Breeze blocks have been a commonplace element in commercial and residential buildings since the mid-twentieth century. The term refers both to generic lightweight solid concrete bricks that include breeze (cinders, or fly ash) in their aggregate, and to ornamental wall blocks that channel air through a variety of patterned gaps. As multitudinous, elemental, they often lay hidden in plain sight.
Like a visual palimpsest, or an afterimage, the familiar patterned wall gaps of my childhood felt as though they had been following me—from my origins in the Caribbean—everywhere I went for most of my life. My naïve dream-logic assumptions first led me to believe that breeze blocks had originated in the Caribbean and at some point in history had since curiously been adopted everywhere else. This was admittedly biased, but it wasn’t entirely unfounded. I knew that I could likely chalk up the frequency of my observations to mere coincidence, perhaps a frequency illusion or simply the result of a banal symptom of mass production. However, as Henry Massonnet’s Monobloc plastic chair is an apt testament, modern ubiquities are usually embedded with their own transnational narratives.1 To gain the full picture, I decided I needed to reverse the order of pursuit.
What essentially began as an attempt to put words to the experience of leaving home, and finding pang-inducing traces of that home in other homes, unexpectedly also became a meditation on returning home, and finding that while other things had shifted in the transit of time, these traces had grown only bolder. Memory can be a slippery, incalculable thing, and what the mind decides to hold onto as a method of understanding the world—in my case, hollow concrete blocks—is sometimes trivial. But the simple act of naming this triviality can open up an entirely new way of seeing, just as looking through a small hole makes a scene become clearer.
Once I learned the name “breeze blocks,” I couldn’t help but linger within the poetics—a double entendre: blocks that contain breeze or the blocking of breeze itself. An effort to harness or manipulate something so transient speaks, in one sense, to artmaking, in another, to the act of articulation, finding the right words. For this transience to be held within concrete naturally creates an interesting dialogue with architecture, the very structure of our lives
To truly hold on to breeze requires emulating its movement, and as such, this text allows for errantry on the page. As the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant—whom I return to frequently as a beacon—affirmed in his seminal Poetics of Relation, errantry can serve as a generative mode of thinking for those who have been displaced.2 By resisting linearity and leaning toward deviation, giving into interruption, connections can form between the seemingly disparate. This wandering interprets the breeze block as a portal or passage to the distant and not-so-distant past, the here and not-so-distant there, attending both to the personal subjective and to the concrete objective.
In the absence of breeze is an overwhelming heat that sits heavy and stagnates. This is especially true close to the equator. Nothing stirs; everything is still. Still what? Stillness is, in one way, presence, persistence, but that’s not what I mean. No, still as in without movement, without motion. Breath is a constant corporeal breeze, meaning the absence of breath is the only way to lie completely still. But of course this is actually impossible while still alive; the tongue is never motionless in the mouth—even in sleep its restlessness practices how to form words.
Despite this, stillness can be thought of as an end; it carries a concreteness. Concrete is thought to be more closely aligned with death than it is with life, as Adrian Forty puts it in his sweeping work Concrete and Culture.3 A slamming door of darkness, which denies breath, speech, and laughter, is concrete in its ending, blocking the breeze. The idea of denial here is key, the first stage of grief: not everyone is given access to breeze—what is easy, lighthearted—and this is why its absence should be carefully scrutinized. When breeze is denied, everything is still, maybe slowly suffocating. Though in optimistic, maybe more practical terms, unfaltering. Light things wobble and waft in breeze—in stillness there is at least stability. No more frivolous fluttering.
Who determines this access or denial? We are only in control of our own breeze until someone else stands in the way; then it is no longer ours. We laypeople, the ones who are made to lean horizontal so as to not impose any friction, are at the mercy of the controllers of the proverbial weather machine. And I actually do mean this to be conspiratorial, from the Latin conspiro, “to breathe together.” Sometimes it feels like something doesn’t want us to breathe together, wants to put an end to all that. Tao Leigh Goffe puts this more concretely: “Racism is the system that ensures Black people across the globe will die before others.”4 Her latest book, Dark Laboratory, another beacon, offers a revelatory point of origin for the global climate crisis—not the Industrial Revolution but the wind in Christopher Columbus’s sails, marking the beginning of colonialism in the Caribbean.
