I often think back to the short video you sent me some weeks ago of your surrounds framed so simply and powerfully by the three words: volcanic, oceanic, Atlantic. I had meant to send you, in return, one of the black shores at Cabassango -- the Atlantic shoreline that sits at 5.5541°S, 12.2491°E in my native Cabinda. To me, it's a place where the short distance between Malongo Bay to the north and the Port of Cabinda to the south momentarily collapses into a single, suspended horizon. These two logistical nodes -- just twenty kilometers apart -- have bound our lands and waters into a planetary system of circulation for over four hundred years, and counting.
I often describe these shores as inherently wavy, cyclical, Atlantic, and immanently Black -- both in the literal and figurative sense. The metonymy, black, in this context, unearths the absent presence of the door of no return and the storms that saturate our air, soils, and waters -- a lingering imprint of shifting imperial and colonial regimes. Chevron's, then Gulf Oil's, seventy-year's mining operations is only the most recent chapter in this long and layered geographic script. And yet, even within that history, the black shore also invites me to tend to the elusive poetry of the ordinary that emanates from the movement of the beach; the soft gestures and rhythms that seep into our collective political imagination. This past month, I kept returning. Time and again, I would sit for hours between my daily morning swims, watching the black Atlantic waves crash, and simply stare at a horizon teeming with multiple unknowns before eventually fetching my usual motorcycle ride at the Rotunda do Cabassango to resume my daily itinerary of family visits and field recordings scattered across the city of Tchiowa.
Why exactly did this ritual become the anchor that would intimately draw me back? Frankly, I didn't know at first. Especially not when I was submerged underwater, holding my breath, attending to the dissolving chatter of fishers, of kids playing in the glittering sands. I guess I sensed the distance between two opposing ontological relations that the shore stories. Possibly, I was even seeking answers to my involuntary dislocation at a young age. Or maybe I was trying to grapple with how my multiple returns, thinking with Aimé Césaire's Cahier, pulled me deeper into my visceral (re)readings of the shore. I began to wonder how this praxis of return might be the device through which I could possibly decipher the undercurrents of the murky fluid and solid textures that undulate on these black shores. All of this -- these thoughts, questions, and longings -- seem to converge around a shared middle ground: oil. Not as a commodity, but as a residue that continues to wash up in moments of unfolding catastrophes.
I also wanted to share with you how I spent the past few months before my return to mining historical strata. Alongside my wonderful sojourners, Max Cooper-Clark and Gloria Pavita, we moved between the UK, Belgium, France, Portugal, Germany, DR Congo, and Angola, sifting through historical records from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that linked geology to the kinds of ideologies and atmospheres that have shaped the Congo Basin -- the vast ecoregion and broader cartographic imaginary to which Cabinda belongs. This had us exhume nearly 150 years of critical inflection points in history, tracking, reconstructing, and collapsing time as we went by.
Among hundreds of archival entries -- exhausted, indexed, and cataloged -- I continue to return to one: H.M. Stanley's map of the "Geographical and Commercial Basin of the Congo," drawn in 1884, which Max and I sat with for hours at the British Library in London back in November. This map, drawn within the contours of Rev. Grenfell's hydrographic tracings and sketches, has somehow become a significant spatial-temporal marker to us as it links together the destinies of a number of solid and liquid geographies -- the abyssal edges of the Congo Basin -- at one particular moment in time. It is a map that joins a constellation of earlier practices that laid claims to territory and echo in later moments of cartographic violences -- lands partitioned and instrumentalized for conquest; mapped to deplete, separate lives, and scatter lineages. It traces a continuity of movements. Its subtext reveals the different speeds that have carried peoples, commodities, ideologies, and infrastructures across centuries. I can't help but sense how all of this forms an uncanny tapestry of the kinds of necropolitical instruments that continue to give rise to new and old forms of power and domination, working to negate nature and arrest infinite variations of life. But I am still uncertain if this was ever the right place for me to begin the writing I have at hand. A dear friend had once asked me what I really hoped to find in these archival collections that I don't already know. You know, those veins that connect the Basin to the vast geology of data and information recorded in maps, drawings, photographs, geological surveys, legal reports, letters, sedimentary core samples, and fiscal policies that now lie shelved in the British Library, BnF, RTP arquivos, Library of Congress, New York TimesMachine, MARUM, RMCA Tervuren, Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Black Cultural Archives... My own question remains: what did I possibly hope to read apart from the flattening of the spaces, places, and histories that I know too well -- the readings that render our geographies as mere raw material for the colonial making of modernity?
