Ti -Bon-Ange

Research break : sketching a future character.

The Powhatan Mantle is an artefact that opens a door onto the history of some of First Peoples of North America.

Today, it is kept at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It was made in the early 17th century by Algonquian-speaking peoples from the Southern Chesapeake region, in Virginia.

(The name Chesapeake comes from an Algonquian language and may mean "great shellfish bay"/ "great water". Today Chesapeake refers to a large region on the eastern coast of North America around the Chesapeake Bay, including Virgina, Maryland, Delaware and Washington D.C.)

The mantle is associated with the Wahunsenacawh, whom the English called "Chief Powhatan". He was the paramount chief of Tsenacomoco, the Powhatan Confederacy, a powerful Indigenous political organization in the Virginia region. He was also the father of Matoaka, better known as Pocahontas.

In colonial memory, Pocahontas has often been presented as a symbol of peaceful encounter between Indigenous peoples and British settlers. But other readings, Indigenous and critical ones, remind us that she was a very young girl who was taken away, Christianized, displaced, married to a cultural stranger (John Rolfe), and brought to England.

The mantle also introduces the story of Opechancanough, Wahunsenacawh's close relative, who became a major Powhatan figure of resistance. Face with English expansion, the stealing of food, the desire for Indigenous lands and the development of tabacco cultivation, he led major uprisings againt the Britsish settlers; in 1622 and 1644.

What touches me about this artefact is that it materializes some aspects of their cultural world : political organization, spirituality, material culture, skills, animas, beads, skins, signs and territories.

In Anne Yentsch, "Beads as Silent Witnesses of an African-American Past," 1995

This drawing reminds us that , in African and Afro-diasporic studies, as well as in the the archeology of slavery sites, fragments of beads and ornaments can become silent archives.

Let us imagine !

There are several reasons for this silence. First, my computer is no longer working, and writing without a computer makes everything more complicated.

But more than that, these past few months have been extremely difficult. The teaching job I have been doing this year has deeply exhausted me. It drained a lot of my energy, my motivation, my joy, and at times even my confidence. I went through a period of intense fatigue, stress, anxiety, and discouragement.

Last month, I also burned myself and had to go to the hospital. Life, lately, has not been gentle.

Fortunately, I feel that something is slowly coming back. I am now in my last week before the holidays, and I am gradually finding motivation, clarity, and the desire to create, read, write, and think again. I do not yet know exactly what I will do next year. I am in a period of deep reflection: whether to stay here or leave, whether to continue on this path or completely reconfigure my life. But one thing is certain: I will return to what deeply nourishes me. I will return to research, writing, travel, knowledge, archives, objects, languages, memories, and the worlds that keep calling me.

This teaching experience has taught me a lot, but it has also deeply wounded me. I have been working in a difficult context, in a school and territory marked by many social tensions, violence, poverty, and colonial legacies. Teaching under these conditions requires an immense amount of strength. You have to face disrespect, insolence, conflicts, lies, fights, noise, exhaustion, and misunderstanding. You also have to survive in a professional environment that can be deeply anxiety-inducing, where you do not always feel supported, recognized, or protected.

I do not want to romanticize this profession. Teaching can be beautiful when there is respect, curiosity, and a genuine relationship of transmission. But in some contexts, it can become extremely violent for the people who experience it every day. This year has made me deeply disillusioned with a certain form of teaching. It has also reminded me that I do not want to live trapped in a job that destroys me.

I am not saying that I will never teach again. Perhaps one day, in another setting, in another country, in an environment where transmission is welcomed with respect, I will rediscover the desire to teach. I have experienced that elsewhere, especially in Barbados, where the relationships between students, teachers, and researchers deeply moved me because of their human and intellectual quality. But today, I know that I no longer want to accept just any conditions in the name of a salary or apparent stability.

During this period, what helped me hold on was returning to more intimate practices: writing my own meditations, recording them, reading, reflecting, reconnecting with books that accompany me, nourishing my Reading Circle, and slowly coming back to my research. These gestures reminded me that my mind was not dead. It was only exhausted. It needed silence, care, beauty, and depth.

So I am coming back here with a different state of mind. Perhaps more lucid. Perhaps more tired too. But still inhabited by the same questions: How do memories survive? How do objects speak? How do cultures continue to circulate despite violence, silence, and erasure? How can we restore a living relationship to knowledge, histories, places, languages, and inheritances?

I will soon share new texts, especially around my recent readings and my Reading Circle. I would also like to share some of my meditations, because they are part of my process of healing, grounding, and returning to research.

I send a lot of strength to everyone working in difficult environments, to those who are exhausted by their jobs, to those who feel trapped, worn out, devalued, or emptied. There are moments when we have to endure, yes. But there are also moments when we have to choose to protect ourselves.

Thinking about oneself it is a vital necessity.

I wrote a text on Substack about Nothing’s Mat by Erna Brodber.

There are books, characters, artists, or fictional figures that almost become symbolic sisters, brothers, or kouzin. They speak to things we have lived or felt. They make us feel less alone, more connected, more inspired, more understood.

Nothing’s Mat is one of those books for me.

Through Princess’s story, the novel explores Jamaican memory, diaspora, return, family silences, violence, transmission, repair, and social transformation. As Princess traces her family history, she also weaves a mat : an object that becomes a foundation, a source of strength, and a symbol of inheritance.

I chose to include this text in my reading circle because this novel speaks of social change, positive transformation, and the way some stories can help us understand, repair, and transmit.

See the full text on Substack.

In Suriname, I visited a bar-restaurant that stayed with me because it reflected the kind of use of Afro-descendant heritage I would love to see more often.

The place was full of Maroon art, especially tembé designs and carved wood. The tables were carved, the chairs were carved, the whole space was shaped by this material and artistic language.

Some time ago, i went to Paramaribo and this city left a very strong impression on me : an impression of softness, history, dream, and slowness.

I had the feeling that several words had settled onto the facades, the wooden houses and the atmosphere of the city center. Paramaribo, is a former Dutch colonial city whose historic center preserves architecture from the 16th to the 18th century. It reminded me at once of certain Caribbean architectures, but also of South American ones.

At one point, I stopped in front of a house at sunset. There was a small waterway beside it, palm tress, and a very soft luminous light, almost like being drawn back into a inhabited past. I saw Barbados, Guadeloupe and even Haïti.

The porches and balconies made me think the kinds of houses one sees in films set in the Carolinas or Virginia, and even New Orleans where I never been. The mix of people, the diversity also remininded me London. Of course, all of this belongs to my own perception of the town, shaped by the way i moved through, by what i was looking for there and by the inner state i was in.

Someone could ask : why find beauty in colonial architecture, shaped by slavery, domination and their afterlives? What i perceive is not admiration for the colonial or slave-holding administration. I feel something else through these walls : a historical density, presences, something subtle and powerful.

As if several threads of memory were crossing one another and drawing an invisible map between different Caribbean and Atlantic spaces. Spaces that are at once painful and luminous, and that continue to live within us, returning us to pasts, presents and resonances.