1. (inter)tidal textualities
we consider the littoral zones as a pretext for developing a literary counter-aesthetic. littoral zones are liminal geographies, they are sites of perpetual flux. ecologically, they are areas of high turbidity and biodiversity. thus, with the shore as our locus, we simultaneously propose and enact a turbid literary practice, after éduoard glissant’s poetics of relation and the “right to opacity”.
italicized phrases, glossaries, the singular authorial subject, and show-don't-tell maxims have become a few methods for ignoring and repressing the flourishes of language inherent in the embodied (oral, performative, gestural) and textual traditions from the global south. the current capitalist regime weaponizes genre and emphasizes categorizability/transparency of authorial identity, audience, and subject matter at the expense of writers from the colonized world who navigate the fundamental contradiction of resisting the metropole with its own rhetorical/linguistic principles.
these stressors, alongside the writer’s need for economic stability and artistic visibility, create the conditions for a stifled imaginative range. with (inter)tidal textualities, we roundly oppose these impulses. we, susceptible to this symbolic violence, resist with an obstinate pleasure in the sounds and shapes decidedly indigestible to the so-called universal audience: whiteness. the text need not operate in the singular trimmed fashion generated and perpetuated in west-centric writing workshops. we know that the text can flow in varying directions, bloom like underwater foliage, and become an errant subject, refusing the strictures of form and genre established through violence.
through littoral, we perform the structural misrecognitions and miscommunication between dialoguing minds. by decentering clarity, the idea of a clean transmission of message from one zone to the other, we will find liberty in the cut and mix, in the infinite recombination of signs, a flood that spills beyond the narrow band/zone/belt/region of sense/logic/reason/understanding.
2. coastal intimacies
how can one speak of intimacy where a sinister connotation overdetermines what forms of touch are possible under the trade in flesh? how can we shift, if for a bit, from the intense, roiling life of the hold, to imagine the vast fields of cultures, their intimate tensions, betrayals, and loyalties? what is (west)african personhood, if it ever existed? what happens when (west)african personhood encounters the descendants of the enslaved, the objectified, the socially dead? what happens when the (west)african person becomes the enslaved, the objectified, the socially dead?
coastal intimacies are necessary but uncomfortable touches. like the knuckle pressed hard against the rib to dislodge a choke, we explore the (fraught) relations and the (wounded) kinship between the continent and the black diaspora. through coastal intimacies we ask questions, open up the conversation anew, with the akan flourish of yɛ nim, nanso yɛ bisa (we already know why, yet we ask), an answer to its antagonist nipa a wo nim no ewia no, wonnsɔ kanea ɛnnhwɛ nenim anadwo (the person with whom you are familiar in daylight should not be identified by a lamp in the night). these proverbs stage the paradox of recognition, an example of the antagonistic tendencies within cultures. however, misrecognitions populate social reality. through coastal intimacies, we explore these epistemes of misrecognition.
coastal intimacies are proddings into the sensitive corners of intraracial contacts. the coast is etymologically linked to the rib, flank, side, the uncomfortable sensation of being tickled, the horror-stunned laughter as its effect. the coast is the pre-transit, the site where many humans, strangers among familiars, are fused into the commodities in the middle passage. it is the shore in the literal sense. here the african was shaved, washed, and sheared away from the land, now strangely familiar, into a hostile alienation of the middle passage and the americas. it is a site of paradoxes, of limits that transcend immanently.
the africans of the west african coast have also been altered by encounter in that irruptive event of enslavement, it is the uncanny sameness of the trans-atlantic diasporic african to the continental african, a series of misrecognitions that both constitute and dismantle the littoral zones of blackness, as an articulable, articulatory, cluster of position-takings, or position-inflictions, in the arrangement of empire.
3. (c)littoral: erotics
following the questions of fraught coastal intimacies, we enter into the even more treacherous belts of the erotic, of pleasure, leisure and desire potentialities, of the movements of bodies, organs, of sensuous viscerality, their uses, their ends within themselves.
the carnival, carnal, porous structuration of the self and desire.
(c)littoral questions the investments in the flesh from the coast across the atlantic to the americas. it prefigures modes of erotics at play at the coast, drawing from the sexuality of yemoja and the duplicity of esu-legba, their brimming surplus of gendered configurations, the rise of commercial sex work along the coast during, before, and after colonization, the return of formerly enslaved folk from the americas to the west african coasts with their technologies of self, gender and sexuality, the sexual license sanctioned by the restructuring of the economies around profit, the possessive individualisms and inventions of the powerful whose dilated appetites demand more flesh.
the question of the erotic, of the libidinal flows and recoils, is entangled with the ethical limits of desire—an entanglement with its dangers and necessities.
(c)littoral fashions itself around the possibly minimized or obfuscated propulsions of desire among west africans enslaved within the violent architectures on the shoreline, and the middle passage. it also explores the attempts by coastal elites in the 19th century to control the bodies of women through colonial laws, the invention of homophobic codes to govern bodies that rebel against heteronormativity, and the more effective imposition of gender hierarchies. it accounts for, traces forms of arousals, the swellings and squirtings of the roiling waves on the shore, the push, pull and relaxation of shoreline fractals, of foams bristling and bursting, of lives dissolving into the melting heat of passion, to heightened life or spiritual death.
(c)littoral is interested in the ethics of pleasure, its supposed limitations when surrounded by subjugation, degradation, and the destruction of human beings and their material bodies. it follows and haunts the expressions of leisure, voluptuous despair and abandon, as are practised now just as they were practised in the past, the sublime surrender to the boisterous expanse, a seething sheet of meaning, hope, confusion and pain, a mangled coil of desire and regret.
the paradoxes of the sublime, of the body, as that which is susceptible to the brush and tug of distant forces, of the tidal incursions against and for the body, of the celestial effect upon terrestrial bodies, of the hint of portentous proximity, or gravitation and gravidity and miscegenation.
here, pleasure is figured within a geographic habitus, wherefrom it emanates, returns, diminishes or intensifies. The (c)littoral summons the suppositions of tourisms along the coasts, the sexual economies that undergird them, the long tissues of desire that subtend the economic and political movements of the shorelines.
one also thinks of fluids, both those of cleansing and pollution, those that cool and those that torch the air. we are talking of the black scourge of oil extraction along our coasts, the many spills of black fossils upon the seas, lagoons and lakes, the planetary levels of disasters building up along our coasts, but also the blood leaks of the working class, of the seeping of quick metal in the waters due to gold mining, the poisoning of the arteries of nations for the extraction of gold, oil, bauxite.
an anti-mythologizing praxis moves the (c)littoral. the clitoris is a tip, a phenomenon with a deep substructure, it emerges, or is always emerging. the staging of this genital middle ground is of importance here, a kind of non-arriving motion, like the movement at the shore.