The Feminization of the Land and the Naturalization of the Black Female Body: Ecowomanism and African Ecocriticism in the Poetry of María Elcina Valencia Córdoba, Mary Grueso Romero, and Sonia Nadezhda Truque

Abstract

This article analyzes how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Afro-Colombian women poets from the Pacific region challenge and reframe the feminization of the land and the naturalization of the Black female body within colonial and Eurocentric epistemologies. Drawing on a framework that conceptualizes body, territory, spirituality, and community as an interdependent continuum, the article conducts close textual analysis to demonstrate how these poets construct territory and the Black female body as sentient sites. These sites are simultaneously shaped by historical violence, forced displacement, extractive economies, and racialized gender constructs, while preserving ancestral knowledge and collective memory. The findings show that Valencia Córdoba develops the body–territory through metaphor and anaphora as a generative space; Grueso Romero deploys orality and the sea as transatlantic archives of ancestry and identity; and Truque articulates urban displacement as an ontological rupture that affects memory and Black subjectivity. Ultimately, the article advances the concept of body–territory as a decolonial aesthetic and analytical tool through which Afro-Colombian women’s poetry articulates environmental justice, gendered racialization, and forms of resistance within the Afrodiasporic diaspora.

1. Introduction

In recent decades, environmental humanities and ecocritical scholarship have increasingly questioned Western paradigms that separate human life from nature and privilege universal models of environmental experience. Within these debates, literary production by historically marginalized communities has emerged as a crucial site for rethinking the relationships among territory, embodiment, and knowledge. This article focuses on late 20th- and 21st-century Afro-Colombian poetry through the works of María Elcina Valencia Córdoba1, Mary Grueso Romero2, and Sonia Nadezhda Truque3, whose writing offers a reconfiguration of these relationships within contemporary Afro-Colombian contexts. Through their literary production, these poets generate forms of knowledge that challenge colonial and Eurocentric paradigms that have historically shaped the relationship between human beings, nature, and territory. Engaging with the consequences of structural racism, class exclusion, the struggle for identity recognition, and their marginalization from both the literary canon and academia, their work not only bears witness to experiences of oppression but also articulates relational philosophical and ontological paradigms grounded in Afrodiasporic epistemologies. Through their verses, these authors reveal the biological, geophysical, and social transformations that have profoundly affected their environments, while simultaneously proposing an ethic of environmental care grounded in the interdependence among human beings, living beings, and non-living elements.

In the study of Afro-Colombian women’s poetry, diverse academic and editorial contributions have played a fundamental role in the visibility and recognition of these authors and their literary production. The anthologies compiled by Guiomar Cuesta Escobar and Alfredo Ocampo Zamorano (Cuesta Escobar and Zamorano 2008, 2010) constitute some of the earliest systematic efforts to document and legitimize Afro-Colombian women’s poetic production, emphasizing rhythmic, musical, and historical influences central to the configuration of their aesthetics. Shortly thereafter, Alain Lawo-Sukam (Lawo-Sukam 2011, pp. 170–89) highlighted the literary, cultural, and historical significance of Afro-Colombian women’s writing, contributing to the consolidation of critical attention toward these authors. Subsequent projects expanded both circulation and critical engagement with Afro-Colombian women’s poetry, including the collective work developed by Jefferson Torres Guerrero and Mary Grueso Romero (Torres Guerrero and Romero 2020), followed by bilingual and transnational initiatives by Sally Perret and José F. Bañuelos (Perret and Bañuelos 2021), and later compilations such as Mirian Pérez Díaz (Pérez Díaz 2022). More recent editorial efforts, including the anthology coordinated by Wilmer Villa, Maguemati Wabgou, Ángela Emilia Mena, and Carlos Augusto Viáfara (Villa et al. 2024), have further strengthened the visibility of these poets while foregrounding territory, memory, and Afrodiasporic epistemologies.

Building upon these developments, more recent studies such as Lawo-Sukam (Lawo-Sukam 2025) and the edited volume by María Mercedes Jaramillo and Lucía Ortiz (Jaramillo and Ortiz 2025) situate Afro-Colombian women poets within broader Afrodiasporic literary and philosophical traditions, consolidating the field’s expansion beyond national literary frameworks. Although these contributions have been fundamental to processes of visibility and to the consolidation of an Afro-Colombian literary canon, sustained aesthetic and theoretical analyses of individual poetic projects remain limited. This article examines the poetry of María Elcina Valencia Córdoba, Mary Grueso Romero, and Sonia Nadezhda Truque and how their work reconfigures the relationship between the Black female body and the territory’s body in contemporary Afro-Colombian contexts. Drawing on Afrocentricity, African ecocriticism, and ecowomanism, the article also adopts a decolonial aesthetic approach. Pedro Pablo Gómez and Walter D. Mignolo suggest that decolonial aesthetics disobey the colonial/modern logic that has shaped aesthetic and epistemological conceptions (Gómez and Mignolo 2012, p. 9). They seek to decolonize “the complicit concepts of art and aesthetics in order to liberate subjectivity from the colonial wound” (Gómez and Mignolo 2012, p. 9). Decolonial aesthetics, in doing so, move away from and deconstruct the Western myth of the decolonization of art and aesthetics. This myth erroneously locates the origin of decolonization in Europe. Rather, decolonial aesthetics propose understanding art, aesthetics, and the knowledge that emerges from them from the standpoint of postcolonial territories and subjects, enabling the liberation of aiesthesis (sensing/feeling) (Gómez and Mignolo 2012, p. 9).

