by Khadra Ghedi Alasow and O. Hugo Benavides
Sun, Dec 26, 2021 at 7:12 AM
Dear Hugo,
I have been reading a collection of Native American poetry and have been fascinated by their descriptions of land. It makes me think of the beauty of poetry as a mode of telling stories and preserving and embodying culture. In the book the editors describe this beautifully. They write, “[The poems] hold up a mirror to loss and unexpectedly translate the small reflection it makes as hopeful” (When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, p.17). Hope…. That is the key.
The history of land for many is painful. Yet, in my experience, those that have lost the most are also the very same people who have a deep-rooted zest for life and what seems like endless positivity. It fascinates me—honestly. Suppressed by the forces of capitalism, they shine through by drawing on the energy of hope. The intergenerational connections, using modes such as poetry, are maintained and passed on and keep people grounded—literally.
In many African societies oral history and poetry are a rich well of wisdom used to pass down messages of hope. They create and enact a strong cultural bond of continuation and continuity. Quite simply these societies teach that the land beneath our feet is what connects everyone across the globe. Land is the ultimately the source on which embodied messages of hope are built.
Warm regards,
Khadra
——
Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 8:06 PM
Dear Khadra,
Thanks for your note. And as you can imagine, tons of food for thought.
I was struck very powerfully by your lines. I had a hundred different reactions and thoughts, all at the same time. Perhaps my strongest association—it has stayed with me since you wrote—was to the story my Palestinian colleague tells of how her family and friends still keep dirt from the lands that were taken away from them. A material physical reminder of their loss, and a way to share that land with their children, and their children's children, etc. A way, in a sense, to share their loss. But, as you very rightly say, it isn't just loss. Somehow in that material connection and transformation of memory, loss actually becomes hope. Loss is transformed into hope in that unfathomable, unexpectedly small reflection by the dirt of the actual catastrophe. The material dust reflects so much life, loss, pleasure, pain, desire, and promise—if we are lucky....
I guess where I enter this conversation is through the Andes. Those majestic mountains/ancestors that humble us. Having been brought up and having spent over half of my life away from the Andes, I have always thought long and painfully about belonging—the enormities of longing, of never fully belonging to one place. Yet now I remember the poet José Kozer once signing a book to me with a beautiful line. He wrote, "To Hugo, and the equatorial line where he enters." I felt this lack of belonging most acutely when I excavated both an Inca site near Quito and the Ancient Roman site of Pompeii. I was traumatized by the fact that we could identify absolutely everything that we excavated from under our feet at Pompeii: coins, oil lamps, murals, dice, perfume bottles, etc. At the Inca site we wrote on the labels attached to almost all the items we put into bags, "ritual object." This was the way we announced to ourselves that their meaning had been lost to the contemporary descendants of the Incas, to us....
The answer of course is colonialism and capitalism. Only colonialism and capitalism can explain how we as Andeans lost our connection to the history under our feet (and impressed upon our skin). Colonialism and capitalism explain how we are instead connected to a Western history thousands of miles away. We are legible to ourselves in objects to be found in the Bay of Naples. And yet I suspect that in some profound way this displacement of our knowledge of ourselves only reinforces how much we are actually, conflictingly connected to the alienated land we walk upon and what is under it as well....
My best, Hugo
——
On Wed, Jan 5, 2022 at 4:28 PM
Dear Hugo,
Just like you, I have thought long and hard about belonging. Your words on belonging struck me deeply. Belonging…. What it means to belong…. Who can belong…. How to belong….
The notion of belonging is difficult to articulate. It is a feeling that cannot easily be described.
Belonging is fluid. It is, as you say, not always related to any one place. However, no matter where or how, I believe that everyone aspires to belong. Some are lucky enough to feel contented. Others (and I believe that this is the greater part of humanity) are emotionally roaming and searching for a way to belong. I believe the connection to land plays a massive role in the feeling of loss and lack of belonging.
When I assisted a friend with his PhD research on the Nama people of Namibia and Northern South Africa, a local resident we interviewed captured the notion of belonging beautifully. His words were something along the lines of “We belong to the land—the land does not belong to us. As long as the Earth exists we will always belong to it—because it is who we are.” When we asked him how land restitution could effectively take place so that justice could be restored, he did not answer the question as I would have expected. He said nothing about wanting the ownership of so many hectares for instance. His simple wish was to nurture his connection to the land by being able to use it freely. He never used the terminology of “ownership” or permanent possession. He did talk a lot about how he belonged to the land instead of vice versa. He was one of the most contented people I have ever encountered in my life.
This interchange made me think about how successfully our current world order of capitalism restricts most of us from expressing our relation to the land. Capitalism offers only the vocabulary of the ownership of potential capital to express the possibilities of material value. It has converted the meaning and value of “belonging” into the concept and extractive practices of “owning.” As a result, the deeper, most meaningful connections to land are now lost to most people.
Could this be a major reason so many now feel lost?
Best,
Khadra
——
On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 5:55 PM
Thanks, Khadra.
Yet again your comments about belonging and ownership in relationship to land continue to make me think and feel my way more deeply through this.
