Elements of Coffee

AirThe scent of roasting coffee is not sensed gradually, especially when the air sits heavy with moisture. Every morning as I approach the atelier, I am struck by a dense aroma of burnt popcorn and sweet tobacco—the unmistakable fragrance of roasting Robusta. A regular customer once shared that it was his search for cigarettes that first led him to Café Bò-kay. The bittersweet perfume clings to clothes, hair, skin, conjuring memories of grandmothers grilling coffee in a Dutch pot at dawn, of the first stolen sip of tjòlòlò1away from a parent’s watchful gaze.As with roasting Robusta, so too the miasma of decaying sargassum. The sulfurous odor does not permeate the air—it overwhelms it. One does not breathe; it is the air.So too the brume de sable. The air carries Saharan sands that carry dust, that carry illness. One cannot breathe; there is no air.The air carried European ships that carried human cargo, that carried death. One could not breathe; there was no air.So much we needto repair: to mendto re pair: to put back togetherto reap air: to harvest freedom.In 2022, I spent ten months in Martinique conducting ethnographic fieldwork on a heritage project aimed at reviving the island’s historic coffee industry. As an anthropologist, I examined the social relations and symbolic labor that brought coffee—both as an agricultural product and a heritage discourse—into being. While working at an artisanal roastery that I call Café Bò-kay, I was drawn to another more elemental dimension that shaped coffee, its history, and its futures: fire and heat. Léo, the manager, spread coffee beans out to dry beneath the beating sun; I singed my fingers on the molten seals of coffee bags and watched the gas roaster exhale clouds of steam. Fire was both a tool of transformation and force of destruction in the atelier and across the island—implicated not only in coffee production, processing, and consumption, but in shaping landscapes, memories, and histories. The hot ash of Mount Pelée—the island’s deep history of volcanic eruptions—was the reason Martinique had the possibility of coffee futures. But if fire makes futures possible, it also reminds us that futures are never guaranteed. In my work, I take elements as a provocation to think temporality otherwise: not as steady progress, but as a volatile and recursive force where the environmental conditions that enable futures are also those that can undo them.FireCafé Bò-kay caught fire. Tar from nearby construction found its way into the extraction vent while the gas roaster was on, igniting the roof. The metal duct and part of the ceiling were left charred.Blackened.Léo tells everyone who inquires about his swift action: “Gas off. Ladder up. Extinguisher ready.” Soot remains.I am drawn to heat. I notice coffee drying under the sun, the fire of the roaster and the steam it exhales, the warmth of freshly ground beans, the burn of the package sealer, and the sting of espresso in delicate glass cups. I notice the constant high-temperature records.Heat is the alchemy of coffee. Heat shall be its undoing.These ethnographic prose poems began as meditative interludes, distillations of fieldwork moments where elemental encounters became metaphors for the broader questions animating my research. In form, they were inspired by Bianca Williams’s reflective interludes in The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (Williams 2018) and Malcom Ferdinand’s literary descriptions of slave ships as political metaphors in Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (Ferdinand 2022). Drawing from news media and sensory recollections recorded in my field notes, the poems place ecological fragments into conversation with history, politics, and the future.Water“C’est fade,” Tony says. The mamey apple he tastes is fresh—the Caribbean way of saying that something lacks depth of flavor and sweetness. Mylan agrees. This land is hydric. Too much water in the ground suffocates the coffee plants. Too much water in the air invites coffee leaf rust. Water is life and form; water is death and disease.“Martinique is experiencing a hydric crisis,” the Prefecture announces.“An exceptional drought,” the Prefecture proclaims.The driest year since 1973. The earth cracks like broken pottery, the mornes turn brown and brittle. The rivers run thin with the memory of water; we grow heavy with thirst.“There is no more water in Martinique,” the Prefect says.Each poem turns on a different classical element: air as breath, scent, and trace of empire; water as crisis, memory, life, and loss; earth as terroir, groundedness, and contact; fire as heat, risk, and transformation. These elements are necessary substrates of sustenance—food and life—while harboring contradiction: fire can forge and destroy, water can nourish and rot, earth can speak and swallow, air can carry pollen and pollution. I offer these pieces as a way of experimentally sensing food and environmental futures to insist on the interconnectedness of human, nonhuman, history, politics, and place. In doing so, I follow what Malcom Ferdinand (2022) calls decolonial ecology: reimagining and enacting how we inhabit the Earth.Earth“There is too much noise,” Jovani says. Martinicans must stop listening and find their own voice. Doing things as they have always been done is a habit that must be broken. “It’s passive yet violent,” he adds.The earth imparts itself on the bean and flavors develop.Jovani works to bring out the characteristics of terroir: roast grind brew smell taste test repeat...The earth parts itself and a world is enveloped.I sit at my desk, looking out the window into the garden. I feel an undulation like the gentle swaying of a boat at anchor in a placid sea. I glance around but continue my reading.So this is how disaster arrives: not with spectacle but with silence. No herald, no cry. It moves gently as the current, lulling you farther,farther, until land is out of reach.Passive yet violent.While these interludes were inspired by scenes and tensions from my fieldwork in Martinique, my interest in the use of elements preceded it. I had been searching for a capacious frame for the environmental metaphors Black scholars have long used to describe being and becoming: the wake, the oceanic, the volcanic, among others (Sharpe 2016; Spillers 1987; Césaire 2017). These metaphors—ecologies, really—are formative of Blackness, and by extension, the modern world. In my work, I call them Black Atlantic elements, flexible counterpoints to the fixedness and universalism of continental paradigms. This inquiry led to a two-part panel I co-organized with Janita Van Dyk at the 2023 American Anthropological Association meeting, titled “The Elements of Agriculture: Chemical Symbols and Material Metaphors,” modeled on the work of anthropologist Vanessa Agard-Jones (2012), who also served as a discussant. In another panel that year on archipelagic thought, our discussant Amelia Moore posed a question that I would answer differently today: Is this framework decolonial? This piece marks a new beginning for me, a chance to take up that question of decoloniality in earnest.Accordingly, I have been asked why I chose to organize the poems around the classical elements—earth, water, air, and fire—given their roots in Western philosophy. In retrospect, I recognize the tension—even contradiction—in using Greek philosophical cosmology in a project that seeks to resist Western essentialisms. Perhaps I invited this tension by seeking a single container for the multiplicities of African diasporic becoming. Nevertheless, I approached these elements not as fixed categories, but as mutable and relational entry points into Caribbean life—categories that themselves resist containment. Sargassum invasions ride currents, intensifying with ocean warming. Sand drifts, gathering the detritus of industrial pollution on land. These overlaps reveal the impossibility—and the violence—of imposing rigid boundaries between nature and culture, past and present, destruction and renewal. This structure, then, is one imperfect and evolving attempt to trace sensory, historical, and ecological registers of coffee.It has since opened onto other experimental forms, including a speculative fiction story that imagines Martinique after a cataclysmic volcanic eruption, where environmental collapse revives suppressed histories of care, kinship, and cultivation. Through this and other work, I continue to explore how fire, sand, air, and sea both make and unmake worlds—and create the conditions for us to build anew.I offer this postscript not as resolution, but as invitation—to think with and through elemental relation, the lively conditions through which we might reimagine the sites and sights of our shared food futures

Bazaar · Dirt · Roasting · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Coffee research and impacts · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact

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