Muhé Di Rancho, Be(com)ing with Calco: a Caribbean Feminist Practice for Decolonial Life Writing

Abstract

The queen conch—locally known as calco—is a vibrant assemblage of decolonial life force: creative inspiration, layered onto-epistemological symbol, ancestral carrier of stories and indigenous abundance and historical aquatic witness of the transatlantic Middle Passage. Combining autoethnography, decolonial Caribbean epistemologies and feminist posthumanisms, calco inspires a Caribbean feminist life writing practice emerging from a space of a slower ontology; it is creative, reparative, nonlinear, polyvocal and intergenerational in its movements and temporalities; it is an embodied practice expressing fleshy becomings; it is ecological, connected to the depths, fluidity and tidal waves of the Caribbean Sea, linked to situated shorelines. An ecotone space metaphorical for the liminal spaces of transformations and the numinous dimensions of everyday life. Writing ourselves into being from this space is a process of actively worlding our decolonial becomings.