ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS
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“za ki tan ke parlay lot
you who hear tell the others
this is not some other cities’ trial.
— Audre Lorde
Overnight on June 30 to July 1, 2024, the winds came, like they always do, from the shores of West Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean volcanic arc and reclaimed the houses, shops, crops, and broader vegetation of the island of Carriacou.
This collection of recycled trade winds gathered up into a Category 4 hurricane meteorologists named Beryl. Beryl is a common early twentieth century name in the Caribbean, and therefore in my own Caribbean family. My great aunt Beryl, who everyone called B, was a midwife. She was the one who fed my grandmother custard and coached her through the birth of her first child. Hurricane Beryl was not as gentle or considerate as Great Aunt B. She was more like birth itself. A phenomenon that comes in its own time and rips open a preexisting structure. A potentially deadly process that offers the possibility of a new life.
Before Hurricane Beryl, there is no record of a Category 4 hurricane ever developing in the Atlantic Ocean in June. Right at the beginning of hurricane season. Beryl’s record setting is explained by the fact that the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea are hotter than they have ever been, which increases the velocity of the wind as the cold and heat between the ocean and the clouds chase each other more and more intensely. And the water is hotter than it has ever been before because carbon pollution, mostly from industrialized nations outside the Caribbean, has changed the atmosphere of planet Earth. There are no factories anywhere on the island of Carriacou. There are very few cars. Most people use fifteen-passenger commuter vans or walk to get around the island. And yet, because of the accumulated deregulated carbon emissions of the United States and other nations of the Global North, Hurricane Beryl changed the definition of an “early” hurricane and destroyed nearly every home, business, grove of trees, and piece of public infrastructure on the island of Carriacou.
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Za ki tan ke parlay lot is a creole phrase from Carriacou. It means “You who hear, tell the others,” and traditionally people call it out in the streets before a funeral or a burial to let the community know to grieve, to honor the dead. And to prepare for the Big Drum ceremony.
In Carriacou, after a community member dies, a big drum ceremony is held to mark their passing, to signal the continuity of ancestral connection across the bridges of life and death. The big drum ceremony also happens when someone builds a home, to ground the building in an ancestral context. There is a feast, with food offerings to the ancestors on the “old parents’ plate,” and community members eat and dance with the ancestors to drum rhythms that signal a larger death, a more collective afterlife. The rhythms and songs, called Cromanti, Congo, Temne, Juba, Arada, and more, remind the people of Carriacou that they know who they are. People get up and dance when the drummers play the specific rhythms that represent the West African nations of their lineages.That is the big drum. A sound loud enough to rebuild. Not homes, but the sense of home. Not washed out roadways, but paths of lineage. A vibration that cannot raise the dead to speak but can renew our pact to listen to the ancestors whose names we may never know.
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The death-dealing transatlantic kidnapping enterprise through which, as historian Tiya Miles describes it, colonial corporations “feasted on the flesh” of African people, depended on the same trade winds that fuel every hurricane that has ever reached the Caribbean islands. Chattel slavery, the shorter name for the process that seeks to turn people into property, or into pure disposable production, also depends on destroying infrastructure. It is impossible to enslave people because people are inherently free. And so, to perpetuate slavery, an enslaver or an enslaving society must act as if people are not people. An enslaving society must destroy the bonds between a would-be slave and their community. It must destroy every sense a person has that they are divine. Connected to a lineage of love. Beholden to something bigger than their own lifetime. It must destroy every sense a person has that they are powerful enough to direct their own strength. As old and free as the wind.
In the Americas, capitalism has never functioned without slavery or the interest accruing from the feasting of flesh that founded the system that every so-called citizen and economically active resident of the Western hemisphere is participating in. The rules carry over. We live in a society where the need for capital supersedes the bonds between people, a commitment to the environment, and certainly any sense of our own divinity. The targets of an enslaving or capitalist society—our social bonds, our lineage of love, our sense of ourselves as a divine part of nature—are clues to what would most dangerously free us.
