LIFE SEEN THROUGH A SISTA’S EYE PODCAST TRANSCRIPT S1 :E8a
ANNOTATED TRANSCRIPT available here.
What Is Your Relationship To Land?
Hello, my loves! It’s been ages! Let me tell you: I have been on such a beautiful adventure into the world of learning, like literally formal education. I think the last time I spoke to you all would have been in January (oops! I almost lost my voice recorder there). And the prompt was what’s your relationship to land and so we’re going to pick up that prompt in this particular episode and continue on our journey.
I made a couple of decisions about how to structure the episodes. So, I’m going to alternate between a session where we focus on the writing prompt and then a session where we focus on the next part of the story that is unfolding. And that story is all related to me unpacking and looking deeper into this inherited identity of #BlackBougieAndQuestioningCapitalism as an African who is speaking back into a system that has pretty much built its wealth by robbing the African continent. Let’s just call a spade a spade. Whether that’s robbing the natural resources of the continent or robbing the cultural resources of the continent. So that’s really the direction that we’re tending to and everybody is welcome into this discussion. It’s a discussion that we all have to have because it is a discussion that affects all of us.
So, on this beautiful full moon night — I’m not sure what star sign we’re in, I do know that we’ve just gone into Cancer or if the moon is in another star sign — I haven’t looked at the astrology today. I’m still a baby in all of that but we’re coming out of eclipse season (we might still be in it? Who knows? I’m still learning) and all of that is relevant because I’m talking about land.
In the six months since I gave you that prompt, I’ve really been developing a relationship with my backyard. I rent accommodation and there’s a beautiful backyard and it’s not far from a nature reserve so I’m quite fortunate in that regard. As you also know from previous episodes, I love spending time by the ocean (the bay), so I’m also called by large bodies of water. But recently I’ve found myself really staring at the sky a lot. Just the changing winter sky. SO beautiful! I mean usually I absolutely dread a Melbourne/Naarm winter. There’s been a lot of frost on the ground when I wake up so it looks like it will be a chilly winter. The days are still really quite warm. Where was I going with all of this … am I digressing? I’m always digressing — you know me. Oh yes, the connection between land and the heavens; and that thought itself draws me to the ancient Kemetic pairing of the Sky Goddess/Mother Sky/The Mother Of The Cosmos/The Mother Who Gave Birth To The Milky Way Itself — one of the ancestral deitites or entities that preceded the gods who are all aspects of nature itself — nature outside of us and nature within us. If you don’t get it just stay with me, stay with me. Listen and you will get it one day.
Mother Sky is known as Nut; and then we have Father Earth. I remember saying that once to a Senegalese friend of mine and he laughed at me. He said “what are you talking about? There is no such thing as Father Earth. Everyone knows it’s Mother Earth.” And I was like “actually the ancient Kemetic folk used to pair Mother Sky with Father Earth.” I think when I was reading Credo Mutwa in his book “Indaba My Children”, which is all about African mythology, the Earth might have also been a masculine energy force. So, we’re really just talking about masculine and feminine energies which can be embodied by a person regardless of how they wish to identify in terms of their gender.
So the land is something that I’m thinking about a lot; and of course living on stolen Blak land I’m very aware that there are stories that have been told here for over sixty thousand years that give meaning to what land means here, meaning beyond the Capitalist program of land. We’re all on that program now, you know? The program of relating to land as something that you own. I mean that’s a really big issue here at the moment. I mean if people are living in large cities with gentrification and all of that we really feel that pressure of the system of renting and trying to find a place that is affordable and there’s a lot of stories right now with people where our relationships to land are being challenged as we consider “do we buy”, “do we move into the country/do we move away from the city?” All sorts of decisions around our ability to survive. I kind of find it interesting that relationship we have with the overarching system of money and land (where money connects into land as a capital resource) is changing our relationship to it (land).