In the Colombian Pacific, the human–nature–territory relationship is based on a principle of balance: not taking more from nature than is necessary. This principle constitutes an ethic of care that sustains harmony between the self and the various entities that configure the territory’s living space. In alignment with this vision and drawing on the foundations of African epistemology as reflected in the poetry of women poets from the Colombian Pacific, Ruch and Anyanwu argue that African knowledge is conceived as an integrative understanding of reality in which each element (including territory) exists in mutual dependence (Ruch and Anyanwu 1981, p. 36). From this perspective, reality is understood as a harmonious totality, and the African subject (like Afro-descendant women of the Colombian Pacific) seeks the order of the universe to anchor both individual existence and the broader fabric of reality. African epistemology thus advances a holistic mode of knowing that encompasses experiential, rational, religious, intuitive, symbolic, mythical, and emotional dimensions (Ruch and Anyanwu 1981, p. 37).

From Afrocentricity (centers African and Afro-descendant values and perspectives) to African ecocriticism (examines literature through African and Afrodiasporic ecological frameworks) to ecowomanism4 (highlights the ecological, spiritual, and political dimensions of Afro-descendant women’s experiences), these approaches do not operate in isolation; instead, they exist in constant dialogue. This ongoing conversation among frameworks enables a theoretical, conceptual, and aesthetic analysis better suited to Afro-Colombian women’s poetic constructions, particularly those centered on Black body–territory–environmental struggle. As a result, these analyses challenge interpretive frameworks shaped by Eurocentric epistemologies. Within this broader context, Afrodiasporic approaches question Western and hegemonic dynamics governing human relationships with their environments, as well as examine the consequences of hegemonic gender constructions on bodies, territories, and communities. In particular, they critique how the imposition of a rigid, hierarchical gender dualism places the hegemonic, white male subject at the apex, subordinating African and Afro-descendant women and constraining their connections to nature, the Earth, spirituality, and philosophical traditions.

Afro-Colombian women writers from the Pacific region transform writing into a critical tool for challenging hegemonic norms imposed on their territories and within academia. This is particularly evident in the work of Valencia Córdoba, Grueso Romero5, and Truque. Their poetry, read through an Afrocentric approach that centers African and Afro-diasporic cultural values, experiences, and epistemologies, reconfigures environmental ethics of care, gender, and aesthetics. By examining these three authors, whose works are situated within the same regional and cultural context, it becomes possible to observe their distinct yet interconnected responses to the relationship between the Black subject, territory, and environmental ethical transformation. In this context, they propose new modes of understanding, linguistic expression, and resistance that are not reduced to conceptual impositions on Afro-Colombian women’s poetry or on the Pacific region.

Building on this foundation, the study examines their poetic production, often associated with the group Las Almasnegras6. The selected poems, marked by violence, socio-environmental domination, and displacement, reveal a situated Afrodiasporic ecocriticism—an approach that analyzes environmental issues from Afrodiasporic perspectives rooted in the Colombian Pacific. Specifically, the study explores how ecowomanism—a framework developed by Melanie Harris, operates in dialogue with Afrocentricity and African ecocriticism. Through this integrated conceptual framework, it becomes possible to understand how the poetry of Valencia Córdoba, Grueso Romero, and Truque critiques the gendered and aesthetic logics imposed by coloniality and modernity on their bodies and territories, as reflected in the poems analyzed.

Finally, this article, through a qualitative literary analysis grounded in close reading, examines selected poems—chosen for their thematic relevance to environmental experience, gendered embodiment, and territorial memory in the Colombian Pacific region—that articulate these concerns from three distinct perspectives. Drawing on this corpus, the study shows how the feminization of the land—defined as the symbolic coding of land as feminine, passive, and exploitable—and the naturalization of the Black female body—representing Black women as inherently tied to nature and thus rendered available and subject to control—emerge as interconnected mechanisms of domination. Consequently, colonial and patriarchal logics position both nature and Afrodiasporic women’s bodies within these feminized frameworks, legitimizing material and symbolic domination. Taking this analytical approach further, the poetry examined disrupts and reassembles these logics by revealing that the subordination of territory and the oppression of Afro-descendant women respond to the same matrix of power. By reinscribing the Black female body as a symbolic, sentient, and thinking territory, and conceiving territory as a living body marked by memory, meaning, and care, these authors propose a relational ethic. This ethic reconfigures both gender and the relationship between Black women and nature from an Afrodiasporic ontology, ultimately giving rise to a decolonial aesthetic.

2. Afrocentricity, African Ecocriticism, and Ecowomanism: A Theoretical Framework

2.1. Afrocentricity and Centralization Through Language

Valencia Córdoba, Grueso Romero, and Truque make visible the interconnection and interdependence of all beings by transcending the anthropocentric notion that prioritizes individual human benefit over the territory. Through this, they demonstrate how environmental protection and care constitute intrinsic and fundamental values for humanity. Their poetry is essential for observing and understanding traditions, ways of being, and ancestral heritage from an Afrocentric perspective. In this regard, Molefi Kete Asante underscores the importance of African and Afro-descendant subjects reconfiguring Eurocentric modes of thinking, being, and feeling by developing their own narratives about their communities and realities (Asante 1988, p. 172). In turn, African and Afro-descendant subjects (through different modes of enunciation) analyze the social, economic, cultural, historical, and psychological dimensions that shape both their lives and their territories (Asante 1988, p. 175). Asante suggests that each African subject should reflect on where they stand (their position and perspective) to ascertain whether they are situated within their own history or relegated to the margins of the European framework (Asante 2017, p. 234).

