María Suárez Toro,
INMAR Caribe, CCBEEM

 

                  Power point about CCBEEM lived experience:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1apHBlKyUuvvkmmCImDMj2Aq_7kNslhKQ/edit?slide=id.p21#slide=id.p21

 

Costa Rica’s Caribbean is a mountain and coastal territory of Talamanca, furthest south, bordering with Panama. It is homeland territory with a matrix – Bribri, Cabecar and Afro descendant peoples – that have been joined eventually by people of other 52 nationalities in a landscape that is 1,084 square miles.

It hosts some 450,000 people (INEC, 2923) , half of them indigenous and or mixed, and the other  half is 50% Afro descendant and mixed, and 50% of all the other  nationalities and ethnicities, mostly European, USA and Costa Ricans from other areas of Costa Rica.

Talamanca’s shoreline was thought to have been inhabited by Afro descendant fisherfolk at the beginning of the 18 hundreds when turtle fisherfolk came to establish there from the rest of the Caribbean islands and continental shores.

But very recently, this past month, a local youth scuba diving Center has proven that one hundred years before that, two Danish Slave ships arrived by mistake in 1710. The Africans and sailors mutinied, burning one ship and leaving the other astray to crash paint the coral ref the enslaved landed free on the shoreline.

The finding of the identity of the slave ships has been stewarded by the Centro Comunitario de Buceo Embajadores del Mar, created by me with four afro and Bribri mixed youth. We created it in 2014 out of their dream to learn to suba dive in order to presentee the ocean and their costal Afro and native culture.

I have written the story of =such endeavor is a book where I created an ancestral, matriarchal African character to tell the story of the saga of this youth changing history because of a dream they had about diving with the purpose of ocean conservation and in the process, found their own roots in it.

Her name is Tona Ina, s’he was cerated as a literary character in 2015 on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast to tell stories of  the waters of Planet  and their connection to the local youth deepest roots of identity, ancestral  knowledge, and interactive symbiosis of our species as nature.

African descendants and Bribri/Cabécar native claim to see a light in the darkest nights  in Punta Cahuita in the Cahuita National Park. In the sea waters near that Point, there are two shipwrecks being researched by Afro descendant and native scuba diving youth as potential slave   ships, giving them deeper insights into their identities and the history of the place and its peoples.

TONA INA HOLDS THE MEMORY IN THESE WATERS, BRINGING TO LIGHT HIDDEN HISTORICAL  FACTS ABOUT SLAVERY AND ITS INTERACTION WITH PATRIARCHAL PREDATORY, capitalist and supremacist HUMAN PRACTICES.

Another historical fact in Tona Ina’s ancestral voice is the story of  women’s tenacity as the “vital reserves” of a species that has reached  its biological limit in the Planet due to those predatory practices. Women have had the tenacity to live by other standards  and paradigms in their holistic approaches to:

 DEVELOPMENT OF CITIZEN SCIENCE: connecting the scientific method with the ancestral knowledge that the youth brings into the process

TRUTHS BEHIND MYTHOLOGIES: all of life has a common spirit and Mesoamerican human’s shared quest is the revitalization of the wholeness of who we are in the universe.

MATERNAL GIFT ECONOMIES,  being born and learning the gifts of nature in the human lived experiences learned in early life of all human beings and carried on throughout.

INTERACTIVE SYMBIOSIS BY HUMANS IN ECOSYSTEMS: re-vitalizing its lost connections

FEMINIST ACTIVISM in movement building; how lived experience is becoming shared or collective lived experience historically from having been placed by patriarchy erased from history, to revitalizing women’s powers by bringing back the memory of historical experience to building a new history that is matrifocal in its reintegration of the inclusion of women’s honored place in societies.

                                                                               How it has evolved in the Caribbean 

Together with four Afro and Bribri mixed youth, we created in 2014 the youth scuba diving camp that produced the discovery of this untold story under sea that is changing the history of Costa Rica.

I have written the story is a book where, as I told you, I created an ancestral, matriarchal African character to be the one to tell the story of the saga of this youth changing history because of a dream they had about diving with the purpose of ocean conservation and in the process found their own ancestral roots in it.

As I said, her name is Tona Ina in Yoruba, which  is Sea Light in English, Dejë Boe in Bribri.

She is the memory of the waters, the ancestral memory of the wombs of our lives in this planet: the ocean, where all of life came from.

And our mother’s bodies -actual and ancestral – to keep learning to co-habit together with all of the other gifts of life that we are a part of, in order to become whole again.

But that is not the story I want to tell you today. You can read about it elsewhere in local, national and international media because we are making history. We are making history by changing who researches and tells the untold stories, by finding hidden truths about the slave trade in Costa Rica and how Africans struggled against it and to overcome its sequels expressed in racism and supremacism and extractivism.