So, bringing us back to the full moon. I’ve been making friends with this backyard and on the new moon (which is the time when you’re supposed to set intentions for an energy that you would like to grow in your life) I set an intention to become more observant of the backyard and the wildlife that comes into the backyard. Like I said, I live close to a nature reserve so there are a lot of birds around me (I think you’ve heard them in the recordings). But I’ve never looked to see what kind of birds there are; and I’ve been spotting some really beautiful feathered friends coming into the garden. They love to eat the worms here. I think this earth must be really rich in insects. I’ve seen a few flying ants — and I’m like “isn’t it the wrong season for flying ants?’ — but ants are always a good sign that the earth is in good shape … well aerated. And I’m thinking of growing a garden. When I put that intention out (with the new moon), a friend of mine actually offered me two vegetable boxes because they have to move out of their property in a very short amount of time and it’s just beautiful how all of these plants are finding me since I set that intention.
So, I am in a shifting relationship with land since I set that intention. And yes, I am renting so I still have that relationship with capital you know where I still have to work in order to have access to a place to call home, which is the reality for most of us in the world right now but it wasn’t always that way. Was it? We didn’t always have to pay for water. We didn’t always have to pay for somewhere to live, for food. So, when I set the writing prompts (let’s just get into those), I wanted us to pick between two writing prompts that would determine what our current and always evolving relationship to land might be.
Now those are just two prompts and you could have a completely different way of relating to land — go for it! Run with it: I’m just here to guide you not to tell you what to think. So let’s just cut to a quick excerpt from that episode with the writing prompt and we’ll take the stories and the storytelling from there.
What Does It Mean To Be African In The 21st Century?
The following writing prompt presents another opportunity for us to study ourselves, with love, grace and compassion but with full honesty. It is also preparation for next (week’s) podcast … a deeper dive into the definition of “success” from the perspective of a Black Insider — the writer who rejects the bougie lifestyle and challenges a postcolonial society to instead embrace complete liberation. More about this Zimbabwean writer next week.
Based on my own reflections to date, I offer two reflective journaling prompts.
Simply pick the question you vibe with the most, right off the bat. No judgement, only curiosity. I repeat, no judgement or harsh self-criticism.
Please proceed with grace, with compassion and curiosity as there is no right or wrong answer …
It is just a story and if you don’t like your story, you have the power to transform yourself and become what you prefer to be.
As you reflect on your selected question, please relate your own answer to the land where you currently live, work and play. By contextualising your response in such a personal and tangible way, you can bring the questions with you everywhere you go this week and note your observations in your journal.
Are you ready for the two questions? Okay, here we go — remember to pick the one that most resonates and journal about it over the next two weeks. Zero judgement. So …
Q1 When you talk about Land, to yourself or to others,
- do you speak of Land as something you can own? As something that belongs to you to the exclusion of all others, unless you grant them a right to enter, live on or make any profit? What is the nature of your relationship to this commodity/investment/the land where your home is currently located?
OR
Q2 When you talk about Land, to yourself or to others,
- do you speak of yourself as belonging to the Land; in the same sense that a child belongs to a particular/a particular set of parent/s? What is the nature of your relationship with your parent/s i.e. the land where your home is currently located?
Okay, have fun engaging in some self-study! Do what you will in terms of documentation. You might like to record voice notes, paint, take photos, collage, write a song … whatever comes most naturally to you. I prefer to journal but love to see what you do with the prompt.
So, here’s a little more background about these journaling prompts.
Are you ready? It’s storytime. Get comfy.
I write poetry to help me remember the epic stories I feel called to write. Ten years ago, I wrote a poem which is still awakening my ancestral memories and intergenerational wisdom around how I related to ideas/concepts/experiences/relationships to land, family or collective living and success. I based my forthcoming booklet/novella, “For Visionaries And Raindancers” on this poem, which is called “The Conversation Is Always The Same”.
I shared this poem and the booklet with some of my podcast guests ahead of the recording because I really love to receive critical feedback and insight from folks who are doing similar work with their own creativity. If I lived in the country where I was born and raised, this digital interaction would happen in real time; but because I am an African living overseas, I rely on the internet for access to these really important creative discussions with folks who can read between the lines and hear the unspoken so that I can step out of my own conditioned interpretation and see the issue from multiple perspectives — without losing myself or my own story but rather allowing my story to exist with a larger patchwork quilt.
