“Warm waters trigger my PTSD. The water is warmer before a big storm.”
Ian – while swimming in La Esperanza
Karen Santos,
HASER-La Colmena Cimarrona, Vieques, PR
In the last few weeks I’ve been coming back to Yarimar Bonilla’s “Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico before and after the storm.” The multiple readings in this book helped me learn and critically think about disaster capitalism, shock, and trauma doctrine. In the introductory interview, it was especially interesting to read how another author, Juan Rosario, once mentioned that colonialism is a war over imagination. But is colonialism and the trauma it causes just a battle over someone’s imagination? How does trauma operate? Does it desensitize people, making them more individualistic? Or maybe it causes the opposite effect? A combination of both perhaps? Is trauma an imagined phenomenon? Bonilla further expands on how access to resources plays an essential role in how communities respond to trauma, and emphasizes that even when there are no resources (electricity, water, food, hospital), people still get together and share all they have, regardless of how little. The same keeps happening over and over again after any hurricane and earthquake hit the islands; or when Viequenses kicked out La Marina (US Navy).
Another critical claim in the book, I think, is that for Puerto Rico, border sovereignty is not enough. Sovereignty and power over all their resources and industries are needed to achieve actual freedom. To properly build an educational, energetic, or health system that works for all Puerto Ricans and is under Puerto Rican control. Hurricane Maria made the effects of colonialism and historical trauma more visible – the devastation and trauma were there even before any catastrophic event happened.
Topics that will accompany me in the following weeks will focus on forced displacement and new forms of settler colonialism in Vieques.