Basalt Sand
Basalt sand, a black
volcanic sand found on beaches near sites of volcanic activity, is formed from volcanic
rocks that have broken down into fragments, often when lava hits the sea. Other
black sands- heavier, glossier- are a partly magnetic mix, containing minerals
such as magnetite, hematite and ilmenite formed within alluvial deposits, the
main source of early gold mining.
In his essay The
Black Beach[1],
Eduoard Glissant reflects on the forms of chaos and futility generated by
ongoing colonial intervention in the political and economic structures of his
native Martinique. The beach behind his residence becomes an ever-changing
surface onto which rhythms of the seasons and movements between the land and
the sea visually shift and spread. Volcanic rock, carried by rivers from the
island’s interior and broken down by the sea, is washed over the darkening
beach as the rainy season approaches. Palm trees fold “like stricken bodies”[2],
as the storms arrive. As the season passes the dark material slips, with each
low tide, further into the sea, revealing pristine pale sand that glimmers as
the storms subside. The landscape becomes a threshold between order and chaos, between
interiority and the inexorable incursions of the sea-as-outside-world, and a
“constant movement between threatening excess and dreamy fragility”[3].
It is in the patterns within the seemingly chaotic movements of minerals, salt,
wind, rain, and apparently futile passage of a silent man who walks daily on
the beach, that Glissant glimpses the chaos caused by ongoing forms of
imperialism, economic exploitation and intervention that underpin the struggle
to establish independent post-colonial economies.
The landscape proposes a
logic of chaos, a means to confront the failure and futility that attends the
economic and political realities of the post-colonial island state. It is as if
living with and in attendance to the ecological languages - the movement of the
skies, the seas, the winds - offers poetic forms through which new rhythms may
be perceived, emerging not from a capitalist- imperialist logic of economic
expansion, but a logic intrinsic to the landscape, its histories and
ecologies.
The topographies of
volcanic landscapes are evidence of the earth’s power to profoundly disturb, to
obliterate architecture and infrastructure. Human communities inhabiting
geologically unstable environments live in constant awareness of their precarious relation to larger forces animating the landscape. Materials and minerals
found at sites of volcanic activity make the landscape appear alien; peaks
wreathed in cadmium reds, lakes soaked in lunar turquoise. In these spaces the
earth’s core trespasses towards its skin. We dig holes in the sand and find hot
water bubbling out over the beach. Geysers spurt mud and gas high over molten
pools, acrid yellow crystals accumulate over rocky terrain, sulphur infuses
neighbourhoods with its acrid stench. It is here we encounter the earth’s power
to dislodge, to obliterate. When the earth shakes, we must move under tables,
huddle beneath doorframes. Amidst these shifting, unpredictable spaces we experience
our vulnerability in new ways.
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[1] Published in Édouard Glissant and Wing, B. (1997). Poetics of
relation. Ann Arbor: Univ. Of Michigan Press.
[2] Édouard Glissant and Wing, B. (1997). Poetics of
relation. Ann Arbor: Univ. Of Michigan Press. Pg 121.
[3] Édouard Glissant and Wing, B. (1997). Poetics of
relation. Ann Arbor: Univ. Of Michigan Press. Pg 122.
Image (top to bottom):
1. Karekare, Aoteroa New Zealand
2. Estuary at Piha Beach, Waitakere, Aoteroa New Zealand
