The inaugural event of Bwa Kayiman: Crossing the Mangrove, On Forests as Sites of Eco-political Knowledge opens with keynotes from two decolonial thinkers: environmental engineer and political scientist Malcom Ferdinand alongside professor and poet Stéphane Martelly. Having extensively studied the relations between colonial history and environmental issues in the Caribbean context, Ferdinand suggests a reading of the Bwa Kayiman ceremony that initiated the Haitian Revolution as a foundational moment for a Caribbean decolonial ecology. He argues that reclaiming this politics of emancipation carried on by the enslaved and maroons of Haiti in the ensuing revolution helps break away from a rather technicist environmental narrative about the contemporary ecological crisis. In response to James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s well-circulated Gaia hypothesis, Ferdinand states that the Caribbean offers a radically different proposition he calls ‘Haiti’s hypothesis’: that through a decolonial struggle for justice, equality, and reparation, a politics of ecology can both touch the Earth anew and embrace the world. 

From a Haitian standpoint, Martelly explores through poetic writing the liminal spaces of liberation—the mangrove and the mountain—within the imaginary of Bwa Kayiman. Drawing on the work of various Black poets from the Americas, she examines how these specific ecologies only exist through the making of radical Black liberation, preparing an ‘outside’ from all colonial and supremacist systems of exploitation and destruction—a continuous process exemplified by Bwa Kayiman, but infinitely reiterated by Haitian cultural productions. Poetry therefore becomes another way of this making and thinking of liberatory ecologies.