Posts tagged interconnectedness
Posts tagged interconnectedness
i have a lot of memories of being indoors and outdoors. i remember climbing trees in harare and planting maize for the summer. i remember sitting as a teenager on sidewalks and playing in the sprinklers of inwood park in nyc to keep cool in the sticky heat. i remember my grandfather telling me stories of the kkk and taking over the farm my great grannie had been sharecropping in virignia since the days our people were fighting enslavement. visiting my father’s family in rural kenya for the first time since he was exiled and eating small sweet bananas and sleeping under mosquito nets, unlike all my cousins who new how to live in their home without them. hearing story of ovens dug into the ground by friends’ relatives in méxico. spritzing at plants in harlem apartments. there are many many reasons why us Afro folk have had a tenuous relationship with the land: being taken away from our homeland on this continent or that; being forced to work on the land, land stolen from Brown folk, to benefit the whites; being commodified just as land was within oppressive capitalist sytems; being denied the fruit of our labours on the land, or time to walk leisurely; fleeing and fearing our footprints in the soil; and also dreaming of flying home; singing in the fields; sharing ancient afroknowledges of cultivating rice, being part of growth; learning from Brown folk of the berries and moons. understanding the problematic connections made by the euroworldview- we are not more natural or animal. this is us exploring that Black people overstand ancient and deep meaning, both metaphysical and material, within the earth. the toxic worldview constructs lies of dichotomies and divisions: human/nature, white/Black, man/woman, intelligence/animal brutishness, beauty/ugliness, to maintain toxicity and domination. in Brown and Black worldviews there is the radical to-the-root-to-the-stars understanding of the interconnectedness of all beings and elements-creating new spaces in which the non human such as plants, air, stars, and all humans are valued and important.