I wonder how you, in Praia, are thinking about time, distance, and place? I wonder what the shores mean to you?
Greetings from windy, sunny, dusty Praia. It's Harmattan season. The sands of the Saharan desert reach our shores in a persistent haze (po di terra, as we call it) like heavy whispers carrying both particles and the memory of extractive routes, of past and present displacements, of cartographies drawn across our distant, yet intimately linked, geographies. These sands are carried in the air we breathe, physically and metaphorically. Sand and salt blend in the atmosphere, thick with histories and imaginaries, stitching together threads of anthropogenic violence across both solid and liquid geographies. I keep returning to how radically different geographies and geologies -- the desert, the island, the forest -- are woven together through colonial entanglements. These are not empty lands, but dense terrains of resistance, reminding me of Samia Henni's work resisting the colonial "emptying" of the desert.
You asked how I think about distance, place, and time from Praia. As I write, I sit with the image of Cabassango's shores, painted by your words in deep Black ink. I also move my thoughts back to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, from where I've recently returned. The Atlantic felt like a mirror there, holding our shared histories, reflecting back our present-day struggles and solidarities -- a living archive of diasporic identities, movements, and stories. I recently described Salvador to a friend as a place that welcomes and holds us; cradles us in care, its shores rocking us back and forth. It feels umbilically tied to ours. The metaphor may seem worn, but I reach for it again and again, searching for a language capable of carrying both the intimacy and the rupture of that bond.
I sometimes say that I have to go to the diaspora in order to return to Cabo Verde -- to reread it from a different perspective. It is a very difficult place to unravel. From this edge, from these islands -- occupied, exploited, and settled to serve the slave trade and other European imperial missions -- I wonder we might rethink our relationship with the shore, one that has been marked by trauma, dependence, and ambivalence? What does it mean to return to the shore as an epistemic space -- a site for liberatory political imagination?
The framework I proposed to explore during my time in Bahia was "Ingesting Water(s), Breathing the Ocean, Liquid Alliances of the Black Atlantic." I was searching for ways of expanding my understanding of Afro-diasporic spatial practices: contemporary, self-affirming practices of belonging that unfold alongside the negotiations and struggles against enduring colonial logics. My time with the marisqueiras -- fisherwomen and activists of the island of Maré in Bahia -- marked me deeply. These women are engaged in struggles against environmental toxification caused by polluting industries that occupy former plantation lands. Despite the physical and emotional demands of their struggles, they continue to cultivate spaces of care, solidarity, and respite. They gifted me the experience of the mangue (the mangroves), which unfolds simultaneously as a space, a temporal marker, an ecosystem, and an entity. It exists in multiple registers at once, challenging containment within a single category. For them, the mangue is a place of nourishment, celebration, resistance -- fluid sites, at the intersection of solid and liquid geographies, that operate as epistemic grounds.
I've been thinking of Katherine McKittrick's geographies; Black geographies that are not fixed, but shifting, layered, insurgent. They articulate a different spatial logic, one that refuses erasure and flattening, as you also spoke about. And I also recall your beautiful invocation of the shore as immanently Black. But now I am back in Santiago Island in Cabo Verde, an archipelagic nation deeply embedded in the historical, political, and cultural condition of the Black Atlantic. The video I sent you was filmed on the northern tip of the island, on the shores of Tarrafal, a place marked by the violent legacy of the colonial prison. I wander, back and forth, leaping across vast times and distances, between these interconnected geographies, asking how to build alliances through the shared continuities of struggle, survival, and radical care.
I was thinking about the idea of shores as an analytical and conceptual framework, as both a metaphorical and literal portal and anchor. These shorelines -- this tidal island in Salvador de Bahia -- mirror and reflect the very thing you're talking about: the continuities of violences, which are spatialized in these shores, but also the resistances that emerge. We could stay with this idea of shores as a generative location from which to weave connections, to think across temporalities and geographies. I think of the shorelines as this recurring condition-space, but also about disconnecting from it, or not necessarily grounding the conversation only in a geo-referential condition and literal edge, but more thinking through its affective and relational characteristics. How can we create a more expansive idea of shore? This brings me back to the idea of mud, to a tidal zone. It's the same kind of condition that captivated me in the mangrove tidal spaces of the island of Maré, and its quilombola communities in Bahia. One of the fisherwomen there described it as a portal to ancestral connection. Another person described it as a space of care, a place where they go to celebrate. It's a remarkable space: it operates in emancipatory, and perhaps even disruptive ways. It is also a space of joy, which is vital, especially because in the background, in close proximity to these places, there are petrochemical processing plants that sit just across the shore. These spaces function as geological formations in flux, portals that both disrupt and hold possibilities otherwise.
