by María Suárez Toro,
Escribana

Note: Inspired in  the denial of the sea as the denial of all of life. In the movie “Ben Hur”, the captain tells the rowing enslaved: “This ship is your body, that drum is the beating of your heart, and your rowing is the glory of Rome.” (https://youtu.be/P0wQSh4StFs)

They denied the very place
where they were born:
a blue planet in a universe
that has given rise
to everything in their lives.

They denied the very ocean
that allowed them travel,
just as they arrived,
to a world they called “new”,
by ignoring the rest,
which they also denied.

They even denied
the origin of the place
where they came from.

“The Indies” they called
where they arrived.
Because with their arrogance,
they named her in the likeness
of the riches they sought,
instead of appreciating
the new ones they saw
before their very eyes.

Denying it all,
they were the only “new” ones,
because all that was here,
where they arrived
in the new world,
had originated
in the same womb
that they denied.

We call them “conquerors”,
but that is too soft a name,
for who they really were.

Primarily predators.
Predators of all of nature,
predators of women’s fertile “lands”,
and of all untamed life
that the sea brought forth.
The seeds on earth regenerate;
and women’s bodies and gifts,
birth and rebirth.

The patriarchs, in their thirst to control,
have impose on everything since then:
colonization through privatization,
and through expropiation
of the gifts of nature.

And they recolonize every day,
though the patterns of exchange
of what they kidnaped,
without being theirs to have:
women’s wombs and offspring,
which they privatized
through marriage,
inheritance and violence,
to control of our lives.

They also recolonize
the seeds of life and livelihoods,
which they have tried
to sterilize,
genetically modify
and privatize.

And then they have created
amazing technologies with algorithms
that destroy what brings
the very regeneration in life:
self organization,
intractive symbiosis,
fractals as the patterns of life,
gifting and caring,
among other life-regenerating paradigms.

But they have not
been able to touch it all.

Not our dreams,
not our nature,
not our confidence,
not our resistance,
not our alternatives
lo live and regenerate
natural cycles of life.

Not our mythologies
in the vital deities
that are in mythologies,
that remind us
who we are
And where we come from.

How to regenerate life;
its own vitality to thrive.

Life, liberty
and natural interconnection,
those gifts
that cannot be bought or sold,
they have not controlled.

We are the beat,
we are the oars,
we are the drums
and together
with the rest of nature,
we are the glory,
not of “Rome” –
(a metaphor of civilization,
that they also destroyed)
No, we are part,
of ONE WHOLE PLANET
that counts on us,
to regenerate,
together as one.

We are the vital reserves,
together with the rest of life.

To decolonize it
Is to claim the free regeneration
of the seeds of life.

These are the times!
And the time is now.