Ocean, Sky, Sugar, and Spirit

Firelei Báez is a contemporary Afro-Latinx artist from Hispaniola whose work engages with a broad range of geographies, histories, and Afro-diasporic cultures. This article addresses Báez’s 2019 installation A Drexcyen Chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), a work that brings together the historical and spiritual worlds of Hispaniola and New Orleans through an epistemological and ontological proposition that I term “pooling.” I argue that in Báez’s installation pooling brings together worlds that have been torn apart by colonialism, allowing moments of historical and spiritual confluence between the island of Hispaniola (comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and New Orleans to surface. By pooling together seemingly disparate elements of Afrofuturism, the Haitian Revolution, and Afro-diasporic religions in the Caribbean and the United States to contest the compartmentalization of (neo)colonial histories, A Drexcyen Chronocommons models a vision of the world that is multiple yet overlapping. In addition, the installation’s purposeful attention to the often undocumented role of women in the histories of the region furthers the potential of pooling by proposing lineages and narratives sustained by alternative timelines, as well as methodologies that reveal threads of continuity in the midst of violent imperial fractures. Pooling therefore opens the door to repair, suggesting the possibility of cultivating worldviews not preemptively torn apart by plunder.