“We come, we come from a different place To feel culture As a sign of unity As Afros, that we all are Let's feel the identity Donated by a past That today we want to rescue And this identity unites us To be able to celebtrate With the owner of life The banquet of sisterhood"
Some days ago, we began a process that shook our souls, roaming our various territories with our memory, and meeting again with the motto of sisterhood. To speak of oral memory in Esmeraldas is to speak of culture and legacy, it is to speak of the heritage of the Cimarrón people and the struggle to keep each of those memories alive. Those two days of our workshop served as an induction for young black women from the seven cantons of the Esmeraldas province, who will be in charge of collecting information on oral memory. We could say, then, that the first objective of this project has been fulfilled: to promote research skills in Afro-descendant/Black women, who, after having discussed and clarified the concept of orality, feel qualified for the next objective: the realization of the interviews in their villages.
In an atmosphere of trust, the workshop participants shared their stories, experiences and knowledge. These ranged from the way they dress to their territorial processes, their advocacy, to the different ways having food, their medicinal practices, to understanding that orality is something that traverses the body of black women, things that are not talked about in our country’s school textbooks. Giving these aspects, and especially female actors, a central place within scientific fields of study is of primary importance.
The reflection on and recognition of the oral history of our peoples led the participants to propose that we should rewrite our history, that it should be investigated and told by us.
The three days of getting together - and in some cases, getting together again – allowed us to vouch for the following premise: "we are all knowledge, we are all oral memory"; we will continue discovering this, alongside other narratives, over the course of this project.
This first workshop was also an exercise in stimulating intergenerational dialogue. The conversations between participants rapidly changed from the nature and care of their African hair, to domestic life and motherhood, to their studies, their families, their territories. Through these interactions, they quickly wove a safe space, in which the younger researchers learned what struggles the older researchers had gone through, that they themselves are currently facing, and the older researchers could witness the changes in the experiences, in the struggles and conditions that the young researchers were going through. This evidences the ties that exist between the experiences of black women, and their constant position/situation at the margins of the state.
These experiences represent a preamble to an extremely important piece of ethnographic work for the dissemination, preservation, recovery and celebration of the history and heritage of black and Afro-Ecuadorian women in the province of Esmeraldas. Therefore, we conclude that it will be possible to meet all the objectives of this project, since the traditional ways of obtaining information about ancestral peoples will not be used, and rather this process will be a pleasant dialogue between the young women of each community and their interviewees, who - as expressed during the workshop - will feel the necessary intimacy for this nourishing research process.
Photos by Claudia Cortez
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