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Tidalectical Bodies: Reclaiming Skeletons, Liana~Hips, and Feet with Nathalie Hermine, Suzanne Césaire, and Kamau Brathwaite

This lecture-turned-essay examines how oceanic allegories challenge the colonial archive and reimagine Black women’s embodied histories. The analysis brings together Réunionnais writer Nathalie Hermine’s tale of an archeologist unearthing the bones of an enslaved woman, Suzanne Césaire’s poetics of “lianedialectique,” and Kamau Brathwaite’s “tidalectics.” Through the figures of Bergilde, a Martinican peasant woman dancing with the land and the ocean, a Jamaican matriarch sweeping her sandy yard and walking on the ocean, and the skeleton of an enslaved woman fortuitously excavated after a hurricane, the study explores how oceanic movement—walking, dancing, sweeping, speaking—generates an embodied epistemology of resistance. These allegories produce what the author calls tidalectical archives—fluid, generative sites that counter the erasures of official records. Allegory, rather than metaphor, structures this inquiry, enabling a more nuanced engagement with fragmentation, historical rupture, and the complexities of diasporic memory. The work argues for a tentacular, aqueous framework of analysis that resists colonial patriarchal logic and centers Black women’s political, poetic, and performative relationship to the ocean.