Hemispheric Wake Work: Afro-Indigenous ancestral praxis of territoriality in Guatemala

• In Event: Feminist eco-ethics

Description for Program

Garifuna performances center the soundscapes, particularly Garifuna drumming, as the sounds of reckoning and resisting which have been vital to the discourse of the Caribbean coast. To remember the sounds of yurmein (homeland) is to acknowledge and process the choreographies of Garifuna subjectivity in relation to the nation-state. Intergenerational conversations and spiritual performances amplify social movements for tangibility and validity. Ancestral Land and continuous displacement throughout Central America are memories of exile embedded in women's flesh as embodied archives of ancestral praxis. The intersection of Blackness and mobility is underrepresented in the discourse of citizenship, and personhood through the various forms of migration from their new homelands in Central America. Drawing on my analysis of policies from 1980-present concerning Garifuna people migration narratives, I use Deborah Thomas's form of witnessing and Christina Sharpe's wake work to centrally ask: What are we sustaining and remembering if not the ancestors? How is kinship and the intersection of temporality not divine? The Garifuna spirituality and belief in the power of their extended kin, both living and dead, are the essence of Garifuna duo. This matter of navigating the world through the connection to the ancestors is rooted in the language and Garifuna way of being. This will be a Black feminist reading of sanctuary, praxis, and embodied archive centers Garifuna women as cartographers and the main partitioners of the Garifuna duo.

Author

• Daisy Guzman, University of Massachusetts- Amherst