This focus on Afrocentricity also entails, for Afrodiasporic subjects, reclaiming the African roots that have been denied, censored, or discriminated against by hegemonic systems throughout centuries of slavery and post-slavery periods (de Carvalho 2009, p. 183). At the same time, it involves recovering and reconnecting with the cultural, spiritual, artistic, literary, philosophical, epistemic, historiographical, communal, political, social, organizational, and environmental traditions practiced within Afrodiasporic communities, in connection with the African continent, in order to achieve and sustain a process of centralization or “location” (de Carvalho 2009, p. 183). As a result, language becomes the primary element through which not only their enunciation within their territories is determined but also the location or dislocation of African and Afrodiasporic individuals within their own history, as well as the transformations necessary to propel them toward that centrality (Asante 2017, p. 234). In line with this, Valencia Córdoba, Grueso Romero, and Truque employ language not as an imposed structure, but as an extension of their territory, thereby achieving a form of self-centralization within their own poetry. In doing so, they reclaim their protagonism in the construction of knowledge and challenge the image imposed by colonial hegemony, which reduces them to victimhood and denies the value of their knowledge systems, memories, and perspectives.

2.2. African Ecocriticism Beyond Western Environmental Paradigms

From this Afrocentric focus on language and territory, the need to revise dominant narratives aligns directly with African ecocriticism. This perspective is anchored in African Indigenous cosmologies, which represent enduring cultural traditions—extended and preserved in the diaspora—and are transmitted across generations as a vital element of daily life in African and Afrodiasporic communities (Mapara 2016, p. 78). Jacobus Mapara observes that these belief systems, predating Christianity and Islam and grounded in centuries of collective knowledge, offer “guidance on ethical conduct and promote responsible practices toward the environment”. Such practices include respect for human beings, as well as living and non-living entities, aiming to nurture “collective well-being” (Mapara 2016, p. 78). Accordingly, engaging African (or Afrodiasporic) ecocriticism demands both theoretical and practical acknowledgment of the interconnections between the natural and human worlds as understood in Africa since precolonial times—links carried to Afrodiasporic territories during enslavement and maintained into the present day (Egya 2020, p. 66).

In this context, Sule Emmanuel Egya maintains that the African ecocritical engagement with the natural world must be bidimensional (Egya 2020, p. 67). On the one hand, there is a non-spiritual dimension that encompasses human understanding of one’s physical place within nature; on the other, there is a spiritual dimension that focuses on the dynamic relationships among human beings, nature, and the spiritual world. These relationships are interdependent, each influencing and supporting the others, and together form the interconnectedness necessary for achieving collective harmony (Egya 2020, p. 67). Under this framework, life in traditional African societies, as Egya notes, is governed by an “implicit code of interdependence between humans and nonhumans,” where the instrumental use of the natural world is always balanced by responsibility, ethics, and conservation—principles that also continue in Afro-descendant territories (Egya 2020, p. 68).

Extending on this framework, Chengyi Coral Wu, in “Toward an Ecocriticism in Africa: Literary Aesthetics in African Environmental Literature,” observes that in African literature—such as Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (Achebe 1958)—Indigenous Igbo environmentalism is built on the Igbo people’s attachment to the land inhabited by their ancestors for centuries, a bond transmitted to subsequent generations (Wu et al. 2016, p. 141). Wu explains that, in Achebe’s novel, the “environment” encompasses the Igbo land in its entirety: its inhabitants, the gods and ancestral spirits they venerate, the village compounds, and the surrounding forests, thereby reflecting local ontological conceptions of the relationships among the human, the natural, and the spiritual (conceptions comparable to the territorial representations present in Afro-Colombian poetry from the Pacific Region). Wu emphasizes that the concept of the “environment” is neither universal nor inherently “modern,” as Anglo-American environmental literature often assumes; therefore, ecocriticism cannot be grounded in universalist principles that fail to account for the realities of postcolonial territories (Wu et al. 2016, p. 142).

On this basis, Wu also argues that Anglo-American ecocriticism presents significant limitations when applied to African and Afrodiasporic contexts. It tends to reproduce established ideas and values, generalizing human–nature relations across diverse and postcolonial settings, rather than proposing situated critical readings of local environmental literature (Wu et al. 2016, p. 145). It often conceives nature as an “idealized, pure, and separate” space, aligned with an ecological vision that sees it as a “unified organic” system (Wu et al. 2016, p. 145). Its critique of modernity and environmental impact often assumes modernity is a “universal human” experience, without considering how the distancing of humans from nature is shaped by specific historical and geographical conditions. This is especially apparent in postcolonial spaces used and exploited by hegemonic power, traversed by colonial, capitalist, and diasporic processes, and marked by anthropocentric views that center the white male subject and reduce other beings to mere instruments for survival (DeLoughrey et al. 2005, p. 13).

Wu further argues that environmental concerns were already present within African literature prior to the 1960s. Although these concerns were primarily addressed at the local rather than the global level, this tradition still preceded the emergence of Anglo-American ecocriticism as a formalized critical approach in the late twentieth century. As a result, there is a need to reconsider the application of Western critical frameworks to African literature (Wu et al. 2016, p. 147). Similarly, Afrodiasporic territories—such as Afro-Colombian poetry from the Pacific Region—offer a parallel: Afro-descended women in the region have oriented their writing toward environmental recognition and justice since before the 1960s. Nonetheless, it was only with the 1991 constitutional reform that historical discrimination against Afro-descended communities was formally acknowledged and mechanisms established to guarantee their rights and protect their territories (Hernández 2024, p. 113). This progress occurred despite the prolonged silencing of Afro-women’s literature within the national literary context (Díaz Muñoz 2018).

