\u00a0<\/p>\n
Why do I now want to talk about the woods? After all, I grew up surrounded by woodland. In Coffee Grove, the village in Jamaica in which I spent my early childhood, I was surrounded by farmland, by animals, and by the bush. Why then had I never felt this urge to stand still in the woodland, or walk placidly, contemplating it? I realized, as I express in the poem \u201cWalking with the Word \u2018Tree,\u2019\u201d that for my family, nature was functional. As farmers, my grandparents shaped the land, waited for its yields, saw their living as connected to the earth. They were not contemplators of scenery; their hands were in the earth. These were environmentalists without a title.<\/p>\n
Later, at the age of five, I went to live in a town with my mother who was a school teacher. All of a sudden I was propelled into a different lifestyle. We would continue to be \u201cpoor\u201d but now at least we lived in a small town. We never got \u201ccoming out of the bush\u201d to coincide with \u201cupward social mobility,\u201d which became a source of frustration. Poverty can create feelings of enclosure. I believe it is, first and foremost, an affect (the absence of commodities and resources does not in itself equal poverty). We were living a half-rural, half-urban life, always with the aspiration of leaving the rural behind, because the rural was perceived to be an index of poverty. On the one hand we were trying to escape the rural, elemental lifestyle; on the other hand we couldn\u2019t afford the trappings of middle-class lifestyle. We went to the beach once a year, for example . . .<\/p>\n
Now that I think about it, the whole idea of middle class in Jamaica is about turning your back on the elements. The middle-class ideal entails distancing yourself from the natural, the woodland, any space associated with the \u201cprimitive\u201d\u2014and that includes folklore and myth, in which the woodland is the space of spirits, \u201cduppies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Given the attempts to distance Africans from ancestral practices, Blacks in the New World were forced to internalize a colonial epistemology of nature. The fact, for example, that African spiritual practices (including pharmacopoeia and various healing practices) were viewed as suspect by the colonizers rendered more problematic an already complicated relationship to the land. The urban space is the locus of progress. Nature belongs to the rural, not the urban. Nature is disorder, \u201cdirt,\u201d that which drags us down. There may well be links here with nineteenth-century Europe, in which there emerged the utopia of doing without nature, of replacing soils with a kind of chemical soup, since nature, it was thought, needed to be controlled, even eliminated.<\/p>\n
So in the small town of Porus where I lived from the age of five, people often pave over their front lawn. There is this obsession with covering the green. Modern upward mobility is concrete. The fracture that we experience between ourselves and nature, the desire and obsession to put distance between ourselves and the natural world, is rooted in slavery and colonialism. We try to distance ourselves from the \u201cpoor condition\u201d of living with the earth. To compound matters, violence and criminality deter us from venturing into the outdoors. Landscape and the possibilities of landscape are underpinned by socio-economic dynamics rooted in a colonial history and its afterlives. History\u2014the past and present of social violence\u2014make the woodland in Jamaica anything but a place of leisure. We live in a deep-seated social fracture that keeps us distanced from the natural.<\/p>\n
The question of Blackness and landscape is a complex one. For the Black body, walking is complicated, and to walk in a dark, veiled place is seldom an innocent act. Histories of the hunted Black body form part of the collective memory of the African diaspora. If the city often proves to be a dangerous space for Black people, as recent events have demonstrated, the fact is that, in the Black imaginary, it is the city that is perceived as the site of relative<\/em> safety, while the outdoors continue to be associated with the \u201cconstant necessity and activity of running away, of flight,\u201d as cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten puts it.<\/p>\n How then do we walk? How then do we inhabit leisure? What is \u201cnature\u201d to us?<\/p>\n I am thinking about spatial enclosure. To what extent are my past experiences and feelings of enclosure rooted in colonial ideologies and histories? My current poetic project is one of writing (against) enclosure.<\/p>\n Allow me a slight detour away from poetry, the better to underscore the concerns I engage in my poetry. While thinking about these issues, I encountered the work of photographer Ingrid Pollard. I have been particularly interested in a series of photographs Pollard took and exhibited in the late 1980s. It is quite interesting that the issues Pollard was grappling with in the 1980s are still just as present today.<\/p>\n In \u201cPastoral Interlude,\u201d Pollard takes familiar sites and makes them legible in new ways, playing with the viewer\u2019s sense of what seems natural or not so natural, forcing us to give attention to the ideological workings of landscape. The photographs involve \u201creading\u201d the ways that land has been marked, culturally speaking.<\/p>\n In the first photo, a Black woman, perhaps the artist herself, sits on a stone wall. Behind her a fence marks one boundary of a landscape of rolling hills. She is clad in white jumper, beige trousers tucked into mid-calfheight green socks; her head wrapped in a green scarf. She sits with a camera on her thigh. Her eyes look intently at something outside of the frame; whatever it is, she seems to be watching it with curiosity. The caption begins: \u201cIt\u2019s as if the black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District<\/em>; where I wandered lonely as a black face in a sea of white.