I genuinely embrace your prompt which propels us toward something beyond the shore. I do sense a profound and inevitable infrastructural relation between offshore and onshore formations -- the sea, the shore, the soil, and otherwise -- one that is mutually constitutive and instantly unfolding. Surely, the shores we track in Bahia, Praia, and Cabinda are analytical, epistemic, and layered terrains of convergence. Crucially, they are fixed points of arrival and departure if we consider the historical continuity that binds slavery, colonialism, and geologic extraction together.
Malongo Bay in Cabinda, the present site of Chevron's fossil fuel mining, anchors this in stark clarity. This location, now synonymous with industrial capital, was once (re)scripted as the portal that would link Cabinda, the Middle Passage, and the Americas. The absent presence of the door and the vessel stages and scales the cross-temporal relation between the monstrous violence of the slave trade to contemporary forms of extractivism. What I'm trying to say is: the violence was once spatialized on these shores, and it continues, yet in a mutated form. In this space, oil becomes another rupture in this enduring historical arc. To stay with this longue durée, it is a layered accumulation of the past and of the ancestral energies, which seep through and pool into the strata of the Earth. These energies and fossilized remnants of ghostly matter that are now found and excavated on the same sedimentary grounds where histories of uprootedness and dispossession were once written, unfold a site of historical inscription.
But here's where I want to pause, and shift the frame slightly. Because while the shore -- as geology -- is undoubtedly instrumentalized and weaponized and reproduced through grammars of conquest, I'm pulled by its relational dynamic; drawn to the idea of the shore as a site of possibility, too. If we consider the alliances that act on it to assert political and ontological transformations -- adeptly shifting these currents, charting out possible ways of moving through and constructing worlds otherwise -- geology, then, holds within it rhythms of insurgency. Bahia taught you this, and Cabinda bluntly reminds me of this, too.
Patti, in the early days of 2025, I was tracking the chronicles I had been told far too often as a child who once wandered on these lands, however panoptically observed, externally monitored. As I was holding my breath underwater at Cabassango, I was unaware how much these waters held me. It was only when I found myself in the cargo bed of our four-wheel-drive vehicle, winding along the cratered N110 road that cuts through the equatorial forests that hold a central place in my biography. As we bounced and swayed through Maiombe's mountainous topography -- which starts some hundred kilometers from the shores but extends further along the continental crust -- I began to measure the line between the sea, the shore, the soil, and the forests. As someone who traces my lineage back to the deep, high-lying woodlands of Alto-Sundi and Miconje in Maiombe, I'm pulled by the poder e ambenca tradicional and the rituals for (re)orientation that these forests harbor.1
I had recently shared with someone dear to me that there is a certain calmness to this place that grounds my soul, unlike any other place I have been or lived, voluntary or involuntary, and how these forested grounds -- and Basundi cartographies -- are the perfect place for me to make sense of the realities that surround us. In the back of our 4WD, it struck me how my praxis of haunting the different kinds of atmospheres that structure our lands lays bare how the relation between sea, shore, soil, and forests has operated as an active device for rehearsing freedoms. From this imaginary in Maiombe, I couldn't help but think back to Amílcar Cabral's poetry and ideas. I've been returning to his agropolitical writings from the 1950s in recent years as a site from which to link geological processes and ways of thinking about freedom. As ever, his words propel me to the mangrove life-worlds of Guinea Bissau, and of course, to where you are these days, Praia. I was reminded of how, for Cabral, weathering, or, the processes that act on and transform geology, "gives rise to new combinations, new equilibria, which in turn are constantly altered." What moves me is how Cabral treats the earth, soil, as a thinking partner; as a body that is simultaneously shaping and being shaped by peoples, political struggles, and imagination. There's something profound in thinking through how the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) mobilized the affordances of the Earth to shelter their liberation project in the sixties and seventies, whether it was through the mangrove schools that were rolled out in the so-called "liberated zones" of Guinea Bissau, as Sónia Vaz Borges reminds us, or through the PAIGC's use of symbolic iconographies that draw from the anatomical structures of geology to foster revolutionary and political consciousness, not only as tactical maneuvers, but ontological ones. As Cabral teaches us, and as Maiombe continues to teach me, the very malleability of geology is a site of possibilities -- one that is critically implicated in the political and social structuring of these places.
