of various forms of devastation and destruction” nor for the elucubration of various forms of decolonial critiques (Maldonado-Torres 332). The ideologies surrounding contemporary Caribbean decolonial thought’s critical engagement with Hurricane María separate Puerto Rico’s colonized tropical nature from the social, the political, the economic, and, surprisingly, from Caribbean decolonial thought itself. What can be argued about natural disasters such as Hurricane María is that they put contemporary Caribbean decolonial thought into crisis. Having said this, how can we approach Hurricane María’s aftershocks of disasters without separating the Caribbean’s tropical nature from Puerto Rico’s colonial culture?

As a way of rehearsing an engagement with a natural disaster’s aftermath without denaturalizing Caribbean decolonial thought, this essay will approach Bonilla and Lebrón’s notion of “aftershocks of disaster” from an oceanic perspective. While Bonilla and Lebrón articulate a “coloniality of disaster” by making use of geological metaphors such as aftershocks and foreshocks as analytical categories to critically engage with the multiple temporalities of Hurricane María’s sociopolitical aftermath, I will be reading two of Hurricane María’s oceanic aftershocks enacted across the colonial coastlines of the Puerto Rican archipelago. These two oceanic aftershocks, a storm surge and a feminist performance, function as an oceanic form of critique to Puerto Rican and the Caribbean’s deep colonialism. They allow us the possibility of not only reconsidering the political effects of natural events’ geophysical forces as morethan-human interventions to the Caribbean’s colonial built environment, but they also allow us to speculate on Caribbean decolonial futures’ multiple temporalities. For this, I’ll approach Hurricane María’s oceanic aftershocks from what Maldonado-Torres refers to as “countercatastrophic thought and creative work” (Maldonado Torres 340). I’ll also add speculative imaginary that enables Puerto Ricans islanders to “explorations of time and the formations of space, within, against, and outside the modern/colonial world” while also revealing the various layers of catastrophe (Maldonado Torres 340).

In the context of this essay, engaging with Hurricane María’s oceanic aftershocks—as a counter-catastrophic thought, practice, and speculative imaginary in a geohistorical moment inflected by climate change means—extends Caribbean’s tidalectic geopoetics towards Caribbean islanders’ forced intimacy with the geo-material effects of coastal erosion on the coastlines of Caribbean islands. Speculating on Caribbean decolonial futurities from Caribbean islanders’ forced intimacy with the effects of these oceanic forces means more than responding, repairing, and/or reconstructing what was lost in the wake of Hurricane María. It means being critical of what was left intact on the archipelago’s colonial geography, infrastructure, and colonial built environment and that is left to be eroded, ruined, destroyed, and submerged below the Atlantic Oceanic as part of Puerto Rico recovery efforts.

Oceanic Aftershock #1

On March 5, 2018, six months after Hurricane María, a storm surge came about Puerto Rico’s north coast causing certain havoc. Of all the destruction caused on the archipelago’s northern coast, the Puerto Rican media focused on the storm surge’s partial destruction of one of Old San Juan Isle National Historic Site’s most iconic promenades: El Paseo de La Princesa. Located in the isle’s southeastern coast, El Paseo de La Princesa was built in 1853 by Puerto Rico’s Spanish military colonial governor Fernando Norzagaray y Escudero to commemorate the 19th century Spanish monarchy in Old San Juan’s colonially and militarily built environment. Before the promenade was built, La Princesa was a prison built in 1837 and remained open until 1965. In this prison, the leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Don Pedro Albizu Campos, was jailed and tortured. Ironically, in 1989 La Princesa Prison became, up until today, Puerto Rico’s Tourism Company’s headquarters.

The partial destruction of the promenade’s handrails, lighting infrastructure, and colonial moldings were not caused by a massive natural disaster like Hurricane María but rather by one of its oceanic aftershocks—an ordinary storm surge. Thinking with this storm surge’s erosive effects on El Paseo de La Princesa as an oceanic critique to Puerto Rico’s deep colonialism implies understanding the storm surge’s ruinous oceanic gesture to Old San Juan Isle’s colonial built environment to what I’ll refer to as oceanic decolonial ruination. Based on the American anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler’s articulation of “ruination” in her essay titled Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (2013), an oceanic decolonial ruination is a series of ongoing, corrosive, violent, but vibrantly subtle acts, gestures, events, and processes of bringing ruin upon European and American imperial formations on the Puerto Rican archipelago and the Caribbean Americas. The Atlantic Ocean’s ruination of El Paseo de la Princesa inflicts slow and partial but sudden and irretrievable disaster upon the future of the political life of Western colonially and militarilybuilt environment across the Caribbean Americas. I don’t choose to analyze this storm surge as an oceanic aftershock out of a critical whim. Natural events such as this storm surge are remembered and become politicized by artists after Hurricane María’s aftermath. Such is the case for the second oceanic aftershock: Teresa Hernández’s ongoing performance research project titled Bravata y otras prácticas erosivas (Bravata and other erosive practices, 2019-ongoing).