Like heat, some memories have a way of really lingering. Though a breeze that stays is inherently itinerant, it returns again and again to Jamaica, my country of origin, as a means of preservation, a form of archiving. I have genuine fears that this vulnerable island will be tapped of all its resources and sink into the sea in the not-so-distant future, that breeze blocks might be reduced to mere relics of the homes that I and so many remember, fossils of what once was. Rather than dwelling on this, we can share what breeze we have left—sometimes up close, held tightly against the chest—while acknowledging this looming threat. Today, for now, there is enough to go around.
Breeze is titillating, sensuous. From the old Portuguese briza (northeast wind), its implication is typically one of ease, a transient steadying. The Portuguese were known for their avid seafaring, and this briza on Portuguese sails is what allowed for their departure from the Iberian Peninsula, down and around the strait of Gibraltar to seize Ceuta from the Moors in North Africa in 1415—marking the start of their colonial expansion and the very beginning of European colonization. Glissant might categorize this fateful voyage as one of the earliest tourbillons de rencontre, whirlwinds of encounter, that set our modern relational conjuncture into motion.
In contrast, when the Taíno referred to winds in their native Xaymaca they used the word hura. Also incredibly avid mariners, they rowed dugout canoes through calm sea waters from island to island, creating a vast archipelagic trade network. Gigantic logs were cut down from the ceiba (silk cotton tree), partially burned, then hollowed out whole to fit up to one hundred people. Rough seas and strong winds were stirred up by Juracan, their god of destruction—the word hurricane finds its origins in Taíno encounters with Spanish invaders in the fifteenth century.
Hurricanes have a hollow central “eye,” felt on the ground as a brief breezy respite from the storm. Here in this reflective stasis the extent of the damage can be assessed. At the very back of my grandparents’ yard in Spanish Town, a mound of gravel leads to an insurmountable raw concrete wall, which overlooks the gully (deep man-made drainage canals) running past the backs of all the houses in the community. During the near-yearly hurricanes of my childhood the gully would swell, and we would watch passively from the back door of the house as this wall breached, the gravel and the grass disappearing under murky cataract flood waters, reflecting jagged whips of white lightning. As the eye passed overhead the water would clear somewhat, and the wall would emerge with a dark tan line across it, marking the height to which the flood had risen. These lines are increasingly higher and deeper set now, as storms grow more frequent and ferocious every year.
After weeks without rain in magmatic Jamaican summer the emerald grass always shrivels to brown hay. Now that every summer is more unbearably hot than the last, the lush green yard of my memory is a rare sight in the present. But I remember even then looking up from the green sometimes to see black snow raining down from the sky in big chunks. I used to catch it in my hands and smear it into glittery grey on the brown skin of my little arms and legs. I later learned this was ash from someone burning mounds of garbage in a clearing a few houses down the road, embers cooled and carried over by the breeze.
My grandparents’ house is small, one story with a flat roof, made entirely of reinforced solid concrete breeze blocks. Throughout their community there are continuous building projects in progress or in stasis, neighbors making vertical additions of second or third floors. Concrete stairs seem to float above ground, leading to not-yet-existent levels. Barking dogs guard fences. Wrought iron balconies, bloated between ionic pillars, sit framed beneath high and wide arches, which might reveal a fan installed on the ceiling or an exposed wriggling wire meant for a lightbulb. Building plans are sketched on the backs of envelopes or church programs; piles of blocks and bags of cement lay in wait for months off to one side. Ribbed steel rods jut out like urchin spines from staggered grey blocks in the unfinished sections, reaching up toward the Blue Mountains and out into the future.
Scenes similar to the ones I have described are of course not particular to Jamaica. Adrian Forty explains that unfinished building sites like these in parts of Mexico City are referred to by locals as castillos de esperanza, “castles of hope”: left open to elements outside their control, the hope is that enough money can be saved for the expansion of a home to continue.5 Some houses, however, are never meant to be completed, will always have rebar sticking out from this corner or that—property taxes in Mexico are reduced significantly if a home is unfinished. This state of perpetual becoming, of flight without landing, can easily be brushed away as being unclassifiable, outside the established frameworks of aesthetic examination. In his book Autoconstrucción, the artist Abraham Cruzvillegas describes the form of continuous building in the Ajusco district of Mexico City he was born in as a “mode of construction that is beyond aesthetics, that dissolves in front of us into an organic and collaborative totality . . . a concrete manifestation of urgent needs and the capacity to improvise with the materials at hand.”6
Aesthetics often transcend space, and in this case the aesthetic of the marginal, the vernacular, the “developing,” is rooted in varying states of porosity, the grey of weathered concrete growing darker. A breeze whistles through the common gaps these pores allow, carrying the daily scents of determination in adversity: of fried fish, stewed meat, hung laundry, sweat from heat and sweat from hard work.
