Drowning in the Wake
摘要
This chapter turns to the Bahamian plays Diary of Souls by Ian Strachan and The Children’s Teeth by Nicolette Bethel to illustrate the ways theater re-presents coloniality’s inequalities, slow cultural and climate violence worsened by entrenched structural racism and imperial legacies of inhospitable spatial design. The plays reveal how local agency, the ability of Black bodies to thrive in the post-colony, is circumscribed by structural violence of coloniality that views all Black bodies as less than and slowly erodes their ability to breathe. It is drowning in the wake of the wave as much as it is dry land drowning, where structures oppress and undermine. The sea is beautiful as are the islands, yet to those bodies inhabiting their geographies they can be violent and vicious as waves wash over hardly stable homes in the face of colonially imposed power asymmetries and spatial (in)justices.