Teresa Hernández is a Puerto Rican transdisciplinary artist whose research practice emerges from a thinking-body-in-movement that transits the in-betweens of theater, dance, performance, writing, and visual arts. Hernández is an artist who integrates diverse elements such as costumes, furniture, found objects, and organic materialities gathered across diverse public and natural spaces through improvisation. She utilizes improvisation as a performance-based research tool, an artistic language, a way of economically and institutionally sustaining her art practice, and a way of living as a mature Puerto Rican woman within the archipelago’s deep colonialism. Based on Puerto Rico’s colonial precariousness, she refers to her performance-based research practice as a “practice of uncertainty”. By navigating colonial uncertainty through improvisational structures, Hernández explores artistic and political questions in front of an audience (if any) to produce process-based artistic experiences and knowledge that constantly reframes her artistic questions. Her artistic practice as an actress and performer has given way to the creation of more than twenty characters (mostly women) and stage presences (mostly feminine) that emerge from a multiplicity of Teresa Hernández’s colonial psyche. Between these characters we find: Rubí, Perpetua, Isabella, Pragma, Licenciada Perdóname, Nancy, Milagros Vélez, Teniente Cortéz, La Reina, la primera dama, una madre coraje, La cubana, la mexicana, el chamaco, and el mime. Within her stage presences, we find: the Evening Dress’ Long Tail Woman, the bitch, the Knife Woman, the Seashell Woman, and the Sea Urchin Woman. Her capacious repertoire of female characters and not-always-human stage presences have inspired the public, as well as the artist, to think and feel the palimpsest of colonialities that constitute Puerto Rico’s deep colonialism.

Oceanic Aftershock #2

Following the political north of the storm surge’s oceanic decolonial ruination of the 19thcentury Spanish monarchy’s colonial perpetuation on Old San Juan Isle’s colonial-built environment, Teresa Hernández developed Bravatas y otras prácticas erosivas as an aftershock of Hurricane María. Bravatas is a performance-based research project centered on studying coastal erosion’s ruinous effects on Puerto Rico’s colonial coastlines, infrastructure, and Caribbean islanders’ colonial livelihoods. The project emerged from a series of live improvisations enacted across Puerto Rico’s archipelago. This essay will concentrate on the project’s third iteration.

Bravata: el comienzo de un comienzo (Bravata: the beginning of a beginning, 2019) was performed in the Puerto Rican municipality of Vieques. Located in the southeast of Puerto Rico’s main island, Vieques is a Caribbean archipelago that is internationally renowned for being the site of a series of successful non-violent protests against the United States Navy’s occupation of two thirds of Vieques as a military site, training ground, and bombing range from 1941 to 2001. The west of Vieques’ main island became the Navy’s munitions storage area. Its east became the Navy’s military training range, and in between these two areas lies the Vieques civilians. For more than 60 years, Vieques was used as a military experiment, contaminating not only the surrounding archipelago but also Vieques islanders’ bodies. More than 20 years after the U.S. Navy left the island, bombs are still being detonated across Vieques’ lands, causing environmental health hazards to its islanders. Bravata: el comienzo de un comienzo (2019) was a site-specific performance enacted in Vieques’ Fortín Conde de Mirasol, a 19th century Spanish empire military fort located on Vieques’ northern littoral. Also known as Vieques’ Fort, El Fortín Conde de Mirasol was never involved in a formal war in any way. Built in 1845, it was mostly used as a prison for slaves, plantation laborers, and anti-colonial dissidents for about one hundred years. Although Vieques’ Fort was abandoned during WWII, it was restored by the Puerto Rican Cultural Institute from 1989 to 1991 and transformed into the Vieques Museum of Art and History.

I’ll only be reading the first third of Bravatas’ third iteration. In Bravata: el comienzo de un comienzo, Hernández arrives at Vieques’ Fort in her personal SUV brought directly from San Juan. After this archipelagic movement enacted through a very unreliable maritime transportation, Hernández steps down from her vehicle, looks directly at the public, and puts a domestic kitchen knife in her mouth. Biting on the kitchen knife’s handle, she looks directly at Vieques’ Fort and slowly walks towards the Fortín Conde de Mirasol’s imperial wall. Once in front of the wall, Hernández steps back a couple of steps and, looking at the physical and spatial dimensions of the Vieques’ fort, starts performing “la mujer cuchillo”, or “the Knife Woman”; one of the performance-personas that manifested itself as an aftershock of Hurricane María in Hernández’ feminist repertoire.