Continuing this line of thought, Wu notes that African literary criticism, much like Afrodiasporic literature, had developed environmental perspectives independently from how ecocriticism is practiced in U.S. academia (Wu et al. 2016, p. 148). Environmental justice critics and postcolonial ecocritics challenge Western or Anglo-American ecocriticism for privileging environmental values historically associated with white, middle-class men, while disregarding differences in class, race, and gender, as well as the colonial and neocolonial violence exerted upon colonial and postcolonial environments. Ecocriticism, therefore, if it seeks to formulate inquiries from an African perspective and to generate its own responses, must be grounded in historically situated local realities (both regional and national) related to the social life and ecological conditions of its communities (Vital 2008). Building on this critique, Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson and George B. Handley argue that in Caribbean literature (as is likewise the case in Afro-Colombian poetry from the Pacific Region), nature is already acculturated through the “human process of meaning-making”, which does not imply that it ceases to exist beyond culture (DeLoughrey et al. 2005, p. 3). Unlike North American environmental literature, which tends to idealize a natural landscape detached from human history, Afro-descendant authors maintain that, in Afrodiasporic territories, such a vision is transformed by the recognition that these spaces cannot be conceived without accounting for the direct consequences of colonization, violence, and forced displacement (DeLoughrey et al. 2005, p. 3). Within this context, writers operating from an Afrodiasporic environmental perspective insist on acknowledging that historical and racial violence is intrinsically linked to literary geography (DeLoughrey et al. 2005, p. 4). The land, in this sense, is configured as a “silent historical record”, a “guardian of the past” laden with painful memories of enslavement and repression (DeLoughrey et al. 2005, p. 4). Similarly, particular spaces (such as mountains, rivers, seas, forests, mangroves, and subsistence gardens) have functioned as repositories of African and Indigenous beliefs, as well as sites of resistance against plantation capitalism, mining, overfishing, and deforestation, by enabling the formation of communities that developed alternative means of survival (DeLoughrey et al. 2005, p. 4).

In response to the limitations of Anglo-American ecocriticism and its insufficient engagement with postcolonial histories, DeLoughrey, Gosson, and Handley argue that although ecocriticism shares with postcolonialism the view that a sustained examination of space and territory is essential for recovering centrality (echoing Asante’s conception), postcolonial criticism has paid limited attention to environmental factors. Conversely, ecocriticism tends to underestimate the social and historical particularities of place, a limitation that postcolonial and environmental justice studies have helped to nuance. Therefore, by combining these approaches in the analysis of Afrodiasporic literatures, it becomes possible to develop an ecocritical framework that accounts for how race, gender, class, and other social factors shape environmental experience within these territories (DeLoughrey et al. 2005, p. 5). Within this integrated postcolonial and ecocritical framework, African and Afrodiasporic authors who write from an environmental or ecocritical perspective (such as Valencia Córdoba, Grueso Romero, and Truque) prioritize social justice, natural environments, livelihoods, and the interrelations among environmental practices, representations of nature, institutions of power, and the influence of socioeconomic interests (Caminero-Santangelo 2014, p. 28). They also articulate an ecocritical theory that engages in dialogue with postcolonialism, without reducing the function of African environmental literature solely to exposing the consequences of colonialism. At the same time, they acknowledge traditional dynamics oriented toward the protection of territories, while remaining attentive to the aesthetic particularities of African and Afro-descendant environmental and postcolonial literature.

Returning to Wu, the author observes that by considering not only social justice themes but also literary imaginaries and varied depictions of colonial and postcolonial African environments, one can see how environmental concerns are already woven into African and Afrodiasporic literature through unique portrayals of their surroundings (Wu et al. 2016, p. 158). Similarly, Wu identifies a series of recurring themes in African environmental literature that can also be found in Afro-Colombian poetry: (1) oral traditions, dialogues, dialects, and communal consciousness; (2) land dispossession (land taxation, enclosures, forced displacement); (3) agriculture (local subsistence farming versus global or capitalist agriculture); (4) rural and urban spaces (tradition versus modernity, nostalgia, displacement, and return to the territory); (5) climate change, particularly its impact on community populations; (6) natural resources and their exploitation; (7) natural landscapes and their effects on human psychology, memory, social practices, and customs; (8) urban environments and urbanization; (9) plants, food, animals, and disease; (10) the impact of war; and (11) Indigenous knowledge systems (Wu et al. 2016, p. 161).

2.3. Ecowomanism: The Feminization of the Land and the Naturalization of the Black Female Body as Analytical Categories

Valencia Córdoba, Grueso Romero, and Truque move beyond environmental thematization. Instead, they interrogate the role of institutions of power, capitalism, globalization, and the enduring effects of coloniality. Additionally, these authors articulate a gender critique by reconfiguring the image of Earth as mother. They reveal how this representation has historically operated as a logic of domination that subordinates both territory and the bodies of Black women. At this critical juncture, the ecowomanist perspective engages directly with African ecocriticism. Melanie L. Harris advances ecowomanism as a critical approach that links environmental justice to social justice through the multiple experiences of African and Afro-descendant women and highlights the connection between forms of oppression inflicted upon the land and those historically affecting Black women (Harris 2017, p. 18). From this standpoint, both territory and body are traversed by the same matrix of hegemonic domination, explaining why violence against each often manifests in parallel and, in many cases, simultaneously (Harris 2017, p. 18).

