Dendrolatrie della scia. Corpi arborei e semi della memoria

Invisitization, dehumanization, pain of trauma, shipwreck: the wake is produced and reproduced in the sea, in a crossing in which the Mediterranean becomes an echo of the Atlantic and vice versa. Central to this echo is memory. The memory of a past that has never passed, that returns to fracture the present and continues to reproduce itself in a circular time of slavery, understood as the future created by it (Hartman 2007). And the creation of the future passes through the cultivation of the seeds of memory: seeds in motion, which thus create a threadlike texture that unites the Black Atlantic to the Black Mediterranean. Depositaries of the past and basis for the creation of the future, the seeds of memory and of re-memory (Morrison 2018 [1987]) will be used in the following pages to try to trace this circular time through the use of different tree figurations that dot the space and time of the wake.These arboreal figurations, understood as transformative cartographies, manifest themselves as dendrolatries of the wake that constitute the spaces of the sea of the Middle Passage as well as of the Mediterranean: from the plantation system, narrated in the novel Amatissima (Morrison, 2018 [1987]), to the ships of the wake like trees that plow the seas, up to the seeds of memory, the central symbol of Afrofuturism. A circularity of arboreal figurations that in their crossings and movements become bodies, spaces, products and maps of the diaspora; a circularity that recalls that of the time of slavery, which from the past - which has never passed - fractures the present and builds the future.