After reading your email I was struck by the following line by Ben Ehrenreich: "Only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so." This is from his recent book Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time (2020). And I believe his idea cuts to the core of what it has taken to make Nature an inert reality—quite an undertaking when you consider how alive and loud nature really is. I think it also helps me understand why capitalism and we in the West have made our relationship to land such a sterile and confining one. Since our supposedly most meaningful relationship to land is one of ownership, then of course it limits all our most alive interactions with it. Perhaps even more profoundly, it kills the land in that it removes it from its intimate, inseparable connections to our knowledge of our own aliveness.
Of course, this becomes readily apparent once you talk to anybody who lives "closer to the land." But I think even that is a misnomer. This is exactly what we feel when we go to the ocean or forests and look to re-energize from them precisely because these stretches of earth are anything but dead or inert. But somehow that must be forgotten to fit back into our Western identities and livelihoods and relations of support and belonging. Maybe this accurately expresses one of the acute crises that we are living through: the fact that "belonging," an actual authentic form of it, must at best be conflicted and at worst pathological. Do we belong within our system of capital accumulation, with our jobs, names, kin relations, etc., or do we belong to the land, as most autochthonous communities tend to recognize, and therefore are bureaucratically and instrumentally left out of, or get rejected from, the Western construct? Either way we lose something, or something is missing. Marx tried to get at all this with his brilliant concept of alienation, I think.
My main concern has less to do with blaming or coming up with some ecological form of self-righteousness. I would rather dig deeper into why we have bought into this commodification/ownership of land as the main form of attachment and possessive identification. We know better and have all experienced better ways of relating to each other and the natural world.
At the end of the day maybe one of the questions is, “What is our investment in imagining the world as dead and seeing nature as an inert when in fact we know and feel the reality of the world so differently? Why can't we know what we know?
Abrazos, y Continuamos,
Hugo
——
On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 12:25 PM
Dear Hugo,
You pose some existential questions that powerfully mirror our fractured understanding of being and belonging. I think many have wondered why we engage with our environments the way we do, especially because most people feel like there is something missing....
It appears that the world is currently organized in a way that makes us believe there is a particular instrumentalized way in which belonging and happiness are to be achieved. So yes, some of us have to change more of ourselves than others to fit into this technologically prescribed form of happiness. You pose the very important question as to why. Well, I believe that the rupture from belonging to the land came from the violence of its forceful possession. Other forms of belonging and being were forced out so systematically that it is very difficult now to reconnect. This violence of dispossession leaves us missing an understanding of ourselves. Our values, our humanity, our truths.... Some of us speak of wanting to participate in a cosmopolitan community, but we have a very abstract and obscure notion of what this would really mean.
Our understanding of the ecological crisis highlights some of this. I believe that continuing debates on climate and environmental justice have opened new ways for us to conceive our relationship to the human and nonhuman worlds. We are learning to understand how Indigenous ways of connecting to the land and environment constitute potential correctives to the ways capitalism structures experience. Ownership prevents us from seeing that the welfare of all people and the earth is an important component of our most fundamental needs for mutuality and belonging. Ownership obscures our view of what is most important.
How do we get back (or rather, build) a different future of belonging and reciprocity across all spectrums of human interaction? Well, many among us have been working on this for some time. I think it's now more crucial than ever to whom we listen and from whom we learn. Whose stories and experiences reach what audiences? Equally important, who are the people in the background doing the actual work?
How do we accomplish, and become inspired by, the work we most want to do? How do we share it?
Best,
Khadra
——
Wed, Feb 9, 2022 at 10:24 AM
Dear Khadra,
Excuse the tardiness of my reply.
It was provoked by two things: one of them is that I traveled to Ireland (Northern Ireland) last week, and shockingly (not) the experience was much more powerful than I thought it would be. But I also think the delay had to do with your question: was there were something inspiring in my work that I wanted to share? I think the question stumped me precisely because I don't have anything inspiring around me, or rather the things that inspire me do so in ways that, at least to me, seem to go against the grain of ordinary understandings of “positive” experience.
Take for example the connection between “inspiration” and my “work” of visiting Ireland. Attached to this email is a photograph of the Derry Wall as it looked on January 30th of this year to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Everything about that wall and its current look (people change and paint over it with different images every so often) assaulted my senses. (I believe that is a Baldwin phrase.) Everything—from the black letters to the shadow the sun was casting that morning to being surrounded by so many powerful murals depicting the violence that had saturated that blood-soaked land. A part of me believes that all these images and the host of feelings they produced are finally disarming and paralyzing. At certain moments, I think I know that this is incontrovertibly true. For instance, it was impossible for me to respond to an elderly man when he told me that his nephew had been gunned down on the street where we were standing. In the moment of such an encounter, there is nothing one can say to the knowledge being shared.
