Simarrona: Beyond Etymologies toward a Practice of Unlearning

This essay proposes the historical term simarrona (used in colonial Louisiana archives) as a heuristic for unlearning certain reading practices of the term maroon and its persistent “etymology plot.” Simarrona not only troubles the neat linguistic geographies of the term maroon; it foregrounds the instability of colonial grammars and their attendant binaries. The author pairs the poetic resistance with the colonial grammars of Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, and fahima ife, with the instability of simarrona in the archival record to propose a way of reading archives of marronage that leaves space for that which was withheld.