And so Carriacou, which this past summer lost almost every functioning building, may have the greatest wealth in the Western hemisphere if not the planet. Because countless times, the people of this community have met death with a drum. Have met enslavement and the possibility of social death with memory and connection across the ocean enslavers used to try to make them forget. In other words, Beryl is the newest, fastest hurricane, but the old hurricane, the worst hurricane, the man-made storm of greed and disconnection is still raging. And Carriacou holds a technology with the potential to free us all. The rhythm you play, the dance you do, in the face of the lie that we cannot reach each other across this divide.
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“but wind is our teacher”
Audre Lorde, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, is a daughter of Carriacou and a theorist of hurricane survival. Her father had survived the great Windward Islands hurricane in 1898 in Barbados as an infant, in the time before the weather service gave storms the names of family members. Some ninety years later, Audre survived Hurricane Hugo in the US colony of St. Croix. Writing by the light of an emergency lantern she wrote of climate catastrophe using other words. She connected the earthquake in California to Hurricane Hugo, which destroyed 90 percent of the homes in St. Croix.
The very first sentence?
“Those who do not learn from their history are doomed to repeat their mistakes.”
And then Audre Lorde went on to describe her personal and communal experience of the same social-disaster playbook that has accompanied every storm since. This was her attempt to make her witness sharable. To tell the others. But unfortunately for all of us, Audre Lorde’s account of surviving Hurricane Hugo in St. Croix is devastatingly similar to accounts of US Gulf Coast residents surviving Hurricane Katrina over a decade later. Or my Anguillian family members surviving Maria a decade after that. Each was characterized by governments’ national and colonial prioritization of property and business interests over people, leaving residents in a state of inhumane neglect. Each was followed by a narrative that criminalized bereft people responding to that same abandonment as “looters,” and justified the use of violent force and curfews to constrain survivors. Each was characterized by traumatizing military intervention that rounded people up and separated them from their direct support systems. Each was characterized by disaster displacement through which corporations scooped up properties that residents could not afford to rebuild because they were systemically underinsured. And as climate catastrophe gets worse, insurance gets even more unaffordable. These circumstances put already under-resourced governments in the position of having to take out more predatory international loans from financial institutions in the Global North to rebuild infrastructure. And so the same countries that cause the emissions crises that strengthen the storms profit from the interest that accrues as those storms do more and more damage. In the wake of each storm, neither the most responsible governments nor the global community that watches the desperation and starvation on the news addresses the root causes that turn storms into social nightmares, not “natural disasters.”
We have not learned from our history of escalating storms. We have repeated the same mistakes again and again. What if, instead of the predictable rhythm of disaster, neglect, militarization, and displacement, when the next disaster comes, we collectively practiced a rhythm informed by the big drum of Carriacou. A ceremony of restoration that centralizes kinship, intergenerational resilience, and a dignified memory of who we are, before and after disaster.
Audre’s community of hurricane survivors in St. Croix practiced the mutual aid that restores dignity and rebuilds spirits after traumatic loss. They asked after each other’s survival. They shared anything they had when someone else needed. Batteries. Information. A tarp. And the mutual aid from other islands in the Caribbean, which was even more crucial because the US government’s neglect was also transnational. The people of St. Lucia sent a boatload of ripe yellow bananas to the people of St. Croix who were hungry and starved for color because Hurricane Hugo had taken every flower, fruit, and vegetable away in its turmoil. Audre celebrated those ripe bananas and recounted how, as they lined up to get their fruit, community members shared their survival stories.How was it for you? How was it for you? This was part of what inspired Audre Lorde and Gloria Joseph to later create Winds of Change Press, an independent publishing company with the sole purpose of giving the people of St. Croix a space to share their stories of hurricane survival, eventually compiled in the book Hell Under God’s Orders (HUGO).
