Caribbean Fractals

How do you make an island out of chaos?

Coastlines, mountains, and waves.

Clouds and hurricanes.

Trees, ferns, seashells.

Lungs, heart, blood.

The universe.

All, fractals.

A fractal is a never-ending pattern…created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems – the pictures of Chaos.
The Fractal Foundation

To be resilient, a thing must give up some of itself. Coastlines, land, even heartbeats thrive with a degree of irregularity. It’s the reason that straight, measurable lines simply do not exist in nature. The more complex, higher dimensional, with more variation a pattern, the healthier it is. As above, so below.

Benoit Mandelbrot first coined the term ‘fractal’ in 1975, discovering that visually complex phenomenon follow simple mathematical rules. Fractal patterns were extensions of what Mandelbrot called “the art of roughness”; the clouds, plant leaves, ocean waves, that had given up some of itself. To understand fractal patterns at different scales, picture a large leaf with branching veins: those veins might contain the same angles as that main vein and then a smaller vein and so on. Imagine a set of lungs, a river delta a lightning strike all echoing this branching chaotic pattern.

Fractals, as organized chaos (a concept that might resonate for those familiar with the Caribbean), surround us. I was recently inspired to return to the concept as fractals in the context of the Caribbean through Puerto Rican poet, author and novelist, Mayra Santos-Febres. It was through the language of fractals, that I came to recognize our history of migration and space making, not as individual event rooted in survival (though it encompasses these experiences for sure). Rather, our continued exploration, as Caribbean people, exists on a frequency of expansion, continuous and non-linear re-creation. This is the frequency of a fractal.

In her 2019 talk, The Fractal Caribbean, Santos-Febres reflects on the repeating patterns that define our Caribbean selves, our networks and relationship to chaos. They are our familiar pathways and patterns, the circular tracks that we find ourselves on and wonder…how did I even get here? When the answer to that question is no longer satisfying, we have the option of disrupting the old pattern and replacing it with a new one.

The beauty of fractals is that once you grasp what they are, you begin to recognize them everywhere, in stock markets, politics, and even epidemics. It not despite of, but because of chaos that we survive and thrive…and then do it all again.

learn more about Mayra Santos-Febres here