\u201d<\/p>\n The evocation of William Wordsworth in \u201cI wandered lonely as a . . . \u201d is, of course, evident. Through the ironic evocations of Wordsworth\u2019s iconic poem, the artist challenges the Romantic associations attached to wandering on foot through the land\u2014leisure, relaxation, finding oneself\u2014 while highlighting the absence of bodies like her own in the landscape, and in cultural representations of the English countryside. There is an ambivalence in the speaker\u2019s feelings: the artist depicts herself as wanting<\/em> to be there, as discovering the pleasures of the Lake District (\u201cI thought I liked the Lake District\u201d); and, at the same time, as feeling a strange sensation of \u201cunease; of dread . . . .\u201d The suspension dots suggest an ongoing question, a kind of inability to fully explain why such feelings of unease exist and persist.<\/p>\n Wordsworth\u2019s poem speaks of rest\u2014the rest that allows one to observe the daffodils \u201cfluttering and dancing in the breeze,\u201d and the rest that such an experience gives to the mind. By contrast, the body language of the woman in the photograph does not strike me as being entirely restful. Her facial expression and her legs and knees that press against each other suggest a state of tension, that she might not feel entirely safe in this environment.<\/p>\n In one interview, Pollard was asked whether there was any personal experience that triggered her interest in the British rural, its mythologies and overwhelming Whiteness. She replied:<\/p>\n Just going on holiday. We only had a couple of holidays as a family\u2014we didn\u2019t have that kind of income\u2014 but we went camping a couple of times. When I left my parents, I used to go with friends to the Lake District. I wouldn\u2019t see another black person for a week, and you would notice. It was hard. My white friends would be going to relax, and it would create anxiety for me. I appreciate the countryside, but it wasn\u2019t particularly relaxing. I just wanted to do something about that.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n My book Thinking with Trees<\/em> (2021) considers Blackness and nature from the perspectives of time, race, and class, while interrogating the cultural and geographical meanings of landscape. These poems evoke the environmental conditions underpinning Black identity, while urging us to imagine alternative futures. The book follows a Caribbean tradition of weaponizing language through irony, and does so as a means of challenging social, racial and spatial boundaries. It engages a Jamaican lens on the British landscape and British ways of life, while reflecting on my changing \u201cidentity\u201d as I negotiate the shared and constructed space of landscape.<\/p>\n Thinking with Trees<\/em> grapples with the fact that spatial exclusion grows into the literary field as well. In the eyes of publishers and readers, nature writing is a White concern. They bemoan the dearth, or \u201cnon-existence,\u201d of Black nature writers. They ask, \u201cWhere are they? Are Black writers not interested in nature and ecology?\u201d The question is loaded with a set of assumptions and ossified ideas about nature, about Black writers, about the human being in relation to nature. It fails to acknowledge certain realities about the relationship between Blackness and landscape. It is ignorant of History, of the undemocratic aspects of landscape, and of the things that \u201cnature\u201d might mean in non-White imaginaries.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD TIME<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Who wanders<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 lonely as a cloud<\/p>\n with three golden retrievers?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Not me\u00a0\u00a0 no\u00a0\u00a0 not me<\/p>\n I could never understand this poetry<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n never understand what the poem was saying<\/p>\n and how this could be<\/p>\n poetry for me<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n when my English teacher drilled<\/p>\n the imagination of a white man\u2019s country<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know how but somehow I knew<\/p>\n this wandering was not<\/p>\n for me<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 because<\/p>\n ours was not the same kind of time<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 our wandering never so accidental<\/p>\n so entire so free<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n as if nothing was coming as if no hawk was near<\/p>\n as if they owned the land and the mansion on it<\/p>\n as if tomorrow and forever was theirs<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n as if they had the right to take their time<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 because<\/p>\n everything about them so refined\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 so secure<\/p>\n so clean<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So Wordsworth\u2019s poem never made sense<\/p>\n I\u2019d never stop to listen to the poems about trees<\/p>\n & mushrooms & odd cute things \u00a0\u00a0& \u00a0\u00a0birds whose<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 names I could never pronounce<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n My poetry was Tom the village deejay<\/p>\n It was more material\u00a0\u00a0 I said<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 than the woods \u00a0\u00a0than the lives of those who loafed<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n & bought their time<\/p>\n with money \u00a0\u00a0I thought<\/p>\n those who had all the time in the world<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Where the relationship between Blackness, nature, and history is concerned, a few observations are necessary. I will state these baldly. Firstly, in disrupting relationships with nature (dwelling practices), colonialism disrupts ways of knowing the world (knowledge practices). Secondly, the work of coloniality is based on control over nature. Thirdly, part of that control is the control of the othered (dangerous, out-of-place, to be controlled) Black body.