Building on the ecowomanist framework, which links environmental justice to social justice through the experiences of African and Afro-descendant women, Harris further develops what she defines as the paradoxical character of ecowomanism’s gendered framework. This framework exposes multiple forms of subordination imposed upon Afro-descendant women. At the same time, it also foregrounds the ethical and political solidarity established between Black women and the Earth (Harris 2017, p. 19). This relationship is central to ecowomanism, as it allows for drawing parallels between historical and contemporary abuses endured by the bodies of Afro-descendant women, such as those from the Colombian Pacific, and the systematic mistreatment inflicted upon their territories under colonial, patriarchal, and extractive logics. In addition, Kenosi Molato, in “Environmental Ethics of African Women Theologians,” argues that the conception of “Mother Earth” reflects a correlation between the subjugation of the Earth and the subordination of women in Africa. This correlation also extends to women in Afrodiasporic territories (Molato 2024, p. 191).

This ethical and political connection between Black women and the Earth emerges as African and Afro-descendant women—particularly in peripheral regions—often assume responsibility for childcare. As a result, they suffer disproportionately when the land is subjugated. Molato explains that resource distribution in these territories, primarily organized by men, further exacerbates the situation, placing women at a structural disadvantage when the land fails due to climate change and extractive capitalism (Molato 2024, p. 191). More severely affected by environmental degradation, women thus develop a maternal ethic of care toward Mother Earth, especially when she endures oppression. Nicole Anae highlights that the notions of “Mother Earth” and “Mother Africa” refer to African and Afro-diasporic cosmologies that conceive of territory as a living, spiritual, and generative entity intrinsically linked to human life (Anae 2022, p. 110). In traditions such as the Akan of Ghana, for instance, the Earth is named “Asaase Yaa,” recognized as mother, source of fertility, and origin of life. This recognition implies an ethical relationship grounded in reciprocity and care. Nevertheless, feminizing the Earth and Africa also reveals how both have long been subordinated under patriarchal and colonial logics, naturalizing their exploitation. Drawing on E. Bolaji Idowu, Anae argues that Africa’s subjugation is tolerated when it accepts inferiority but met with violence when it asserts autonomy—thus exposing a logic of domination operating simultaneously upon territory and feminized bodies (Anae 2022, p. 110).

Building on this conception of the Earth–Black woman relationship articulated in Afrodiasporic thought, the feminine ceases to be understood solely as a symbolic metaphor and instead becomes an analytical category through which to examine how environmental violence affects, in parallel, the bodies of Black women and their territories. In the Afrodiasporic context of the Colombian Pacific, the notions of “Mother Earth” and “Mother Africa” acquire a concrete materiality manifested in knowledge systems, practices of care, and modes of relating to the territory. Anne-Marie Losonczy suggests that the feminine is not reduced to a “symbolic representation of the Earth,” but materialized in the bodies of Afro-Colombian women, who have historically assumed responsibility for preserving knowledge related to traditional medicine, the use of plants, spiritual healing, and the maintenance of balance between body and environment (Losonczy 1993, p. 41). In this way, Losonczy indicates that the association between the feminine and the land is articulated as a “relational ontology,” in which the territory is conceived as a living body, vulnerable to structural violence, internal armed conflict, and state neglect, yet also as a space of memory, resistance, and communal continuity (Losonczy 1993, p. 45).

Conceiving African and Afrodiasporic ecocriticism as a method for analyzing environmental literature means more than situating oneself within Afrocentric narratives and African ecocritics’ perspectives. It also requires recognizing how colonial policies have impacted women’s land rights and incorporating a gender perspective into how we interpret the bond between Afro-descendant women and their environment. From an ecowomanist standpoint, this highlights the traditional roles that have linked women to environmental stewardship. It also reveals the symbolic and structural parallel between the Black female body and the body of the Earth, seen in the critical reconstruction of the figure of “Mother Earth.” This parallel exposes a shared logic of colonial and patriarchal domination and highlights the resistance, agency, and ethic of care that emerge from the solidarity between Afro-descendant women and their territories.

3. Ecowomanist Readings as a Decolonial Aesthetic Tool in Afro-Colombian Women’s Poetry

In the poetics of Valencia Córdoba, Grueso Romero, and Truque, the Black female body and the territory are configured as interdependent aesthetic and epistemological categories. Through these collective memories, practices of care, and forms of resistance, people express their responses to colonial, patriarchal, and socio-environmental violence within their territories. From an ecowomanist and Afrodiasporic ecocritical perspective, their writing constructs a relational ontology. This approach destabilizes hierarchical separations between body and nature and presents the land as not just a physical space but as a living, sentient, and spiritual body. In “Anhelo No. 2,” Valencia Córdoba reflects on the parallel connection between the Black woman’s body and the land. Each element of nature is projected onto her body: “Soy tierra baldía… enramada montañesca…” (Valencia Córdoba 2008, p. 161). Valencia Córdoba transforms the body into a harmonious, habitable territory—one that flourishes and awaits someone who will become not its protector, but its complement in forming a bond. At the same time, she reconstructs the relationship between the feminine and the Earth, where the experiences of the territory intersect with the lived experiences of her Black body: “Invádeme… habítame,/vuélveme territorio,/clava en mi tierra semillas nuevemecinas.” (Valencia Córdoba 2008, p. 161).

Valencia Córdoba reconstructs the natural landscape and reveals its impact on the shaping of the felt experiences of her body in relation to the body of the land. Using metaphor and anaphora, she reconfigures an emotional and habitable body–territory. This body is not static but a dynamic and harmonious space in which each natural element is inscribed within her being. In this way, Valencia Córdoba establishes a physical, emotional, and spiritual relationship between her body and the territory, demonstrating how the memory of place shapes her Black corporeality. Natural landscapes now become part of her, through the memory, emotions, and felt experiences evoked by her surroundings, allowing her to integrate and identify each natural resource within her body: “tengo un nido para tu pájaro,/un lago para tu ganso,/un río para tu remo,/una llanura para tu roble” (Valencia Córdoba 2008, p. 161). Valencia Córdoba further reconstructs the body of the land through the lived experiences of her own body: “un arroyuelo para los reptiles,/un desierto para los camellos,/un oasis para tu sed… Peregrino sediento” (Valencia Córdoba 2008, p. 161).

