A Land Mapped Out/ A Map That Moves: Black Indigenous Forest-Life
Published
TEXT BY THABISILE GRIFFIN / PHOTOGRAPHS BY NADIA HUGGINS
In the Caribbean, forests remain the space of Maroons, who freed themselves from slavery and created societies in the mountains’ woods resisting British, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonizers. In this text accompanied by photographs by Nadia Huggins, Thabisile Griffin describes the relationship between those who were called “Black Caribs” and their sylvan environment in St. Vincent.
In July of 1796, it was reported in British colonial documents that 300 Black Caribs had been “brought in from the woods” on the southeastern Caribbean island of St. Vincent. The report emerged at a juncture, when British militia found that the only way to separate the Black indigenous people from the land was to forcefully evict them, and so they were boarded on a ship to the nearby barren island of Baliceaux. At the time of this report, this observation of being found in the woods, or forest, functioned as an adage, and was not an uncommon statement given by the colonial administrators. The forest represented a paradox, an unknown site of ambiguity and danger, but simultaneously still an insistent part of their colonial possession. And while the woods in St. Vincent fell under British control through a European treaty, they were still very much governed by the Black indigenous population on the island. Along with the distinction in spatial control, being “brought in from the woods” also referenced the inability or refusal in comprehending what the forests meant for the indigenous inhabitants. Throughout the 18th century, both the British and French would claim St. Vincent at various times but would never be able to achieve complete control over the land, nor erect the necessary infrastructure to make their settlements truly profitable. The island had been mapped out numerous times by both British and French surveyors from the 17th century onward, but the various priorities, terrain impositions, borders, and ports that the cartographies outlined, were constantly being defied by the Black indigenous inhabitants. St. Vincent was still very much autonomous on the windward, eastern side of the island, the northwest “Carib country,” and in the inland mountainous region, all areas of forestry with different elevations. And the indigenous keepers of the land, the so-called “Black Caribs,” were the alchemists of the woods.
The Black Caribs, the term used within colonial documents in attempts to racialize them, were a people of African, Carib, and Arawak genealogy. Their features and skin tones varied, and colonial administrators took advantage of the chance to emphasize phenotypical attributes when it furthered military and market objectives. But it was their insoluble being and life-ways, impeding the acquisition of property, that made categorization so urgent for British authors. For the majority of the 18th century, the Black Caribs prevented a complete or any large-scale European settlement on their land by the British or French. Much of primary documentation describes the reasoning behind such a prolonged period of autonomy and anti-colonial resistance through a top-down reading of resources and imperial relations, like gifts of armaments to the Caribs from nearby French militias, and an overall condition of colonial insecurity due to intra-European conflict. Both are accurate and have played a major role. However, what European documentation left out, and perhaps could not conceive of, was the central role of the woods unknown.
Even as British administrators and armies moved towards enclosure of the forests, whether through legislation or physical attempts at clearing out the inhabitants (both human and non-human), the Black Caribs maintained a potent communion with the space throughout.
Alchemy as a metaphor, functions as a way of describing the intentionality in the ways the Black indigenous population in St. Vincent both refused and transmuted colonial demarcations of race, class, and land. Its etymology describes the process of transmuting metals into gold or silver, and consequently, alchemists were people that engaged in transforming elements into what they believed were superior forms. Historically, alchemists were also invested in metaphysical and spiritual processes, and indigenous ways of healing the human form. If the Black Caribs were alchemists, then the woods were their science labs, albeit the relationship was importantly symbiotic, rather than one of discovery. British proprietors, administrators, and governors tried deeply to compartmentalize forest areas into changing sites of domination, dependent on stages of resistance. Preliminary observations from European mapmakers illustrated forestland in St. Vincent as visible but tangential, suggesting a process of easy enclosure, or a future sugar plantation site depending on the topography. Later arose the discourse of immediate deforestation, as these areas were unused and considered “cultivable lands remaining undisposed of,” but they also needed to be cleared because of their mysterious nature, and the impediments to British visibility and control within the forest. Finally, the forests were spaces of fugitivity, both the Black indigenous population living against colonial imposition, and enslaved African people fleeing from the smaller plantations that were mustered on the southern and southwestern parts of the island. These instances of maroonage gave British authorities an added, urgent incentive to clear the forests. However, as these ideas of deforestation permeated not just St. Vincent, but the Atlantic colonial world, the Black indigenous population on the island would not just refuse logics of large-scale production which fundamentally devalued and rendered the forests non-alive, but they stayed in the woods and transformed them into sites of resource, mobility, subversion, familial networks, and possibility.
The colonial unknown, which were the forests, the woods, the bush, and the unclearable, were their sites of enchantment.