In this fragment of Bravatas’ third iteration, the Knife Woman pushes against, climbs over, and stabs the imperial walls of Vieques’ Fort. The Knife Woman’s enactment of these three gestures is animated by Hernández’ failure to finish them successfully. For example, the Knife Woman’s doesn’t only push against the imperial walls of Vieques’ Fort. Hernández’s failure to push them out of their place enables the Knife Woman to push against the impossibility of pushing against the colonial monumentality of the Fortín Conde de Mirasol’s imperial walls. Hernández’s failure of climbing on top of the Fortín Conde de Mirasol’s imperial walls performs the Knife Woman’s impossibility to occupy the colonial visuality enabled by the Spanish imperial walls’ colonial verticality that seeks to dominate, extract, and commodify Caribbean island’s tropical nature and people. Hernández’s failure to stab Fortín Conde de Mirasol’s imperial walls articulates the Knife Woman’s futility in trying to erase the colonial built environment of the Caribbean islands and trying to transform it following the islanders’ terms.

Hernández’s repeated encounter with failure enables in the Knife Woman an intimate engagement with an array of colonial impossibilities. Reading these encounters with colonial impossibilities as an aftershock of Hurricane María offers us other ways of reading Puerto Rican performance practices. Puerto Rican islanders pushing against, climbing over, and stabbing the long durée of Puerto Rico’s deep colonialism is, at least in part, what characterizes a Puerto Rican anti-colonial performance1. But, understanding the Knife Woman solely as an anti-colonial performance that endures Puerto Rico’s deep colonialism through more than five centuries of decolonial errantry implies reading Hernández’s Knife Woman through the sociohistorical analytical lens that denaturalizes Caribbean decolonial thought. By reading the Knife Woman’s performance as an oceanic performance from the perspective of Maldonado-Torres’ counter-catastrophic thought, we can approach its anti-colonial enactment as not only being entangled with the Atlantic Ocean’s more-than-human forces but also being a performative relay of coastal erosion’s ruinous effects on Caribbean islands’ coastlines.

By reading Hernández’s Knife Woman as an oceanic performance, we can understand Hernández’s failure to push against the Vieques fort’s imperial walls as the Knife Woman’s speculative oceanic displacement of the Fortín Conde de Mirasol’s geological monumentality across Vieques’s littoral. The Knife Woman’s oceanic displacement enables the possibility of speculatively pushing the Fortín Conde de Mirasol towards the Atlantic Ocean for it to become yet another Caribbean island of Vieques’ archipelago. Hernández’s failure to completely climb over Vieques Fort’s imperial walls is to the Knife Woman’s oceanic gesture of submergence of Vieques’ Fort below the Atlantic Ocean’s horizons—or, at least, seeks to point towards the grounds of the Fortín Conde de Mirasol as the place where Vieques’ climate change-afflicted coastlines will migrate to. Hernández’s failure to completely stab the Fortín Conde de Mirasol’s out of Vieques’ littoral during the live performance proposes the understanding that the Knife

Woman’s oceanic decolonial ruination of Vieques’ colonial-built environment as a durational performance that is oriented towards the future. While the Knife Woman won’t be finishing her targeted oceanic decolonial ruination of the Fortín Conde de Mirasol during Hernández’s performance with just a domestic knife, the relative slowness of the Knife Woman’s oceanic relay strategically accelerates climate change’s oceanic futurity on Caribbean islands. By specifically bringing ruin upon Caribbean islands’ colonial-built environment, the Knife Woman’s acceleration of climate change’s oceanic futurity uses the geological monumentality of Vieques’ Fort as a sculptural medium for carving out a Puerto Rican decolonial future as part of Hurricane María’s recovery process. The Knife Woman’s oceanic relay of coastal erosion’s ruinous forces across Vieques’ littoral enacts a counter-catastrophic geomorphological sovereignty that—according to Maldonado-Torres—explores the Caribbean island’s “formations of time, space, and matter within, against, and outside the modern/colonial world” (Maldonado Torres 340). The geomorphological sovereignty proposed by the Knife Woman’s countercatastrophic acceleration of climate change’s oceanic futurity opens Vieques’ archipelagic lands to Vieques islanders’ re-occupation and re-shaping on Vieques islanders’ Antillean terms.

Bibliography

Bonilla, Yarimar and Lebrón, Marisol. “Introduction: Aftershocks of Disaster” in Bonilla, Yarimar and Lebrón, Marisol (Ed.). Aftershocks of Disasters: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarker Books, 2019, 1-20.

Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “Afterward: Critique and decoloniality in the Face of Crisis, Disaster, and Catastrophe” in Bonilla, Yarimar and Lebrón, Marisol (Ed.). Aftershocks of Disasters: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarker Books, 2019, 332-342.

Stoler, Ann Laura (Ed.). Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013.