{"id":5672,"date":"2021-08-24T18:48:02","date_gmt":"2021-08-24T18:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ecoversities.org\/?p=5672"},"modified":"2021-08-24T18:50:04","modified_gmt":"2021-08-24T18:50:04","slug":"a-leap-of-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ecoversities.org\/es\/a-leap-of-imagination\/","title":{"rendered":"A Leap of Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Fran\u00e7oise Verg\u00e8s<\/strong><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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No change for the good ever happens without it being imagined first, even if that change seems hopeless or impossible in the present.<\/em> \u2014Martin Espada<\/p>

When I was an adolescent on R\u00e9union Island and I was walking in its impressive mountains, which all bear the names of Malagasy maroons,\u00b9 I imagined them looking down at the land of unfreedom, of plantations and colonial administration. They were free. They carved a land that belied the normalization of enslavement. At night, they went to the shores of the Indian Ocean to train themselves in the art of fighting. The slave owners, who deeply feared them, organized armed militia to wage war. The war lasted a century. Those who had killed a maroon were awarded with enslaved women, children, and men. Those who had been brought in chains to this French colony and had dared to imagine freedom when everything around them said that enslavement was natural and normal, had to be destroyed. Yet, their leap of imagina – tion was constitutive for the child and adolescent that I was. They created an art of marooning that had to be imagined in order to become possible.<\/p>

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\u00b9 Maroons were the enslaved who fled the plantations, for a day or more, or for years, establishing sovereign communities in the mountains of R\u00e9union. They renamed themselves, rejecting with this gesture the surnames that slave owners had given them (which could be demeaning). Through this self-naming, they expressed their anti-slavery resistance and their fight for freedom in their native language, Malagasy: Tsimendef (from \u2018Tsi Mandevi,\u2019 which means \u2018not a slave\u2019), Mafate (from \u2018Mahafaty,\u2019 which means \u2018one who kills\u2019), Dimitile (from the Malagasy word for \u2018the watchman\u2019), Tsilaos (from \u2018Tsy ilaozana,\u2019 which means \u2018a space that one does not abandon\u2019), or Anchaing and Heva.<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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This essay is part of the publication\u00a0Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection<\/i>, Carolyn F. Strauss (ed.), Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021,\u00a0www.valiz.nl\/en\/publications\/slow-spatial-reader.html<\/a>.<\/p>

Published under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0:\u00a0https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/4.0\/<\/a>,\u00a0with the editor’s and publisher’s knowledge and permission.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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