The launch of Sourced's new season on Trees had me thinking a lot about landscape, and the systems of landscape, and how us humans are part of that systems.
I have a lot of feels, after so much reading I do, that doesn’t always allow for concise ‘academic’ or ‘journalistic’ writing - there is no argument to be made. When I think of landscapes, I often think of trees, of the jungle. And this thinking is always a visceral one, the feeling of a landscape on my skin, in my bones, and translation down generations.
I’m interested in how colonialists saw these ‘new world’ landscapes; there were ‘Enlightened’ thinkers who deeply thought about the environment, but saw the environment as an influence on the people as opposed to a conversation - the landscape was a un-thing; oppressive even. The environment was a way to justify a hierarchy of race, and from there racial definitions became ways to legitimise slavery, exploitation… our beloved environment was a reason to subjugate. So my blog post this month is the feels I get from all this information swimming in my head, it is about the colonised body existing in multiple times.
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They came to our lands and proclaimed a system of knowledge that was unrelated to the landscape before them. They claimed knowledge of the space were they stood, and ownership of the land they stood on. They came with the arrogance of words, and the inability to listen.
They looked to the environment, and claimed ‘environmentalists’ approaches, and seeked to impose the environment on our bodies to lay claim and to denigrate our world. Eighteenth-century philosophers said that brown and black bodies ‘stagnated’ because of the landscape they existed in. This view was about how space and land affect the human, not how can the human converse with the world. They could not imagine the sophistication in listening, in hearing, in responding. The mapping of worlds, on to bodies; the breaking down and analysing difference and categorising what they did not understand. Bodies broken into boxes, to be defined and later to be studied.
Our world became a system of misunderstanding. Our bodies etched in the way a section of the world saw us. A German Johann Friedrich Blumenbach broke the bodies of the world down into five - Caucasian, Mongolia, Ethiopian, American and Malay - claiming whiteness as ‘the most beautiful form’ and said the climate broke our bodies down be lesser than1. And our nuances became radicalised as points of box to be ticked. Hierarchy and boundaries were placed on our skin - to be ruled, traded, sold.
They arrived.
Came into our mists and forests, circumvented our lakes, and rode up our rivers. They hacked their way through our jungles and drained our lakes.
The arrival.
When we look back into our stories we find the beginning of a world comes with an arrival. We arrive at a place: a fish fished out of an ocean, a god dropped onto a land, the world from the back of a turtle. But we stumble on this new world, we are foreign and vulnerable and we seek help in the landscape we are in, the animals already there.
“It is good to remember that the original woman was herself an immigrant” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes2. How do we become indigenous, how do we become Indigenous? We must first dream, and our dreams must be part of the environment we sink our feet into, and we must listen and hear and respond. We must ask to be part of the new world we have found ourselves in, allowed to be let into the rhythms.
This isn’t about ‘assimilating’ in the racist systems that brown and black bodies are subjected to when we moved West. Systems that became racist because “you were there”, because whiteness decided to be white and decided categories before we came to ‘you’. This is about assimilating into systems of nurture.
Moving west. We moved West after they were in our space, places of home. They moved westward and stole spaces, places of home. New worlds. Move to and through.
Asking to be part of a new world is about dreaming of the future that is not about gaining in the immediate. They arrived, like us in our myths, but they arrived without the notion to listen and instead with a notion to take. They didn’t dream of a future, not in the way we did. Some moved to hope for a future - working men and women who had not been allowed a future in their homes, so seeked a new home and in turn made whiteness settle into notes of states - they were limited by the rules and structures that only allowed them to see their future, and not the future of the trees and the plants and the peoples who homes they invaded.
Our bodies respond to the landscape, and I feel the many landscapes I have existed in, mapped out on my body. I feel the wind through my hair, as if it has been there before time, before I knew time. My body seeks warmth, the sweat of dusk; but I also feel the chill of an autumn mist in highlands of ancestry. And I am born over and over again as shapes of hills echo inside as if I have seen them before. It feels impossible to me to not recognise how the shape of a place is part of its people and cannot be categorised into neat little boxes. Bodies broken.
And these boxes exclude the histories of collaboration and connectivities we already had across oceans and seas. We spoke and we laughed and we schemed and we traded, across the Indian Ocean and we had kingdoms and we had villages and we had jungles that were cosmopolitan, even amongst the canopy of thick jungles. When you were locked in land with Roman dominance and gothic wars, black pepper was traversing from the Western Ghats to Indonesia and on to China; 100 BCE, 392 CE, 1178 CE3 are dates recorded of complex trading. We knew the world, before they could comprehend it. They learnt from us, and corrupted the learning with greed. (Although there is greed everywhere and my nostalgia clouds the stories of these, but those stories still pale in comparison to the brutality Europe unleashed on the world).
They arrived with the ignorance and the arrogance to dominate. And to dominate is to subjugate. And to do so it proves that you are better than. And to be better than, you must find borders around your identity, build sticks to square yourself. To define, and refine, YOU, them. So that WE must bounce off your borders and not feel kin, not build bridges, not find commonality, not share knowledge. You created a them, and an we. It could have been us, all, together.
But it seems so funny that your search for difference and domination comes from your misunderstanding of environment, seeing our landscape as lesser, and yet exploitable riches from it. Our nature enriched us, gave you riches, and could have saved the world. But you didn’t listen, you just spoke - carving up the world into little boxes: people, land, produce, product.
We, you, them, us will continue to arrive in new spaces - and how we can become native and how can we listen and hear, and respond? And how does our place in the landscape become one that does not break bodies into boxes?
1The Chinese in Britain 1800 - Present, Gregor Benton , Edmund Terence Gomez pg 287
2Braiding Sweetgrass, pg8
3The Banana Tree at the Gate, Michael R Dove, pg53
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