Ahead of our conversation about Dambudzo Marechera’s literary fiction, I shared an early draft of my manuscript with Tinashe Mushakavanhu. I wanted to provide some context so he could appreciate my perspective and understand my motivations for interviewing him about this writer.
In that manuscript, I write about my transformed definition of “success”; and the lifestyle and the professional career path which comes along with my new definition of “success”. This lifestyle and career path which I am actively creating are both deeply rooted in my soul’s purpose. It’s such bougie privilege to choose a path that allows me to stay in deep alignment with who I am and how I can keep showing up in the world, authentically, not as a colonized person but as a sovereign being who is actively returning colonial baggage back to sender so I can get on with the radical dreaming. This may not all make sense to you right now but it will as the podcast series unfolds and you do your own deep work through the journaling prompts. Yet, this decision places me at odds with the value system in which I was raised and socialized at school, at home and in the world of work. The version of me that I am allowing to emerge is countercultural — for now, at least. And there I days where …
This instinct to go against the grain and define success on one’s own terms in relationship to what best benefits the collective is precisely what drew me to Dambudzo Marechera as a writer. As the poem reveals, it’s a tough journey … this going against the grain is exhausting and frightening because it triggers a backlash (not just outside of me but also within me) because of deep-seated and unresolved ancestral trauma which erupts exposing inherited assumptions and stories about which jobs and careers are worthy of financial security and the type of stability which does not turn a person into a burden on the family. In a society where the family is the only source of social security and a leveraging point for each of us to sequentially escape and then turn around to pull the other out of the quick sands of impoverishment that threaten to swallow all of us whole, success is always more than just individual … success is both collective and an ancestral victory.
As my poem and the forthcoming booklet reveal, colonialism deeply transformed our individual and collective relationships to land.
Colonisers created stories so that Black Africans became the underclass, the slave wage labour for the colony. As the emerging colonial capitalist patriarchy used these stories to create policies, laws and regulations that forced Black men to work as labourers, the system also banned our earth-based ceremonies and rituals, defining many of our practices as demonic. As colonialism spread, our connections to ourselves, to each other and to the land shifted radically into a new direction. Once the people were left with no other option than starvation, many turned to exploiting the Earth to survive. I wonder if we have any record of this type of trauma and what it does to a person and their descendants.
If you’d like to read more about how encounters with colonialism changed Africans relationships to self, each other and land, I recommend “The Spirit Of Intimacy” by Sobonfu Somé and “Of Water And The Spirit” by Malidoma Somé.
So, when I ask about relationship to land in terms of how you define “success”, I am coming from this historic and collective experience where land became property as ownership was a strategy for survival within a colonial capitalist patriarchal paradigm that never meant for us to survive, let alone live. Since property is traded for money, education becomes the quickest means to break out of imposed impoverishment and own a home or land from which to build more wealth and create stability for entire families.
Indeed, when adults saw me reading a book, especially during the school holidays, they always praised me and encouraged to keep studying and learning. We always celebrated academic excellence and punished those who failed to achieve within this system. My grandmothers would often say that “the old way is gone” and “you must make a path for yourself now in the new way”. Their advice always puzzled me because I had no clue what they meant by “old ways”. They could see the confusion on my face and would laugh it away, saying “oh, they no longer know.” But I detected pain in their voice and in their eyes, so I sensed something valuable and priceless had been disappeared like it never existed … and although they never told me the stories, I still carry the pain of that silencing and erasure.
Indeed, I only understood what they meant by “new way”: I was trained to excel at public exams and to always come first in class, no matter the cost because the world did not give Black folks any second chances, especially not women.
Under this new path, success looked like an expensive private school education, which could guarantee access to a university degree from an elite university followed by a white collar career in the traditional professions with a respectable institution, a large house in the wealthy low density suburbs, a big car, lifelong marriage to an equally successful partner from a good family and children who could repeat the cycle but with intergenerational wealth under our belt. That’s the story we were told, at any rate and, as an adult, looking back on this story — the “Born Free” dream — I see that a concept of land as property, a commodity and investment is the vital linchpin that holds together this “new way” and its vision of “success”.
