’ constitutes one of the so-called Anthropocene’s most urgent, visceral, and ethically fraught sites of political praxis and theoretical inquiry,” noted the feminist critic Astrid Neimanis. [+]Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, p. 20.[-] The earth as a site of experience and the reproduction of life is made possible by the fluidity of water. Another image of the planet takes shape and gender. The oceans’ waters can be seen from above, in space capsules, and from below, in underwater navigation vehicles exploring the oceans’ deepest trenches, places where the seas are home to volcanic vents and strange beings. The analogy of the planet as a womb and a placenta, a safe environment for myriad particles, microorganisms, and other life forms in a liquid state that mix and mingle as different bodies, brings into play modern certainties and knowledge about the beginnings of the earth and its oceans, their chemical composition, geological ages, hydric systems, about what they contain and where they are contained.
A few months later, in September of the same year, the federal government issued a veto against 22 points of Law Bill 1142/20, which had established some measures to protect traditional peoples and Indigenous and Quilombola communities. Access to water, which guarantees State protection in the case of a sanitary emergency by sending drinking water to the affected population, was one such vetoed point. The control and management of the ‘hydrocommons’ – supplies of drinking water that interconnect rivers, basins and diverse aquifers – implies the governance of certain forms of existence considered infrahuman. Water from repositories controlled by gigantic assemblages and profitable hydraulic structures, transformed into commodities by the State or local companies and transnational corporations through the addition of substances that ensure potability criteria, differs from other ways of living and being water.
The dry and the wet translate beginnings and endings, the time-spaces of life in the cyclical movements of the tides.
In the latter, water is much more than a vital substance, or what Linton has called ‘modern water.’ It is the water needed for the subsistence of Black, Indigenous and traditional populations who live by fishing in rivers and seas, and who remain deprived of basic sanitation infrastructures. [+]Geographers have been investing in making Indigenous maps that differently mark the ‘’places’’ and the ‘’spaces’’ of the riverside communities that speak the language of the rivers, mangroves and tides. See, for example, on the Afro-descendant communities of the Colombian Pacific, Oslender, U. (2002a). “‘The logic of the river’: a spatial approach to ethnic-territorial mobilization in the Colombian Pacific region.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 7(2), 86–117.[-] Non-modern ways of living/being water through which humans and non-humans cohabit temporally submerged worlds, the abode of amphibious and aquatic living, ‘watery’ ontologies, ‘bodies of water’ condemned to disappearance by the Anthropocene. In the words of the Vazanteiras Quilombolas, women who populate fluid places, where earth and water shape the mud, a ‘place,’ a physical state, an ontological condition: “Not only of the water, but of the mud. The river flows and whatever it leaves, we collect. Until it comes back and eats the land again.” The dry and the wet translate beginnings and endings, the time-spaces of life in the cyclical movements of the tides that cover and reveal the Ilha da Ressaca on the São Francisco River (Minas Gerais), near the Xacriabá Indigenous territory.
Beyond highlighting the lack of access to water, the absence of basic sanitation, and the pollution of water sources by mining and deforestation as examples of environmental racism, the manifesto also places side-by-side the relational constitution of nature and human beings. Or, we may say, other human beings, if we recall the centrality of water as a ‘way of life,’ as defined by the Black Coalition for Rights. In this way, the fluid present of the Vazanteiras could be seen to recover certain ‘liquid pasts’ in which black subjects figured as ‘aquatic bodies’ connected to the ocean, a vital space for the implementation of colonial projects, the plantation, and other capitalist structures. The ocean, the sea, and the frightening waters that connected the old and new ‘worlds’ were also home to transitory forms of existence.
Being ‘liquid’ or immersed in water was not a metaphor or even an attempt to highlight the fragile existence of Black bodies conceived as forms of infrahumanity. ‘Being water’ – or what we might coin a ‘water-being’ in an analogy to the Andean ‘earth-beings’ studied by de la Cadena – meant being subject to the consumption of other bodies and, in this way, being connected to other existents and their histories contained in submerged worlds. This connection cuts across human body tissues and the composition of saltwater.
Studies in different disciplines have explored the connection between Black experiences and water in contexts of deprivation, consumption, control, and debasement. In these experiences, the environment is a mediator that renders problematic any attempt to see the fabrication of nature apart from the radicalized production of bodies. The levees breached by the devastating force of Hurricane Katrina brought to the surface a myriad of actants – including families and populations sheltered and protected from racial violence in the bayous and flooded banks of the Mississippi Delta. The levees released the force of the waters and the beings that found shelter in them. The Mississippi, the “father of waters,” carries natural, geological sediments, chemical aggregations, and the remains of building structures that can both collapse or rechannel the waters to generate other forces.
Like the movement of floods, tides ignore the static, making water a space of contact with winds, coastal shores, navigation capsules, human and non-human others struggling against the currents.
“But the oceans are far from passive. They are one of the main actors of the active system which allows life to prosper on Earth,” contends Latour. [+]Latour, Bruno. “Foreword,” in Prospecting Ocean, edited by Stefanie Hessler. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019, pp. 11-14[-] At the same time, they figure among the most eloquent signals of the effect of the Anthropocene. As DeLoughrey pointed out, “sea-level rise is perhaps our greatest sign of planetary change, connecting the activity of the earth’s poles with the rest of the terrestrial world, producing a new sense of planetary scale and interconnectedness through the rising of a world ocean.” [+]DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press, 2019, p.138[-] Let us look at the Capitalocene’s inception and its direct connection with the transatlantic slave trade. From modern narratives of conquest to scientific ontologies, the ocean is an immersed territory that challenges our understandings of how, where, and when ‘life’ is made possible. In Helmreich’s terms, the ocean is an ‘alien frontier’ where the deep sea meets signals of the unfathomable and the speculative that mark outer space.
We can prospect the salty waters, the Atlantic Sea, the oceanic worlds of the modern Black Atlantic – a ‘system’ of cultural and political ideas on what it meant to humans – for instance, remaining attentive to what the Barbadian poet and essayist Edward Kamau Brathwaite has coined tideletics. Like the movement of floods, tides ignore the static, making water a space of contact with winds, coastal shores, navigation capsules, human and non-human others struggling against the currents. The Middle Passage created new ontologies on the seashores and in the sea’s depths through tidal movements. The waters and their distinct currents created a disposable infrahuman form of existence during the crossing. The control of freshwater on the ship, the rehydration of the ‘pieces’ after the shore landing and before their sale in the slave markets, punctuate the healing properties of water in the Plantationocene machine. [+]The relation to water makes the very ‘quality’ of the commodity, as in, for instance, the extensive use of the expression ‘saltwater negroes’ for the newly-arrived African enslaved. See Lombardo, Michael. “Water and Dehydration,” in Falola, Toyin, and Amanda Warnock, eds. Encyclopedia of the Middle Passage. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007, pp. 397-398; and Carvalho, Marcus J. M. “O Desembarque nas Praias: o Funcionamento do Trágico de Escravos depois de 1831.” Revista de História 167 (2012): 223-260.[-] As aquatic travelers sharing their infrahuman condition in the slave trade cargos, and as subjected bodies to be utilized as fuel for the energy supply needed within plantation structures, the African enslaved experienced ‘patchy’ new forms of existence. Tideletics is a conceptual device to explore the ‘alter/native’ histories of what were then called ‘New World’ societies, along with the ways in which the earth, water, land, and sea compose a unique entangled territory made of waves and tides of forced migration of human and non-human bodies, micro-substances, technologies, structures, and knowledge.
Should we listen to the Coalition’s plea as a situated political demand, a reminder that we are not all “in the same boat