What I want to do today is to share my lived experience in contributing to create a Children’s Pedagogy of the Waters in Costa Rica’s Caribbean with a feminist “tidalectic” lived experience perspective.

Why? Because today’s challenges with regards to the shared human experiences are devastating in the almost total hegemonization of the structure and dynamics of capitalism, patriarchy, supremacism and extractivism.

Almost totally, in the historical times when we have lost our quest and that hegemony appears as cyclical tidal waves of abuse of power through the use of violence and the commodification of life’s gifts for the sake of greed.

Those times like the one today, come as tidal waves  because humanity as a whole does not give up coming up for air from the bottom of the ocean when our quest is almost broken.

We build movements, we have to. We need to struggle together, to build a common shared experience to break the very system that makes humanity  sick with greed and we can only heal by concentrating on dismantling it.

Women are the moral reserves of such processes in the human experiences  when we remember and revitalize the life enhancing powers our place in the regeneration of all of life life against reproductive genocide.

Men who honor, respect and recognize matrilineality as a source of shared power to regenerate life, are also moral reserves in the concert to dismantle his broken global system into transitions to new ways of relating as humans in the planetary family that nurtures all.

A “Tidalectic” feminist perspective in our present day challenge to overcome fragmentation, polarization, commodification and Westernization in all kinds of dichotomies, we need to draw from our lived experiences of the many, beyond the laboratory of the fragmented and isolated predatory minds.

To recognize the spiral-wave dynamics of the sea as the patterns that connect the ways in which we return to our powers to regenerate, share, care and remain connected to the full web of life that keeps appearing in memory, history and movements forever, until – and if -the balance is reestablished in humanity’s presence in the planet.

Sometimes with full force and others as subtle movement, the tidal waves bring and take, take and bring – like all life forces do – creating a balance in movement that is never the same but is always tide in movement in the waters.

A feminist “tidalectic” perspective recognizes that dialectics is not enough. It is not enough because the only dynamics is not the “contraries” and them coming together in synthesis.

The present day struggles to brake dichotomies and polarization, have to recognize the spiral-wave dynamics of the sea where women’s power and empowerment to regenerate, care and remain connected to the full web of life and how it  keeps appearing in memory, history and movements forever until – and if -the balance is reestablished in humanity’s holistic (balanced) presence in the planet.

It recognizes that we remain an amphibian species in many of our lived experiences and in our dreams, where we always return to the sea, its waters, its mythologies and stories  and its waters to recognize ourselves whole again when we all connect to our deepest roots …  An ocean planet where life emerged from its living waters.

A human species that evolved to create an ocean in women’s bodies so that we could live wit an in all of the rest of the living world and its gifts.

   So how do we get there with the children
of the Caribbean coastal communities?

The coast is neither land nor sea… it is the tide of the oceanic planet, cyclically creating its balanced symbiosis.

Tona Ina’s memory is presented to the children through artistic lived experiences and expressions because Art is the primary form of human expression, as “before a child talks they sing; before the child walks, the child dances; before the child writes they paint…” as Priscila Rashad has understood. And she might not have remembered that before we saw the light of day or developed our own bodies, we swam.  We swam!

And I take it a step further drawing from Maria Montessori: We do not have to teach children what they already know. We create enabling environments so that their knowledge manifests itself when the time is ripe.  We do not teach them to walk or talk or paint or sing tunes… they come knowing but it manifests itself when their body – and if-  the self organized body is ready and enabling conditions are there.  We know how to swim for Life! To grow into full grown fetuses becoming human beings. We forget because we are separated from the deep waters and are taught to fear the unknown.

We do not teach them to talk… they come with the universal language of the emotions: Cry for help, or need or pain.  Laugh for joy, affection and satisfaction of needs met. What we do teach them is the  language of the

particular culture we are born in. The “mother tongue”, we call it. You know what it is as compared to other millions of languages? The language we learn from the “motherer”, which means the language we learn with the emotions and  feelings.

Tona Ina is the great mother of the light´s energy in the waters, S´he tells, sings, dances, swims and dives from the belly of the Planet. She expresses the deepest roots of “beingness” of the human experience, from the vitality of its most transparent waters.

She invites us to rethink and redesign strategies for the inclusion of the arts in their lives; the development of all self organized intelligences; our connection with water and its most vital imaginaries of our original peoples for whom the water´ deities are female energy, even in their dualistic nature.

Our roots are in the sea … in more ways than one in the Caribbean…biologically, historically, culturally, sociologically, economically and mythologically.

The children learn that the Southern Caribbean It s a place where everything came by way of the sea… the people (from Africa), the food (by fisherfolk), the offerings of the gift of live and its many gifts (learned from the motherers), the costal marine culture (the livelihoods connected to the coastal lands)  in the gifts of nature and the mythological stories like Yemaya, Mulurtimi and Tona Ina.