These spaces functioned as multi-verses of possibility, and they were areas that superseded categories that only relate to escapement, such as fugitive or maroon. Coming from Atlantic indigenous traditions of communal ownership and sacral land, the Black Caribs maintained both a material and spiritual tract of symbiosis with the various characters of the forest. Their relationship to the woods was more complex and intentional than a reaction to encroachment. They were master woodworkers, especially adept at making boats, long and narrow vessels hallowed out by instruments from a single tree. The process took much time and labor, and afterwards, the boats were carried long distances from the forest to the waters for use. The boats were accompanied with wooden paddles, and could carry upwards of twenty people. Their knives were made with wooden handles, and their homes constructed with reeds from trees. Women would often adorn their faces and bodies with red annatto dye from achiote trees. Their practice of harvesting healing herbs was within the alchemy of the woods, and although attempts were made to vilify their medicinal practices, readers of British colonial documentation cannot help but notice the great admiration for how quickly the Black Caribs healed themselves with simply the application of forest tinctures. When settlers attempted to intrude further than they were allowed, the Black indigenous population were not only defending the forest as their land, but they were protecting a functioning universe. This was a world that had to be re-invented often, with improvisational techniques to maintain wellness, tradition, and laughter, while sustaining a defensive front. Historiography sometimes hails this portion of Black Carib history as them being masters and progenitors of “guerilla warfare,” at least in the southeastern Caribbean region. But a closer look would entail consideration of the beauty that was maintained throughout encroachment and dispossession: the ongoing traditions, and the intimate knowledge of the landscape, organisms, and interdependence of the forest-ways.
Their participation in forest-life as it was continuously under threats of enclosure is perhaps best understood poetically, as it eluded material and social logics of colonialism. Martinique’s own Suzanne Césaire would later articulate the necessity of understanding the full experience beyond the mechanics of political condition in her early writings on surrealism. In the October 1943 issue of Tropique, she wrote “far from contradicting, reducing or diverting our revolutionary attitude to life, surrealism gives it a focus. It nourishes an impatient force within us, ceaselessly maintaining the vast army of negations. And I’m also considering tomorrow.” Although writing some 147 years after the events in St. Vincent, Césaire is speaking of a tradition both far and wide within the Black diaspora: that contrary to Enlightenment reasoning, or a reliance on utilitarian or functional analysis, poetics and surrealism were a necessary mode of being, and also understanding. Engaging with the entirety of the experience, especially during times of siege, is and was the poem. Maintaining the army of colonial negations, the imagining and insistent optimism for tomorrow, all took place in the forests.
While a disciplined analysis of St. Vincent might read being found in the woods as simply the final event of Black Carib dispossession, or evidence towards guerilla warfare tropes, a surrealist reading might consider the feeling, spirit, and desires of life in the forests for this population. As well as the possibility that along with an identity of defense, people under siege contain multitudes of life-ways and feelings. Specifically during the 18th century, descriptors of the Caribs orchestrating night attacks on British militia fundamentally entailed an intimate understanding of tree proximity, moonlight, mapping, the sound of leaves, and other forms of sensorial aptitude and spatial physics.
Simultaneous to a fortress of defense, the forests functioned as their pharmacy, their technology, and their space of worship and veneration of the non-living.
British reports also took note of how when planters were successful in clearing away the interior forests, the Blacks Caribs who resided there only relocated farther back into the woods, as opposed to moving to the area designated for them, “Carib Country.” During this era, the primary threat to the forests was the zealous project of Atlantic colonial expansion, and the attendant plans towards private property and plantation infrastructure. But perhaps true consideration of the forest-ways would conversely present a threatening dynamic to the colonial project; that the details in the woods argue for a much more complicated history than simply the victors and the cleared.
Black and indigenous traditions of alchemy, symbiosis, and refusal of the map, are not specific to time or place. Stories of dispossession, staying, and transforming sites under siege, prevail within the landscape of the mythical nation. On Tongva land, in a city called Los Angeles, there exists a map that moves, and a people that live outside the logics of private property. Houseless neighbors, and their encampments and common spaces of living, also demand a surrealist reading and the dignity of a poem. There is much to be said about a people that stay, even after the map’s lines are drawn out. Just as the Black Caribs chose the bushes over a demarcated space for them, close to 70,000 unhoused people have chosen to stay in their city that has been ravaged by developers, corporations, and evolving violent logics of criminality. Unhoused scholars and organizers like Theo Henderson of the We the Unhoused podcast have been working to identify and platform fuller narratives of the experiences of unhoused people, and what it means to inhabit space as a fundamental organism to that land, in both symbiosis and mutualism. His video interviews of people living on the street evoke familiarity, and detail the innovation within the networks of survival that also need to be re-invented often, in different ways. The texture of people’s intimate experiences, along with their political analysis, emphasize encampment communities as sites of enchantment. They are common spaces of possibility and audacity. This contemporary example on colonized Tongva land, is one of thousands, that necessitate a reframing—an engagement with the entirety of the experience.
Black indigenous life-ways in St. Vincent point us toward the multiplicity and poetics of the woods, but also the profound autonomy of inhabiting a site that is both demarcated as not yours and “unknown.” In St. Vincent during the 18th century, being brought in from the woods held a larger meaning than defeat, it revealed a colonial insufficiency in the ability to conceive of the forest. Today we can understand a similar phenomenon as capital’s inability to conceive of home or community in “uncleared spaces.” Similar to the contradiction of claiming the forests were uninhabited space, while people were still brought in from the woods, descriptors of homes and lots in Los Angeles share those conceits, while people are evicted, people are cleared. And yet when faced with threats of dispossession, and with enclosure, we only move further into the woods. In his poem To Consider the Nearby Bushes, Jamaican writer Kei Miller helps us return even more to ourselves, he says “to consider the nameless places, or perhaps the placeless places. It is to consider the nonspecific ‘here,’—a here that could be everywhere, or maybe nowhere.” Perhaps in defense and in living, the unknown, the nonspecific, the map-defying, is the necessary home. ■