I can't help but hold Cabral's words alongside Christina Sharpe's "weather"; how she reads the weather and anti-Blackness as an atmospheric condition of time and place that produces certain ecologies. What stays with me is how she channels her energy into the kinds of new ecologies that simultaneously emerge, produced by those in the wake; the kinds of ecologies that conjure up new worlds born from climates of oppression and toxicity through the sheer act of breathing. So I wonder, what happens when we join the ideas of Cabral and Sharpe? How can we think of the role of geology in asserting these transformations? How can we possibly envision geological formations not as passive bodies, as backdrops, but as our active companions in our quest to conjure up worlds that hold lives in relation? What kind of relational geology begins to take shape? What if the shore carries a grammar that's older than Chevron and longer than any colonial maps can possibly trace?
These questions haunt and hold me at the same time. They have me return to a breathgiving exchange I recently had with a traditional regedor in Maiombe. His anecdotes about his youth as a Cabindan guerilla during the anti-colonial struggle against the Portuguese empire in the sixties had me consider how specific patches of woodlands were not merely chosen for their strategic military geography, but also for their symbolic forms and the harmonies they exerted; for the ways they could simultaneously hold and protect. Deep into our conversations, we trailed down the forest to a cave tucked beside a river and a waterfall. He shared how this space held the resistance; those seeking shelter, reposing, regrouping, and eventually, planning their next moves toward liberation. The cave itself was never just a shelter; it was a sanctuary, a sacred portal between the material world and the divine. Within branches of Bakongo cosmology, there's a deeply held belief that our ancestral souls, their energies, and the sacred sérias we summon for strength and protection, seep into our waters. They reside in seas, rivers, and waterfalls. They move between mountains and species of trees with an endurance that shrinks colonial time to a mere fragment in the much longer history of the world. From the scale of the rock, mountains, and groves of trees, to our rivers, waterfalls through to the sea, these spiritually, ecologically, and geologically layered formations are part of a living, breathing Basundi cartography, one that archives not just our prior fugitivities, but also our ways of always becoming, as Cabindans.
In a similar vein, I sense that these forested grounds are embedded in ancestral cosmological infrastructures that index an ecological intelligence that is inseparable from the political imagination that guides and carries us toward freedom -- both then and now. I sense a restorative continuity between the entire ambiente, those who once walked this Earth, and those who will follow. That's why I cannot read the forest apart from the shore: they are relations that shape and hold each other. While I speak about these places, I also try to leave as few tracks as possible. Afterall, I am still in the process of negotiating how much must remain unmappable. This, too, is part of the cartography; a knowing that must resist capture.
I'm drawn to the process of finding connections or mirroring historical links between places that shape our personal histories, geographies, and biographies. When thinking about the form that our exchange could take, we discussed biography as cartography -- how our life experiences and the embedded histories of places like the Maiombe forest, the shores of Cabo Verde, and Maré Island in Bahia inform our narratives. I wonder what this means for you, for your history, your family's history, to be part of a longer, slower journey toward emancipation and ongoing struggles for freedom, in Cabinda and beyond. This brought me back to the fact that I was born on a ship en route to São Tomé and Príncipe.
I was born in 1969, during the Portuguese colonial regime -- six years before independence -- on a ship that sailed from Lisbon to the former colonies. It departed from Lisbon, stopped in Madeira, then proceeded to São Tomé and Príncipe, and possibly continued to Angola. I'm not sure if it docked in Cabinda. A few years ago, I started looking into this from a different perspective. Growing up, I romanticized being born on a ship, I always thought it was poetic to be born on a ship. I was born on the Patria (which means "homeland" or mother/fatherland). But, as I now reflect on it, this must have been a very hostile space for my father as an African man. I recall my mother mentioning that the ship was filled with soldiers heading to the colonies, sent there because the armed struggle for independence was ongoing. Only recently did I grasp the implications of that space for my father. My mother was Portuguese, my father was an African man. What did all of this mean for them? And what did it mean to give birth to a child in that condition? Unfortunately, both my parents have passed, so there are questions I can no longer ask them.
It made me think back to Renisa Mawani's "Ocean as Method," where she conceptualizes vessels and ships not just as modes of transport, but as mobile sites of resistance; spaces where colonial power was both exercised and contested. When you first reached out and mentioned how you've been mining institutional archives, it reminded me of when I started researching the Patria. I came across blog posts written by sentimental Portuguese men, nostalgically framing this past as a golden age. I remember finding various types of information, but this was an "archive" that didn't speak to what I wanted to unpack. So when you mentioned that you've been working through the colonial archives, I wonder what other archives can we tap into that could speak to or even create alternative narratives? Or perhaps how to fabulate other narratives? This thought brings me to Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulation. Now that my parents are no longer here, how can I fabulate this birthplace?