The network of mutual aid that responded to Hurricane Hugo went beyond the Caribbean community to include communities of affinity. For example, when after two months, running water, electricity, the telephone system, and a functioning hospital had still not been restored in St. Croix, a Black lesbian feminist collective called Aché was concerned about Audre Lorde, their favorite Black lesbian feminist writer, who they knew was surviving cancer and the hurricane aftermath. They led an initiative asking Black lesbians in the United States to send crucial supplies and resources like sleeping bags, tents, lanterns, reading materials, and monetary donations to Lorde’s entire community. The organization Sojourner Sisters distributed supplies locally. By the time Lorde wrote her long thank you letter to that community of support, the organizers in California had experienced a major earthquake in Santa Cruz. After noting the irony of the names Santa Cruz and Saint Croix being translations of each other, Audre explained what she believed were the messages in the twin disasters:
I do know that hurricanes are a way of cooling down the earth, and I also know we are burning down the rainforests, polluting the atmosphere and heating up the oceans and the earth, not to speak of tearing jagged holes in her protective ozone layer. The earth is telling us something about our conduct of living as well as our abuse of this covenant we live upon.
This covenant we live upon.
Here is our clue. We don’t live on a planet, we live on a promise. We are breaking that promise to each other and to all other living, ancestral, and otherwise dynamic aspects of this planet when we consent to the lie of separation. We have to learn to live as a planet. And not simply to reiterate the chorus of “we are the world”—though as I will discuss later, creativity and major financial reparations and aid are needed—but to acknowledge the reality of our interdependence with every aspect of earth.
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By the light of that same emergency lantern, Audre Lorde began rewriting her own life’s work. She found an only slightly water-damaged copy of her book Chosen Poems: Old and New and decided to time travel. She went back to the younger person who had written those poems and listened for the wisdom of her earlier self, like she had done with so many of her students. She decided that there was a difference between revision and total reconstruction, and at that point, living in the roofless rubble of her own home, she decided to focus on the poems that didn’t need reconstruction but could benefit from revision. Sometimes her revision included a small change of one word. Sometimes her revision included different line breaks. But most often Audre Lorde’s revisions for what became Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New, Revised consisted of adding space within a line, allowing a larger breath between words. A subtle change in the rhythm.
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Some scholars say that in Carriacou today, only 1 percent of the population actually speaks the creole referenced in Audre Lorde’s poem “Za ki tan ke parlay lot.” That 1 percent would be found among the elders who most likely need to be evacuated to mainland Grenada, or further, in the aftermath of a major hurricane like Beryl. And will they return? The risk of cultural loss is a danger to the survival practices the people of Carriacou have been engaging in since they first survived the trade winds of colonial disaster. It will first be the Carriacou diaspora and their descendants who will remember to remember to continue to document the big drum ceremonies and seek out the languages behind the songs. And this will happen along with the rebuilding process, as long as predatory business interests (tourism, offshore drilling) don’t rush in to fill the gaps in the island still visible on NASA satellite maps.
And will those who hear tell the others? The extreme lack of media coverage of Hurricane Beryl’s devastating impact on Carriacou suggests that it will be left to the artists to respond and remember. As always, the artists have so much to teach us.
I wonder if we could honor and learn from the tradition of the big drum without recolonizing it in our imaginations. The big drum ceremony is specific and irreplaceable. Part of why I insist on drawing attention to it here is that the loss of place, the damage that Carriacou has suffered already this hurricane season, is threatening this crucial cultural practice that depends on the ability of specific people to gather. It depends on the access that the drummers, the singers, the family members have to each other and to the ground on which this ceremony was created to reference a connection across the ocean. The specific prerequisites for the big drum ceremony, not to mention the regatta festival and other practices, are under threat in Carriacou. And yet it is the resilience of the ceremony-makers—those who found a vibration that could reconstitute home under the horrific circumstances of kidnapping, violence, displacement, and attempted cultural erasure—that we must honor in this moment, when increasing storms offer not only evidence of the cost of corporate greed on our shared environment, but also opportunities for corporations to displace communities even further by taking over the lands on which they practice.
