María Suárez Toro,
INMAR Caribe, CCBEEM

 

        PowerPoint 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 mountainous and coastal territory in Talamanca, located in the far south, bordering Panama. It is homeland territory with a matrix of Bribri, Cabecar, and Afro-descendant peoples, which have been joined eventually by people of other 52 nationalities in a landscape spanning 1,084 square miles.

It hosts approximately 450,000 people (INEC, 2023), half of whom are indigenous or mixed, and the other half comprises 50% Afro-descendant and mixed, as well as 50% of various nationalities and ethnicities, primarily European, and Costa Ricans from different areas of Costa Rica.

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

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

The discovery of the slave ships’ identities has been overseen by the Centro Comunitario de Buceo Embajadores del Mar, which I founded with four Afro and Bribri mixed youth. We created it in 2014 out of their dream to learn to scuba dive, to preserve the ocean, and their coastal Afro and Native American culture.

I have written a book about such an endeavor, where I created an ancestral, matriarchal African character to tell the story of a youth changing history through a dream about diving, which led to ocean conservation and, in the process, discovering their own roots in it.

Her name is Tona Ina; s’he was created 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’s deepest roots of identity, ancestral knowledge, and interactive symbiosis with our species as part of nature.

African descendants and Bribri/Cabécar natives claim to see a light in the darkest nights in Punta Cahuita in the Cahuita National Park. In the sea waters near that Point, two shipwrecks are being researched by Afro descendant and native scuba diving youth as potential slave ships, giving them more profound 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 on 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 humans’ 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 the 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 expertise to build 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 led to the discovery of an untold story under the sea, changing the history of Costa Rica.

I have written a story in 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 mentioned, her name is Tona Ina in Yoruba, which translates to Sea Light in English, and Dejë Boe in Bribri.

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

And our mother’s bodies -actual and ancestral – to keep learning to cohabit together with all of the other gifts of life that we are a part of, 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 by overcoming its sequels expressed in racism, supremacism, and extractivism.

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

Why? Today’s challenges about 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 create a common, shared experience that breaks the very system that makes humanity sick with greed. 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 of our place in the regeneration of all of 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 their broken global system into transitions to new ways of relating as humans in the planetary family that nurtures all.

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

To recognize the spiral-wave dynamics of the sea as the patterns that connect how we return to our powers to regenerate, share, care, and remain connected to the whole web of life that keeps appearing in memory, history, and movements forever, until – and if -the balance is reestablished in humanity’s presence on 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 are not the “contraries” and their 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 whole 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 amphibious 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 with 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 Priscila Rashad has observed: “Before a child talks, they sing; before the child walks, the child dances; before the child writes, they paint…” 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 at the right time.  We do not teach them to walk, talk, paint, or sing tunes; they come knowing, but it manifests itself when their body, and if the self-organized body is ready and the enabling conditions are there, is prepared.  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, need, or pain.  Laugh for joy, affection, and satisfaction of needs met.

What we do teach them is the language of the particular culture in which we were born. The “mother tongue”, we call it. What makes it unique compared to the millions of other languages? The language we learn from the “motherer”, which means the language we know 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 our lives; the development of all self-organized intelligences; our connection with water and its most vital imaginings 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: biologically, historically, culturally, sociologically, economically, and mythologically, in the Caribbean.

The children learn that the Southern Caribbean is a place where everything came by way of the sea, the people (from Africa), the food (by fisherfolk), the offerings of the gift of life 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 are not a place in and of themselves. It is the constant, yet cyclical, reminder of the oceanic planets that life is all about amphibians, as without water and its cyclic dynamics, we would not live.

Thus, with the children and youth, we turn the sea into their classroom for learning and expressing their dreams through songs, painting, drawing, storytelling, and discovering untold stories, and hopefully move closer to our 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, it also leads.
Work on creating  a peaceful, creative, safe, and 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 the family
and the community
Engage in collective
construction of alternatives.

Understand that children come knowing how to seek the fulfillment of their needs: we coo, we cry, we laugh, and so on. We know equality with motherer who care freely.

However, there have been historical tidal waves of deconstruction and dismantling that can be destructive, thwarting our best capacities.

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

  • In childhood, we experience our needs and learn how they are met or not, and girls and boys are not as 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 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 socio-cultural, political, and economic commodification structures and dynamics, and the political agency to change them, women tend to try to fit in, such as in marriage… until we rediscover our all-regenerating powers, where we are part of the picture and our leadership and paradigms become part of the transformation.
  • In old age, some fixed roles are erased due to 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 knowledge or understanding.

Note: The concept is attributed to Guillermo Dilthey in the emergence of hermeneutics: an 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 on the idea that all change and all phenomena occurred through cognitive processes.  In other words, “self-organized”.

My note: The mind is part of our nature; thus, it is nature in one of its expressions towards adaptation in the living world. Chilean Humberto Maturana considers “self-organization” a category applicable to every organism.

Joan Marler quotes J. Campbell 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 most excellent heuristic value for future works in the hermeneutics of arqueología and anthropology. 

What did she contribute to it? Al Marler says that 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 is a reality, as it is 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, especially 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.