Material reparations through bottoms up movements are possible, community groups such as CARICOM prove.

In 2013, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) established National Committees on Reparations and a Reparations Commission in order to “establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparations by the former colonial European countries, to the nations and peoples of the Caribbean Community, for native genocide, the transatlantic slave trade and a racialized system of chattel slavery.”1Citing the crimes against humanity that disenfranchised both the victims and the descendants of colonial genocide and slavery, the Commission brought forth a lawsuit against the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France in order to begin a “reparatory dialogue to address the living legacies of these crimes.”2Demands like these for reparations are part of a long history of marginalized peoples wrestling with the aftermath of imperial violence, slavery, and degradation. At its center, the CARICOM lawsuit underscores what theories of decoloniality have long emphasized: that the ideological structures, orders, and legacies of colonialism subsist even after colonial administrations ceased to exist in full.3Aníbal Quijano (2000) calls these structuring processes the “coloniality-of-power” and this concept is central to the ways in which I analyzethe struggles for reparations in the modern/colonial world. The quotation from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masksthat prefaces this essay is part of his meditation on anti-colonial struggles and what he calls “a double process” of inferiority (xiv).4For Fanon,the anti-colonial struggle must be waged on two levels: the objective and subjective,or the colonial administration and ideology. Proof of the need for this dual struggle can be seen in the failure of the political decolonization projects that reached their apex in the 1950’s and 1CARICOM member states include: Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago. Press release 285/2013 (10 December 2013) CARICOM Reparations Commission Press Statement Delivered by Professor Sir Hilary Beckles (Chairman) on behalf of the CARICOM Reparations Commission Press Conference Regional Headquarters, UWI 10th December 2013 (accessed 11/9/14 http://caricom.org/jsp/pressreleases/press_releases_2013/pres285_13.jsp). 2The CARICOM suit also includes other slave-owning nations of Europe including Spain, Portugal, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.3Here I am referring to the genealogy of decoloniality,for which the modern/colonial world begins in the 15thcentury,and which contendsthat coloniality is “the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations” (Grosfoguel,2002, p. 205). The coloniality-of-power also “brings together race and capital” to form new relations of power (Maldonado-Torres,2006, p. 233). Please also see: Anzaldúa, 1987; Quijano, 1992, 1998, 2000; Mignolo, 2000; Grosfoguel, 2003; Maldonado-Torres, 2008, 2012; Mendez, 2014. This temporal scope is notnotrepresentative of all decolonial thought.4Though Fanon is speaking to anti-colonial realities of the mid-twentieth century, his relevance is further manifest after the failed political decolonization projects in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Advancing Fanonian thought in the context of theories of decoloniality (emphasis mine) crystalizes its significance outside of his temporal moment. Reparation as transformation431960’s, projects that largely focused on transforming colonial administration. Similarly, in the context of decoloniality, reparations must contend with past evils and the current social and political injustices that stem from those evils. Any reparation that does not transform or attempt to dismantle coloniality is a failed reparation. I contend that literary narratives offer discursive spaces through which to imagine and reimagine the possibilities of decolonial reparations as amends that are both material and immaterial.5This piece is a meditation on how an exilic Equatoguinean and an Afro-Dominican text engage with ideas of reparations and futurities as decolonial love.6I first look at theories of decolonial love and reparation as a frameworks for engaging the texts andpropose that at the center of a decolonial reparation is decolonial love. I then analyze how Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waoand Joaquin Mbomio Bacheng’s Matinga: Sangre en la selva, imagine and reimagine the future through a decolonial love politic that posits a reparation of the self and a reconciliation of community as integral partsof imagining decolonial futurities