An air of romance is necessary here to fan away mounting incessant frustration, which whines high-pitched in the mind like a dengue-ridden mosquito. There are parts of the world that are not used to experiencing leaks and breaches, that have not been conditioned to expect them—where people go in the hopes of escaping them, though often they follow in other ways. Precarity is an antonym of progress. As a modernizing force, concrete blocks were designed to withstand the elements, to be earthquake-proof, fireproof, waterproof, pest-proof, to keep precarity as far away from the sanctity of the home as possible. Concrete is one of the most widely used substances on earth, second only to water, and was dispersed around the world in hopes of making this reality ubiquitous, but vocations for the universal are rarely benevolent7—cement manufacturing and concrete production account for nearly 8 percent of global carbon emissions.
Forty muses that while concrete tells us what it means to be modern, is a “sobriquet of progressive,” the material also has a “telluric backwardness,” a crudeness. This ambiguity causes him to rethink and contradict himself later: “Concrete is, we could say, untimely matter; it never speaks in more than one tense, generally the present, sometimes the future, almost never the past.”8 For the global majority, perhaps a more accurate and less confusing tense could be Saidiya Hartman’s subjunctive—what is imagined, wished, or possible.9
A gentle stir of breeze can arouse wandering daydreams from fluttering curtains. For a great percentage of the world’s population, dreams about the future involve crossing a border into the “developed” world. According to data from 2024, Jamaica has the third-highest rate of “brain drain” in the world, outranked by Samoa as the first and Palestine second, with Micronesia and Somalia following after.10 These so-called fragile states have each been uniquely battered by colonialism’s obtrusive and exploitative historical breach, the winds of which have only further complicated their respective atmospheres in the present. Exacerbated by the global climate crisis, these nations are increasingly vulnerable and volatile places to call home, bearing the load of carbon emissions from higher GDP countries. Opportunity here is often just out of sight, on the outer reaches of the horizon. Being in diaspora can be described as traveling toward the future—does this then relegate a fragile homeland to the intangible realm of the past, of memory?
As an immigrant, there are days when I feel dislocated: the ground is not the ground and is set to rupture at any moment. The surface is thin, and the hollow space beneath it feels endless, an abyss all the way down. If I will myself to envision what lies at the very bottom, I see mangled mangrove branches and their aerial roots above shallow stagnant water, sitting atop a base slab of cracked concrete. The great effort it takes to not allow myself to fall to this dissociative place isn’t singular—a hidden side effect of leaving home is sometimes taking its fragility with you.
The present is an aggregate, mongrel and creolized in the shape of the “postcolonial.” Churning as if in the spinning drum of a concrete truck, the present must remain slippery, unable to settle into solidity. Language can only attempt to articulate this slurry, to pronounce its sediments—at best, to release it from its containment. As the breeze picks up and turns to violent wind, amid wails and cracks we have to speak louder in order to be heard.
Alissa Roach, born in Kingston, Jamaica, is a writer and an artist often concerned with exploring the idea of home—reminders of home, what it means to build a home, what it means to leave, and what it means for that home to face imminent destruction. She is a recent graduate of the MA Writing program at the Royal College of Art, and her work has been published in Parentheses Magazine, through the Cosmic House in London, and in the Philly Plain Dealer.
[1] Massonnet’s white plastic chair is the most widely used piece of furniture in the world. See Arnd Friedrichs and Kerstin Finger, 220°C Virus Monobloc: The Infamous Chair (Gestalten, 2010).
[2] See Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Michigan Press, 1997), 18–20.
[3] Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History (Reaktion, 2012), 9.
[4] Tao Leigh Goffe, Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Penguin, 2025), 51.
[5] See Forty, Concrete and Culture, 41.
[6] Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autoconstrucción, trans. Mike Gonzalez (Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2008), 12.
[7] See Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 23.
[8] Forty, Concrete and Culture, 256.
[9] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, no. 26 (June 2008): 11. I am borrowing this concept instead of Hartman’s often quoted “critical fabulation,” because rather than engaging with her continuous attempt at filling archival gaps, I am more interested in projecting onto a nonlinear present.
[10] See the Fund for Peace, “Fragile States Index 2024: Comparative Analysis,” https://fragilestatesindex.org/.