A hybrid of the words for “china” and “money,” chaney is the porcelain shards found in the soil after a hard rain and washed up on the beaches of St. Croix, US Virgin Islands.
I found this shard in The Gut, the riverbed on my property that runs down the Blue Mountain out to the Salt River estuary.
Ceramics, broken in symbolic acts of destruction by slaves, is a symbol of colonial resistance.
I wonder if the tourists buying chaney repurposed into jewellery are aware of the sociopolitical postcolonial critique of colonization and slavery.
For now, I will keep collecting chaney until It is ready to find it’s way into my work….