I am saying that the big drum must be able to continue to happen in Carriacou.
I am also saying that we should listen to the lesson of the big drum. That home is a vibration, that our existence is accountable to multiple generations, that we must move in the rhythm of memory as we encounter new possibilities. Audre Lorde enacted this crucial tendency in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo in St. Croix, when she chose to go back and fetch her younger self and reinhabit her own body of work by hurricane lantern in the midst of curfew. My Aunt Una, the retired opera singer, embodied this when, stranded in the flooding of Hurricane Maria on Rendezvous Bay in Anguilla, she picked up my books and started singing the words in them out into the sea.
And this is something that I am seeing over and over again in my conversations with storm survivors. After surviving super typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines, Jan Kairel Guillermo has focused on creating structures enabling dancers to travel through their communities, remembering and healing through embodying folkloric memory. While doing community-response work in the aftermath of hurricane Maria in North and South Carolina, folklorist and womanist cartographer Michelle Lanier coined the term AfroCarolina to speak to the intertwined histories and shared destinies of transformative resilience among Black residents of the Carolinas. While supporting her birth community of New Bern, North Carolina, which was impacted by the devastating storm surge of Hurricane Florence, reproductive justice activist Omisade Burney-Scott transformed her experience of a heating planet into Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, a creative multimedia initiative to transform the conversations about menopause within Black communities and to create an intergenerational platform to diversify the conversations about aging all over the world. After evacuating New Orleans during multiple hurricanes, Black feminist abolitionist artist kai lumumba barrow is creating a flow-pattern residency for artists repeatedly displaced and in need of recurring climate refuge.
This too is a rhythm. A repetition. A drum call. Over and over again, artists are enacting resilience through creative responses to disaster survival, which means that as we assess loss and damage it is vital to first invest in the existing cultural resources and traditions that are threatened by climate catastrophe, and also to invest more broadly in the cultural workers of impacted communities, who are the leaders and visionaries for how to adapt and move forward in the face of these crises. Culture is not merely decoration. Culture is not a beautiful tangent to the business of survival. Culture is a methodology of survival, a technology for rebuilding and reconnecting, and a focal point of adaptation, of transforming loss. Cultural practice is also a way to tell and to illustrate the truth of our loss. This very writing is a way for me to say Global North nations should be paying reparations to the islands most impacted by the climate crisis, not profiting via loans. Culture is the form that reminds us that we are sacred, divine, and accountable to each other. Culture is how we track a depth of loss that can never be calculated.
And what about the cultural forms that you are called to remember? What about the creative methodologies that are emerging in your community and in your own spirit as you grieve and survive?
Now, I want to listen to you share about it. Tell the others. Here are some writing prompts to start with:
- What have I survived? (Give yourself time to make a list that feels full if not comprehensive. Consider including survivals or events that precede your own lifetime. Consider whether the breadth of your survival includes events in places you had already been displaced from before the disaster. Consider “natural” and human disasters including storms, earthquakes but also wars, land grabs, colonial displacements.)
- What did I learn, change, shift, create during or in the aftermath of my survival? Or, since survival is ongoing, what am I learning, changing, shifting, and creating now in context of what I am surviving?
- What is my commitment? What am I determined to always help survive? (A particular practice, a species, a place, a community?)
- What is my message to the world? (See if you can distill this to one sentence, even if it takes pages and pages of freewriting to get there.)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The publishers are solely responsible for the content of this publication; the opinions presented here do not reflect the position of the Open Society Foundations. We also note that views and any errors, are the authors alone and that the content of this text does not necessarily represent the views of all the members of the Loss and Damage Collaboration and all those engaged in the Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage program.