WILLEMSTAD - Mikayla V. Ribeiro MA, born and raised in Curaçao, recently graduated with a Research Master’s degree in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam.  

Her bachelor’s degree was from Amherst College, Massachusetts in the USA, where she studied English and Black Studies.  

Her Master’s thesis ‘Healing Ecological Relations in Papiamentu Literature: “a Study of Dutch Caribbean Short Fiction” explores how authors Elis Juliana, Frank Martinus Arion, and Guillermo Rosario envisioned relationships with the natural world.  

Studying how Dutch Caribbean writers have responded to, and envisioned along with and beyond natural challenges historically, can create a blueprint for local, decolonial, ecological healing moving forward.  

To tell stories in Papiamentu means to create from within the imaginary of this territory.  

Ribeiro’s research explored themes of land as an archive, cuerpo-territorio, (oral) storytelling as healing, collective survival, and ecological healing as spiritual and physical.