The coastal area and its communities IS not a place in and of itself. It is the  constant, but cyclical meeting of the oceanic planets’ reminder that life is all amphibian as without water and its cyclic dynamics, we do not live.

Thus, with the children and youth, we turn the sea into their classroom for learning and expressing  dreams in sings, painting, drawing, story telling, discovering untold stories and hopefully move closer into out wholeness.

The secret:
doing things together
under a different leadership that promotes shared lived experiences
where the memories, skills and imagination
in ways of the waters, also leads.
Work in creating  a peaceful, creative, safe, sharing
equalizing opportunity context
Monitor and celebrate their interactions with
each other and the rest of the living world
Engage in the process the rest of family
and the community
Engage in collective
construction of alternatives.

Understand that children come KNOWING how to seek  fulfillment of need: we coo, we cry, we laugh, etc. We know equality with motherer who care freely.

But there are historical tidal wave in deconstructing and dismantling destructive ways that thawrt our best capacities..

Some of the tidal waves where women relinquish our powers most as a general tendency in patriarchy:

  • In childhood we experience needs and learn how they are met or not,  and girls and boys are not so fragmented in our expectations and those of others about us.
  • In adolescence the patriarchal system clamps down heavily on girls to be “girly” and boys to use their powers over girls
  • In the institution of marriage or any kind of family partnership, women give up plenty of power by turning it into a system that works because we give up ourselves for it to work for everyone else
  • In the midst of ociocultural political and economic commodification structure and dynamics and political agency to change it, women tend to try to be in it like in marriage… until we re-discover our all regenerating powers where we are part of the picture and our leadership and paradigms become part of the transformation
  • In elder life some fixed roles are erased out of need!
  • others 

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*”Lived experience” (erlebnis in German) refers to the knowledge and understanding that a person gains through their own personal experiences. In the context of policymaking or research, “lived experience” refers to the perspective of those who have directly experienced a specific issue or policy in their lives. (Social Sciences and Medicine, 2021, Nandini Karunamuni.)

Cambridge dictionary: the things that someone  has experienced themselves, especially when these give the person a knowledge or understanding. 

Note: the concept is attributed to Guillermo Dilthey in the emergency of hermeneutics: alive, historicized subject.

*The notion of “Patterns That Connect” originally appeared in the work of Margaret Mead’s husband, Gregory Bateson (1979) as cybernetics, as the “pattern which connects.” In this work, Bateson pursued a unifying link between mind and nature. This ultimate unity was based in the idea that all change, all phenomena occurred through processes that were cognitive.  In other words “self organized”.

My note: the mind is part of our nature, thus is is nature in one of its expressions towards adaptation in the living world. Chilean Humberto Maturana takes “self organization” as a category of every organism.

Joan Marler quotes J. Campbel in “A_Vision_for_the_World_The_Life_and_Work_of_Marija_Gimbutas”, as saying that ”Marija Gimbutas has given us an authentic Rosetta Stone of greatest heuristic value for future works in the hermeneutics of arqueología and anthropology.  

What did she contribute to it? Al Marler says, she lived her Lithuanian childhood in a family and social context where education was embraced as essential to cultural and political liberation. She also shares how Marija explained it “Although Lithuanian is one of the most conservative Indo-European languages, related to Sanskrit, the folklore and mythological imagery that Marija absorbed as a child reflected, not only the Indo-European pantheon of sky gods, but a much earlier bond with the Earth and her mysterious cycles that was still alive in the Lithuanian countryside: The rivers were sacred, the forest and trees were sacred, the hills were sacred. The earth was kissed and prayers were said every morning, every evening… The balance of male and female powers expressed in the folk material had its correspondence in people’s daily lives: Officially the patriarchal system is clearly dominating, but in reality, there is an inheritance from Old Europe in which the woman is the center. In some areas the matrilineal system really exists, such as in my family. I don’t see that the sons were more important.”

https://www.academia.edu/67574301/

* Tidalectics is a term coined by Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, referring to a way of understanding the world that emphasizes the cyclical and rhythmic movement of water, particularly tides.  A framework for analyzing history, culture, and identity, especially within the Caribbean context. It challenges linear, land-based perspectives and highlights the interconnectedness of land and sea, diaspora and indigeneity, and the fluid, dynamic nature of cultural exchange, in the understanding of time and history outside of “linear”, “land-based” models and paradigms of time and of history, offering an alternative framework for understanding cultural production and historical processes. Tidalectics also carries an anti-colonial stance, challenging the dominance of Western, land-based perspectives and celebrating the agency and resilience of Caribbean peoples.