Bwa Kayiman: Crossing the Mangrove

How true! Life’s problems are like trees. We see the trunk, we see the branches and the leaves. But we can’t see the roots, hidden deep down under the ground. And yet it is their shape and nature and how far they dig into the slimy humus to search for water that we need to know. Then perhaps we would understand.

 —Maryse Condé, Traversée de la mangrove (Crossing the Mangrove,1989)[1]

Bwa Kayiman: Crossing the Mangrove. On Forests as Sites of Eco-Political Knowledge marks the fourth chapter of a long-term curatorial investigation into the unfinished work and legacy of the Haitian Revolution. This landmark event continues to shape and resonate with present conditions of the Caribbean region and other latitudes. Furthering this legacy, the yearly Bwa Kayiman performative arts festival questions how freedom can be imagined and lived collectively, and how memory provides guidance towards emancipated futures.

As its subtitle indicates, this year’s programme looks to resistances from the Caribbean, the Americas, and beyond to think on forests—and more specifically, the mangrove—as a refuge and sanctuary for Maroon[2] and Indigenous lives. Caribbean thinkers such as Aimé Césaire,[3] Patrick Chamoiseau,[4] and Édouard Glissant[5] have described these porous forests as places that teach connection, opacity, and survival. Long perceived as a hostile space, the mangrove is reclaimed by Glissant as a place of refuge, creation, and cultural resistance, while Chamoiseau pushes further to reinforce its definition as a way of being in the world, a behavioural act and way of thinking: la mangrovité. The mangrove holds a multiplicity of layered histories and possible futures informed and embodied by the many species that populate it. It spreads out horizontally, much like Creole culture, which draws nourishment from various influences without seeking a single, vertical origin.

This edition of the festival borrows its title from writer Maryse Condé’s seminal novel Traversée de la mangrove (Crossing the Mangrove, 1989), which takes this rhizomatic ecosystem as a central metaphor to reflect on community formation beyond shared commonalties. As one of the characters of the book narrates her conversations with her foreign lover, she emphasizes the intimacy she feels with nature. Condé uses the deep, entangled roots of the mangrove to allude to the challenges faced and strategies developed by contemporary Caribbean societies and individuals in affirming their plural identity while maintaining cohesion and a sense of home. This was especially important in the face of social norms grounded in essentialist understandings of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class, which colonial regimes instrumentalized to establish hierarchies and division, thereby enabling ongoing exploitation. Echoing Condé’s contemplations, the festival poses a number of questions: How to maintain the spaces, political and cultural practices in which plurality is constantly cultivated? How to foster reciprocal relations with the land? And how to honour the ecosystems that have played such a significant role in countering colonial violence?

Today, mangroves are among the most endangered ecosystems on Earth. Extraction for the purpose of farming and urban expansion, as well as global warming and rising seas, threaten their existence. The same forces that once built the plantation system now erode coastal and island life, continuing a logic of colonial violence that perpetuates the ecological crisis at hand. Bwa Kayiman: Crossing the Mangrove responds to this tragic continuity. Through artistic interventions and collective presence, the programme is an opportunity to practise other ways of sensing, remembering, and acting. Collaborating directly with the Haitian diaspora in Germany and internationally, the festival does not seek to represent the country’s past but to work with the reality of its present and its unfinished proposition: that freedom is interdependent and the struggle for life is inseparable from the Earth.

Comprising performances, dance, films, rituals, conversations, gatherings, music, food, and participatory formats, the two-day festival unfolds in cycles of gathering, dispersal, and resonance. It resists the hegemonic culture of spectacle by stimulating learning—political, spiritual, affective, and social—during the programme’s intervals: in shared meals, in silence after sound, in the slower pace of the evening following the day’s events. The invitation is to attend with the whole body, allowing ‘not knowing’ to be a form of ‘knowing’ that enables re-enchantment, integration, humbleness, and respect for others.

As in previous iterations, Bwa Kayiman is also a moment to strengthen the voices of oppressed communities who continue to seek emancipation today, and to share their histories and fight for sovereignty. The 2026 edition welcomes a frame co-curated by members of the Okinawan diaspora in Berlin, highlighting Okinawa’s unique cultural identity formed during the centuries-long Ryūkyū Kingdom and the successive phases of external governance by Japan, and, over the course of the twentieth century, the US. By foregrounding Okinawan perspectives, the collaborators participating in the programme, including members from Brazil, seek to foster dialogue, recognition, and mutual understanding, while emphasizing their ongoing efforts to preserve their cultural heritage and articulate its place within broader global conversations.

In dialogue with thinkers and practitioners from the Caribbean, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, Bwa Kayiman: Crossing the Mangrove addresses the persistent remnants of imperial histories, ecological crises, and the growing neglect of land-based epistemologies. It offers a possibility of rethinking accountability through exchange and shared responsibility. For this reason, building collaborations with Germany’s universities has been a key effort this year, involving professors and their student bodies to integrate educational approaches that further these aims. Foundational to these endeavours—and the Bwa Kayiman project as a whole—is a notion of freedom underpinned by interdependence between memory, land, and the social body, and the cultivation of practices that uphold them.

 

[1] Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove, tr. Richard Philcox, (New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1995), 139.

[2] As an act of reclamation in response to derogatory origins, the term ‘Maroon’ is used widely and proudly in the context of anti-colonial and anti-racist work. It refers to Africans (and their descendants) who escaped and resisted enslavement, forming or joining free, self-organized, and hidden settlements.

[3] See: Aimé Césaire, ‘La condition-mangrove’, moi, laminaire … (Paris: Éditions du Seui, 1981) 30.

[4] See: Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

[5] See: Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).