In “Rutas de autonomía y caminos de identidad”, Valencia Córdoba, by positioning her Black body in analogy with the land, reconstructs the image of her connection to a territory affected by external forces such as violence and state abandonment. She builds the poetic image from the lived experiences of her body, which in turn become the lived experiences of the territory, thereby reconstructing the body of the land. In this way, she transfigures territorial dispossession into a dispossession of the self, establishing a parallel between the loss of land and the fragmentation of her own subjectivity as a Black woman:

• “Si yo fuera ‘sola’…
• Si no estuviera en el corazón de mis paisanos,
• …si no fuera un pedazo de tierra negra”.
(Valencia Córdoba 2001a, p. 5)

Valencia Córdoba articulates the relationship between body and identity by beginning from the individual and intertwining it with the collective experience that affects her body, the territory, and the community. This connection to her land is precisely what compels her to create, to build, and to sustain a struggle to protect it. By understanding and internalizing what her territory feels, she strengthens her commitment not to abandon it. Valencia Córdoba thus affirms her determination to remain and dwell within her territory, as well as to ensure the protection of future generations. Her relationship with the land is not merely an individual experience but a collective struggle aimed at preserving the life and memory of the territory: “no estaría tan ligada a este pueblo mío. …Pero mientras haya razón para luchar,/echaré raíces cada vez que pueda” (Valencia Córdoba 2001a, p. 5).

In “Tránsito y Resistencia”, Valencia Córdoba invokes forced displacement from the territory, as well as a displacement of meaning—an experience that prevents the subject (whether a Black woman or a Black man) from maintaining a connection with nature and fulfilling their role as caretaker and protector of the environment. The poem reveals a clear dispossession of the land, expressed through the violent transition from the countryside to the city: “Ellos viven transitados de los ríos a las calles/de los montes a los barrios/desplazados por la guerra” (Valencia Córdoba 2001b, p. 163). Valencia Córdoba turns to the idea that there is no life without natural spaces or without the possibility of inhabiting the territory in its essence. This forced transit entails not only a geographical shift but also an ontological rupture: the connection to the land begins to fade, and an unabashed nostalgia for the abandoned territory emerges, acquiring a powerful symbolic value in the poem: “Tránsitos involuntarios/donde se pierde el sentido/y se arranca el lazo vivo/de la hermandad con la tierra” (Valencia Córdoba 2001b, p. 163).

The poem thus articulates a direct critique of the war and violence that have invaded the territories of Afro-Colombian communities, revealing how the destruction of natural spaces leads to the rupture of the bond between human beings and their environment. Territorial dispossession—produced by violence, death, and forced displacement—fractures the vital relationship among body, memory, and land. Yet it is precisely this bond, as a Black woman of the territory sustained by collective memory, that makes possible a desire for justice. From this connection with the land as an Afro-Colombian woman emerges an undeniable longing to return and reclaim the territory as a space of life and dignity: “de la mano de un hermano,/ellos tienen la esperanza de volver y resistir,/porque no hay vida sin tierra” (Valencia Córdoba 2001b, p. 163). Valencia Córdoba further underscores how rural environments suffer the consequences of forced urbanization, which denaturalizes spaces and disconnects those who inhabit them, producing subjects who no longer feel that they belong anywhere. In the face of this rupture, the poem affirms resistance as a mode of existence: “resisten para vivir” (Valencia Córdoba 2001b, p. 163).

In the case of Grueso Romero, in “Orishas,” (2010) published in Cuando los ancestros llaman, she re-signifies the concept of Black identity, which, although shaped by colonial fracture and the impossibility of tracing a single origin, also reflects a territorial–genealogical–spiritual displacement produced by the transatlantic slave trade.In this way, Black identity is configured as emerging from pain and uprootedness yet sustained by transgenerational ancestral memory: “Estoy tras los caminos/de mi identidad/buscando las huellas/de mis ancestros”7. Grueso Romero revisits the image of Mother Earth/Africa, distorted by forced abandonment, where the figure of the sea becomes a silent witness that, even while bearing the memory of enslaving barbarity, in interconnection with other elements of nature, is able to heal and transform into an ancestral guide in the search for that mother–territory: “El carimba me habla de África/y luego perdí el rastro/cuando las olas desperdigadas/fueron tocadas en los mares/por la mano azul del viento”. The enumeration of the different territories of this “mother” symbolizes a fragmented geography that renders physical return impossible, while intensifying the desire for a spiritual, ancestral, and symbolic quest. Once again, Grueso Romero expands the meaning of the sea, which also emerges as a space of transit and loss. The elements of nature, rather than merely being interconnected with the subject, become vessels of knowledge and ancestral memory: “No sé de dónde vengo/si de Ghana, Angola o Argelia/de Malí, de Zimbabue o Etiopía/sólo sé que busco en los mapas/cuál es el origen mío”.

Grueso Romero reconstructs the body of the Black woman as the bearer of ancestral wisdom, which in turn connects with other elements that intensify this environment–body–ancestral bond so that, through ritual—beyond merely alluding to religious syncretism—it becomes a method for locating her physical and spiritual “self”: “Invoqué a los Orishas/con el conjuro de mi sangre negra/y el humo del silencio/y en un rumor de tambores/¡Dum, Dom, Dam!”. Grueso Romero plays with the meanings of time and space; the shift between past and present appears almost imperceptible. She first returns to the ancestral past to communicate with Yemayá and seek answers concerning her “self”; she then moves even further back to a time prior to forced displacement, when, as an African subject, she lived in harmony with ancestors, orishas, deities, nature, territory, and humans. From this temporal return, she acquires the wisdom necessary to construct, in the present, her identity as an Afro-descendant woman of the Pacific coast (Grueso Romero 2016, p. 80).