Derry Wall (Photo by Hugo Benavides)
And yet, neither paralysis nor tragedy, not even anger or revenge, were the dominant emotions swirling around Derry during the fiftieth anniversary commemoration. Suffusing the complex of myriad feelings I sensed being present during the ceremonies above all was a sense of aliveness and hope. It was as if the dead were not dead but walking with us. They had not died precisely because their loved ones had carried them for all this time. They lived because they had succeeded in having a whole national and global community witness the atrocity of the slaughtering of the lambs (also a Baldwin phrase). Because of this we were all part of that global community—ages old as in the religious meaning of “the communion of the saints”—connected by mutual articulation over time and space. I am not saying that we did not cry. There were and are moments (even now) when words falter, but the overall feeling was one of hope and inspiration. Cruelty and tragedy were by no means dispelled, but they were endured, shared, and transformed by fortitude.
However painful all of this is (I think of pain as both a living constant and a constant for living), I draw inspiration from the recognition of land as something alive and nurturing. I believe it is crucial to understand why it is something worth dying for and something worth staying alive for at the same time. I think we can honor its rightful ownership of us through an ethically enlivening witness of our belonging to it against the coercions and temptations to identify with capitalist fantasies of entitled ownership.
Here again, I feel the words with which Fanon ends Black Skin, White Masks, coming to the surface: "Oh my body, make of me always (somebody) who questions."
Love,
Hugo
——
On Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 10:12 AM
Dear Hugo,
Your last words resonate profoundly with me and so many people who I have spoken to. They also bring me back to our earlier conversation on hope. Land is worth being alive for and worth dying for—quite powerful.
We live in a time of chaos and confusion so profound that many of the forced removals and injustices in both the countryside and city are not broadcast the way they should be. In the city the violence and injustice often are perpetrated by gentrification. The stories of the people that inhabited the area for decades are erased in the blink of an eye. In the countryside you often come across deserted and ruined houses like the one in the image below.
Photo by Khadra Ghedi Alasow
So many crave access to a home and some land. Both are physically present but are unavailable.
As you know, I have done some research on land reform in South Africa. The issue is complex, but the key to success is social transformation that leads to a more inclusive society. My research convinced me that land plays a central role in imagining a different future. It puts into direct question the obstacles the states’ promotion of private sector interests place in the path of achieving the general welfare. Central to building a more equitable society is transforming the relation all people have to the land.
The time has come (it has been there for quite a while) to recognize our own power and re-imagine our relation to the land. I find it inspiring hearing those who have lost so much being hopeful through their sadness. Current crises of power and sustainability are forcing all of us to question our ways of being. We are in a moment of recognizing that the continuity of human life is imminently jeopardized by capital accumulation. We exist within a system in which unconstrained capitalist freedom and general human welfare are being revealed to be antithetical. It strikes me intuitively that deep down none of us is at all surprised that it is in this moment that land emerges as posing the most pressing and fundamental issues concerning the universal human project of creating and preserving value itself.
Best,
Khadra
——
On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 11:56 PM
Dear Khadra,
Land now poses the most pressing and fundamental issues of creating and preserving value itself. These are powerful words. They make a good ending to our exchange. What do we do? How do we respond to a system that values the logic of economics and finance over the preservation of the continuity of human life? What do we do when land and our livelihoods are turned into commodities for the highest bidder instead of being put into the service of our collective survival and well-being? What do we do when these economic processes are coercively integrated into globally co-ordinated daily "big brother" solutions or are euphemistically labelled “modernization” and “economic restructuring”? Again, capitalism has proven a gigantic foe that successfully infiltrates and saturates our cultural identities.
Perhaps because of my initial professional archaeological education, I am always pulled back into the past. I believe it is essential to understand how determined all of us are by the colonial imaginings of the past. By this I mean concrete political, economic, and social practices that were put into place to decimate and exploit whole populations. It is as a result of those specific genocidal practices in the past that whole populations in the present have been given the honorific titles of “native,” “Indigenous” or “ancestral” and designated as constituting distinctive “communities.”
Recently I was horrified to learn that the short period of global cooling (called “the Little Ice Age”) experienced by the world from the 14th to mid-19th century may have been augmented by the European genocide of American populations. It seems the slaughter of millions of people in the Americas left stretches of land abandoned which contributed to a grand reversal of the natural greenhouse effect. This may have encouraged a significant drop of temperature for several decades.
Even the hint of such a devastating global impact brings home how profound and systematically destructive the forms of capital accumulation have been. There is no way to minimize how much distress, death, and destruction capitalism has caused or how pervasively it continues to structure our contemporary livelihoods that can withstand honest scholarly scrutiny.
With that said, I return to your question about hope and inspiration. What allows us to continue fighting, making a difference, and refusing to be erased? Perhaps our successful responses are due in part to how Cortázar, among many others, teaches us to envision hope as being less about us than about something larger. Cortázar writes, "[P]robably of all our feelings the only one that is not truly ours is hope. Hope belongs to life, it is life defending itself.”
It is perhaps such hope that will enable us to incorporate into our own practices and understandings concerning land’s globalized political economy the words of the Indigenous Cayuse leader when in 1855 he refused to sign a treaty with the US government ceding the territory now called “Oregon.” He would not sign, he said, because he "wondered if the ground has anything to say?” “I wonder,” he continued, “if the ground is listening to what is said?"
In solidarity,
Hugo