What Does It Mean To Be African In The 21st Century?
This is the central question for this series. I am arguing that there should always be a rich diversity of answers to this question. Here’s mine.
I belong to a generation of people older folks from back home in Zimbabwe refer to as ‘Born Frees’. Technically, I was born under colonial rule; just ten months shy of national independence.
Since I can only remember life after national independence and never suffered the racialized indignities of colour bar or apartheid in housing, work and education, I can understand why folks lump me in as “Born Free” — the first generation of “Zimbabweans” who could fully enjoy all the fruits of their land and hard labour … again, not all of us and that’s definitely another story for another episode.
What is this dream of freedom, though?
What Does It Mean To Be African In The 21st Century?
There should always be a rich diversity of answers to this question.
To be born free according to this definition meant I was free in my own land — the land of my ancestors. This freedom meant I could enter and learn in the coloniser’s school system, work any job in their system and climb as high as any of their corporate ladders, live in any suburb and enter any restaurant without fear of discrimination. I could do all of this — as long as I upheld the silent codes of “civilized behavior”. This dream of freedom freed us to attain “success” and enjoy the land but on whose terms and under what definition of land, what type of relationship to land and “success” at what cost to our souls?
What Does It Mean To Be African In The 21st Century?
There should always be a rich diversity of answers to this question.
“Born free” means I stopped playing in the rain and turning cartwheels in the grass because the school deemed it “unladylike” behavior and worthy of detention.
Detention involved manual labour in the hot sun, side by side with “the help” … the gardeners — always Black and male — or inside cleaning the classrooms with the maids — always Black and female. Any born free who ended up as the help or associated with the help was a failure — enter classism and elitism.
Detention reinforced racialized capitalism but with young Black ladies in training now in the white supremacist mix, it taught us to be elitist. We tacitly learned to look down on people who looked like us, could have had the same totem as us but did not have the bougie clothes, accent, shoes and other privileges. Out of the fear of humiliation and exclusion, we sought to distinguish ourselves by clinging to the rules of etiquette and speech because after all we were Black people living amongst white folk whose ancestors had deemed us “uncivilized” and only worthy for manual labour.
Our association of manual labour with punishment created a growing disdain for working with the land. I reached a stage where I can only appreciate nature when (like us domesticated ladies in the making) nature presents itself on a glamping safari or as well-manicured and a tamed pretty garden. I love glamping as much as the next person and I’m sure our ancestors did it well, too. Bbut this is a different experience where like us, ladies-in-the-making, nature had to be tamed and subordinated in order to become aesthetically pleasing, without a word to say or an opinion to boot, just there for the taking on our terms and for our needs. It would be many decades before I could begin to shift this relationship to myself, to my people and to land. This podcast is a document of that journey back to centre love as I heal the colonial trauma which severed this relationship during my grandparents and great grandparents generations with repercussions that continue to reverberate.
In 2019, I remember sitting with family I had not seen for a while and taking in just how much I had changed since leaving law school with the intention to become a poet. I was already feeling the pull towards building a garden — I just needed to find the right place to do so. Someone made a joke about gardening and the entire room of white collar professionals erupted in laughter, except for me … I was fascinated that once upon a time I would have laughted to at something our grandparents (and parents) had done to provide for us and to ground their energies but now I was keenly aware that this relationship to land without which we could not even exists — is commonly framed as “lower class” and a sign that you were struggling financially and a failure.
What is your relationship to land?
Catch you next week for more of the unfolding story. We’ll focus on the urban landscape this time and the folks who grew up in the cities without any connection to their ancestral lands. If you have any comments, questions, opinions or requests you can email eye of the sista at gmail dot com. I’ll put the link in the show notes. Also, please join the mailing list for updates about new podcast episodes. I promise I respect your privacy and will request permission before sending you any other marketing and sales related information because who needs spam.
SHOW NOTES
Please get in touch with questions, comments and so forth but, better still, join the podcast membership group for consistent support and guidance.
In alphabetical order, a special shout out to the Raindancers tier and Afrofuturistic Storytellers Collective tier for supporting the production of this podcast:
- Kaiya
- Nithya
- Ryosuke.