Similarly, Grueso Romero once again re-signifies the figure of the sea, which shifts from being a witness to barbarity and collective memory to becoming a territorial bridge between Mother Africa and the Pacific as her diasporic daughter: “Me ungió con agua salada y emergí como un volcán/frente a Changó, Agum, Abatatá, Oxulá, Elegua/Alofi, Omulú, Oba, Yanzá/en el reino africano/entregándome los poderes para convertirme/en una diosa del mar”. Grueso Romero continues this interplay of time and eternity, in which the symbolization of communication (through ritual) with the ancestors from the past is projected into the present. As a circular temporality linking past, present, and future, and as a poet who does not separate her “self” from her “poetic self”, she recreates the image of remaining within memory–time, reaffirming her Afrodiasporic Blackness: “Y en medio de ese ceremonial/me dieron el poder de la palabra/para viajar en el tiempo/Y así convertirme/por siempre y para siempre/en una fiel exponente/de la cultura negra”(Grueso Romero 2016, p. 80).

In “Contando el cuento,” Grueso Romero recreates the connection between body–land, Black body, and body–sea, signifying the latter as a symbolic and ancestral space. She establishes a parallel between the construction of her body and the elements of nature, reinforcing the idea that her existence is made possible through the presence of each of these elements: “Soy mañera/y seguiré siendo/mientras aiga peje/mientras aiga río/mientras aiga mar” (Grueso Romero 2016, p. 81). Similarly, the author employs the oral-colloquial language of the Pacific people not only to reaffirm her identity and that of her community but also to construct the figure of language–territory–memory: “y aún pueda soñá/pesca y amá” (Grueso Romero 2016, p. 81). Grueso Romero reclaims the figure of the Black woman as a protector of the territory, one who, rather than merely a “caretaker,” is interconnected with each natural element. She also re-signifies natural elements as connectors and bridges to the spiritual world, which is not conceived as separate from the world of the living. The three spheres (the human world, the world of living beings, and the spiritual world) remain within a liminal continuum, without any obligatory rupture between them. Grueso Romero expresses her desire to remain in her territory regardless of the sphere she inhabits: “Mientras al bogá/en la inmensidá/mi sudor es mar/mi sonrisa río/y cuando yo muera/quiero que me coloquen/una enorme ola/para en las noches de luna/salí a navegá/con mi sombrero ’e tetera/canalete y banquetá” (Grueso Romero 2016, p. 81).

Grueso Romero foregrounds the image of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and cultural memory. Her grandmother, who now forms part of the spiritual world, teaches her to employ other elements (such as song) to preserve collective memory, to remember as an act of territorial–spiritual reconstruction, to evoke the nostalgia of cruelty, and to reconnect with the memory that enslaved Africans left in her territory: “Y seguiré cantando/canciones muy tristes/que me enseñó mi agüela/de príncipes negros/traídos de África/vendidos en el mercado/como negros sin casta” (Grueso Romero 2016, p. 81). The author is emphatic in showing that this memory endures in subsequent generations: “y yo cuento a mis hijos/y también a mis nietos/para que ellos a su vez/lo sigan contando a través del tiempo” (Grueso Romero 2016, p. 81). She reconfigures the image of death, distancing it from the notion of finality for the Black woman (who may also represent herself), and instead presents her as a subject interconnected with the territory, nature, and the spiritual world. Physical death in the world of the living does not sever this interconnection; rather, it is preserved in memory, language, and the sea: “y la historia siga/por todos los siglos/y nunca morirá/porque se volvió mito/la mujer que enterraron/en una inmensa ola/a la orilla del mar” (Grueso Romero 2016, p. 81).

On the other hand, in “Bogotá,” Truque reconstructs the territory from the exterior inward and offers a critique of the city and of the imposed ideal of the capital as a “better” place to live, detached from the dynamics of the countryside and the territories. Truque reconfigures the meaning of emptiness by associating it with the total disconnection of the human being from their space, which exists within a constant paradox: “Es el horror/de encontrarse/con el desencuentro” (Truque 2021, p. 107). This emptiness operates on the same level as space and spirit; its connection, paradoxically, occurs through the disconnection among spirit, body, and territory. In this way, the city appears as a space produced by the consequences of coloniality, where the ancestral bond with the land has been severed. There is thus a fracture between the inhabited space and the being who inhabits it. Truque recognizes how the dynamics between the human being and the city have transformed her humanity and emotionality, turning the former into an empty, fractured, and dehumanized entity: “Es constatar/que la palabra no facilita las cosas” (Truque 2021, p. 107). At the same time, the author reconstructs the silencing of subalternized bodies, displaced from the spaces where they once existed and resisted. The transition from countryside to city is presented as an act marked by nostalgia and desolation, by not feeling part of this new space, and by being reduced to the felt experiences of “faceless” citizens who remain disconnected from their surroundings and merely follow the path laid before them. The subjects’ “self” is affected by not belonging anywhere, by merely “asentir y disentir” (Truque 2021, p. 107).

