Mapping Meandering Poetics and an Aquatic Sense of Place: Oral Tradition as Hidden Transcript of Resistance

This chapter develops the concept of the “aquatic space” as an assemblage of always shifting relations in which everyday life patterns in Colombia’s Pacific Coast region are deeply entangled with a range of aquatic elements, such as intricate river networks, streams, mangrove swamps, high levels of precipitation, and significant tidal ranges. Prominent in this chapter are the perspectives of two collaborators from the town of Guapi, the local poet Don Agapito Montaño and the traditional healer and midwife Doña Celia Lucumí Caicedo, whose experiences and stories provide the individualized, personal keys through which a more analytical account of the sense of place in this part of the world is unlocked. Drawing on James Scott’s work on resistance, this chapter argues that the oral tradition functions as a hidden transcript of resistance that is turned public in the articulation of an Afro-Colombian identity politics that reclaims cultural and territorial rights.