I found a photo of the ship I was born on in its cemetery, in Taiwan, where it was disassembled. I am reminded of how violent and toxic the shipbreaking process is today. How it reproduces geographies of cheap labor and environmental degradation. There are so many different geographies to consider, each unfolding their own temporalities. The ship is a space that disappears -- a space that leaves so much in its wake, but one you can never return to. I have no ground to call my birthplace; it no longer exists. And yet, it's still grounded in multiple, layered, historical and epistemological conditions. It doesn't need to be a material grounding to be real.
I've been thinking about something you sent me, a line Christina Sharpe wrote to Alexis Pauline Gumbs:
I have been reckoning for twenty years with A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging's insights on Middle Passage as a 'rupture' to paraphrase Brand, in history, geography and being, on language and what it might do, on the shape and texture of dislocation, and what return might mean for those of us for whom leaving was never voluntary. Thinking as well about what the door might mean for those of us who did not leave through it, then, but whose staying was irrevocably changed.2
We "stayed," right? If we position ourselves on this side of the Ocean, there is so much that still needs to be conceptualized and theorized. I sometimes say that in Cabo Verde, in a way, we already had our own Middle Passage: a pre-Middle Passage, the space-time between the shores of the African coast of Guinea and the shores of the islands of Cabo Verde. I want to grapple with what that means, because Cabo Verde is a place marked by tremendous violences. It was imagined and designed as a gate for the extractivist economy of enslaved people. That short stretch of ocean between Guinea and the islands -- the space between the West African coast and Cabo Verde -- is a profoundly complex condition. By the time our ancestors arrived in Cabo Verde, they had already gone through a violent process of capture and displacement. To begin to understand Cabo Verde -- its historical role, but also its present condition -- we have to think about how it resists, how it has resisted -- but also how it reproduces, even if only symbolically -- many of these violences. That's why, in many ways, it feels like a place from which to think, to begin untangling these layered histories. We're often in conversation with the writings of thinkers writing from the other side of the passage -- from across the Atlantic. Their frameworks guide many of our questions. But how do we methodologically or analytically speak from this side -- about these spaces and what happens here -- while remaining in conversation with that side? It's complicated. I don't know if I have an answer.
There is something striking in how you hold the ship as a space of contradiction and negation, as both vessel and wound. You gesture toward its doubleness: a site of profound hostility and violence, but also a site of beauty and life -- your birth. I've been thinking about that, about how the ship becomes not only a container of memory, but a device for charting your personal navigational route. It connects distant Atlantic shores, and that movement -- both imagined and real -- feels deeply resonant to me. Maybe that's why I began my own navigation at the shoreline. Why I return, time and again, to the black shore and its glittering sands and pulsating life, as a space that harbors synchronous contradictions. It moves, it erodes, it resists; it sediments, gathers, and disperses. It is recursive, always in motion.
Thinking back to what really fixes and pulls me across these shores that we're tracking is not just geography, it's the kinds of languages that exist. Or, rather, the assemblages of grammars that are nurtured within and around these places. From Bahia's quilombolas and Guinea Bissau's mangroves and "mountains" to Praia's volcanic ridges and the rivers, caves and trees of Maiombe and Tchiowa, I sense an Africanness that is both situated and diasporic, one that defies the continental rift and the geographical bounds drawn in the maps that were made for our use. It's a way of moving with the Earth that resists total capture. It's performed, enacted, felt, and lived, and it links distant places together through the tangential histories, cosmoecological practices, and geologic relations that are built from these shorelines. I, too, sense a tension between the disparate sources that emerge both from the historical records now shelved in European collections and the grounds of lived experiences -- the fugitivities that these breathing cartographies make space for, scaffold, shoring. I am not entirely sure where exactly my landing place is, let alone will be -- these thoughts are fluid, unsettled, and unfolding. But I will tend and return to this space we share between us in my continual navigations; a point on my map that is yet unfixed.
Tantas saudades,
Magy
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McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Nenquimo, Nemonte and Mitch Anderson. We Will Not Be Saved. London: Wildfire, 2024.
Orock, Rodgers, Achille Mbembe, and Joshua Walker. "Regions 2050: Mobility, Extraction, Circulation." The WiSER Podcast, May 27, 2021.
Vaz Borges, Sónia. "The PAIGC's Political Education for Liberation in Guinia-Bissau, 1963-74." Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, July 1, 2022, ➝.