Truque thus constructs the image of a subject submerged in the frozen dynamics of the city, which render him fractured, empty, and dehumanized. Truque employs the metaphor of the “ciudad de murmullos” to reinforce this contradiction: a subject inhabiting a space that is not materially empty, yet with which he is unable to connect. Both subject and space are absorbed into the silence of disconnection: “asienten y disienten” (Truque 2021, p. 107). One might, therefore, ask: Is nature necessary for these faceless citizens to reconnect and recover a sense of humanity toward others? Truque suggests that the dynamics of the city strip its inhabitants of emotional depth and produce a rupture between them and their surroundings: “de ti vale” (Truque 2021, p. 107).

In “Bosque izquierdo,” Truque presents elements of nature as witnesses to human barbarity, far removed from their former role as caretakers and protectors, entering instead a state of absolute disconnection: “Fuera los árboles/no se mueve una hoja” (Truque 2021, p. 108). Truque constructs the image of how, through the death of the trees, everything becomes static; time itself comes to a halt, and with it the life shared between humans and nature: “Nada interrumpe el silencio” (Truque 2021, p. 108). The poem reveals territorial dispossession by transforming the landscape into a witness to violence and death. This condition of death paralyzes nature and denaturalizes it, interrupting its everyday rhythm and subjecting it to mistreatment by those who should protect it: “Un auto se detiene,/dos hombres bajan una bolsa Negra/apoyados en la baranda del puente” (Truque 2021, p. 108). Truque reconfigures the notion of nostalgia as something experienced simultaneously by the territory and by lifeless bodies: “la arrojan al vacío.” She resorts to the anaphora “Fuera los árboles” (Truque 2021, p. 107) and to repetition, reinforcing the sensation of silence, emptiness, and confusion.

The poem constructs the image of collective death and of trees as silent witnesses to barbarity. It also enters dialogue with oral traditions by evoking the presence of an “observer,” who, in this case, is the territory itself. It is the land that acquires the weight of memory and death. At the same time, the poem exposes the rupture between countryside and city, showing how urban environments (or spaces reshaped by violence) dehumanize both bodies and landscapes. The relational connection that once linked human–nature–spirit is replaced by a triad of death–silence–barbarity. Nature ceases to progress under the atmosphere of death that now haunts it. It is transformed by the misfortune of the human being who, in turn, is threatened and forced to abandon the territory: “Una fila interminable de hombres/de mujeres y niños” (Truque 2021, p. 55).

In other words, the protector of nature must leave the environment because of other human beings who have become disconnected from their own humanity, territory, and community. Through the image of the “empty basket,” Truque symbolizes the rupture of the Black woman–territory bond; unable to fulfill her role, she re-signifies the feminization of nature through absence and hunger so that the body–territory becomes dispossessed: “Las mujeres llevan los cestos vacíos” (Truque 2021, p. 55). Truque recreates displacement not only as a geographical phenomenon but also as an existential and ontological one, constructing a “path without destination” that reinforces the impossibility of inhabiting space without the memory and knowledge rooted in the territory: “Recorren caminos sin destino concreto” (Truque 2021, p. 55). Finally, Truque reconfigures the image of wisdom as something that does not emanate from power but from collective–ancestral experience; even within displacement, a collective territorial memory persists and resists, though the subject may find no hope in return: “Un niño advierte sobre lo improcedente/de atravesar el río./En Colombia/la esperanza está herida de muerte” (Truque 2021, p. 55). Thus, an imbalance emerges that affects everything around it.

4. Conclusions

African ecocriticism and ecowomanism, in dialogue with Afrocentricity, constitute fundamental analytical frameworks for understanding Afro-Colombian poetry from the Pacific not merely as a representation of socio-environmental violence but as a site of epistemological production and as a set of conceptual tools for an Afrodiasporic decolonial aesthetics. From these approaches, the human–nature–territory relationship is conceived as a relational ontology transmitted from Africa and preserved in the diaspora, in which the land is understood as a living, spiritual, and symbolic entity. Consequently, the body–territory emerges as both witness and historical archive, marked by dispossession, war, and displacement, yet also sustained through practices of environmental justice, collective memory, and an ethics of care.

The Afrocentric centrality of language thus becomes a strategy of historical emplacement that reconfigures authority over enunciation and displaces hegemonic readings of the Afro-Colombian Pacific. This centrality is directly linked to African ecocriticism insofar as it foregrounds interdependence between humans and non-humans while also challenging the universalist assumptions of Anglo-American ecocriticism in postcolonial and Afrodiasporic contexts. Within this framework, ecowomanism sharpens a crucial dimension: the ways in which colonial and patriarchal logics have feminized the land and naturalized the Black female body as an extension of territory, thereby legitimizing a simultaneously material and symbolic extractive violence.

Poets such as Valencia Córdoba, Grueso Romero, and Truque dismantle this matrix of domination by positioning the body–territory as an aesthetic nucleus of environmental justice. In Valencia Córdoba, the body becomes a habitable and affective territory in which metaphor and anaphora inscribe environmental memory within Black corporeality, transforming the relationship with the land into an ethical and communal bond. In Grueso Romero, orality, ritual, and the sea articulate a transatlantic spiritual genealogy that re-signifies displacement as ancestral search and affirms the continuity of collective memory through language–territory. In Truque, the city and denaturalized landscapes expose the ontological fracture produced by coloniality and violence, revealing how displacement not only strips the land but also erodes belonging and the subject’s ontological centrality.

Taken together, these three authors configure an Afrodiasporic decolonial aesthetics that reorders hierarchies between nature and power, body and territory, reason and spirituality, and that situates the ethics of care as a practice of justice enacted upon and for their territories. Consequently, the Black female body and the land do not appear as passive metaphors but as spaces of agency, knowledge, and memory: a poetics in which the defense of territory also entails the reconstruction of subjectivity, language, meaning, and memory in the face of the ongoing continuity of colonial violence across both territories and the bodies of Afrodiasporic women.