<\/p>\n The assimilation of the Black to nature is central to the functioning of coloniality. But this is, of course, paradoxical, since, while the dynamics of coloniality assimilate the Black to nature, it also, at the same time, separates her or him from it. In the New World, as philosopher Sylvia Wynter points out, the African \u201chimself served as the ox for the plough of the plantation system which brought about the technical conquest of Nature.\u201d The history of European colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa reveals similar logics with respect to the control of bodies and land.<\/p>\n Yet, in the New World, the African presence \u201crehumanized Nature, and helped to save his own humanity against the constant onslaught of the plantation system by the creation of a folklore and folk-culture.\u201d The Africanist construal of the land as always Earth, the centre of a core of beliefs and attitudes, would constitute \u201cthe central pattern which held together the social order.\u201d Through sacred rituals (dance, drum rhythms, forms of \u201cearthing\u201d through possession rites, masquerades that enacted the drama of the gods), Afro-Caribbeans created a different temporality. Thereby, they maintain a sense of the sacred, and the affirmation of ancestral ties that bind the community to Earth, enabling humanness despite social death. The results of these attempts to \u201cgrapple with a new Nature\u201d are well known: Haitian Vodou, Santer\u00eda, Obeah, Pukkumina, the Orishas, the Shango Baptists, Rastafari, among other forms of sacred practices which sought to animate a life whose aim was to produce groundless individuals.<\/p>\n However, these forms of resistance, if they help to create alternative realities and perpetuate ancestral worldviews, also highlight the nature-culture fracture that begins during slavery and persists today. A part of slavery\u2019s violence was that \u201cthe enslaved was excluded from responsibility for the land in which she lived and worked,\u201d as political ecologist Malcom Ferdinand writes.<\/p>\n Our relationship to land, our ability to relate to Earth in a certain way determines our freedom, but also another fundamental human urge, which is the urge of belonging. Here it is worth pointing out, as cultural theorist Raymond Williams has done, that the etymology of \u201cnature\u201d ties it to \u201cnative\u201d and also \u201cnation\u201d . . .<\/p>\n How does a Black history of exclusion from land influence how we think about Black futures in nature and the environment?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I had been busy writing poems about the police and white cops killing Black people and black anger and rage and that kind of stuff. And then I realized that the time we spend pouring our souls into that kind of writing and thinking robs us of time. There is no doubt that we must continue to write about these issues; we have no choice. But I am forced to think about the relationship between coloniality, racism, humanness and time. This brings me back to my work and its central theme of time.<\/p>\n The observation of process is a political act linked to a reclamation of time. It highlights the fact that racism pushes us into an attitude of always reacting: to hurt, anger, provocation, exclusion. This is a theft of time, a robbery of the connection we are meant to have, as humans, with real life. In that sense, the poems in Thinking with Trees<\/em> are an expression of my taking time, in a societal context that creates the environmental conditions that disproportionately rob Black lives of the benefits of time: leisure, relaxation, mental and physical well-being, etc.<\/p>\n Right now, I\u2019m standing beneath what used to be, I imagine, an impressive tree. It is split down its bole, it is still alive, has sprouted green leaves that will be rustling way into September. But at its base and lying athwart the clearing is the severed part that looks so dead and yet so alive. The color of brown has weathered to near-grey and the footfall of walkers has covered the wood with a layer of dust. And yet the part that has fallen among the spikenard and hungry shrubs seems so alive in its death.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Disintegrating and flourishing<\/p>\n frail and green<\/p>\n The raspberries feed on its breath<\/p>\n and beetles thrive in the slurry middle where the<\/p>\n bole rots<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Process<\/em>. The wax and wane of objects, the feeling of life coming into me. The feeling of self as part of life.<\/p>\n Slowness. I am talking about time, a defence of time. I\u2019m talking about the robbery of time from Black life. I am talking about the ability to be slow. I am talking about the ability of our bodies to be here. I\u2019m talking about the ability of my body to be in the woods. Thinking about people, the people who find me strange because I am just standing here, the people who look at me while talking, look at me suspiciously, because I decide to stand and listen and look, because I am not going anywhere. Because I\u2019m just standing.<\/p>\n I\u2019m thinking of how we have been workers. I\u2019m thinking of how my ancestors have been the workers, just the workers. I\u2019m thinking of the Congo and how one man had a land almost eighty times the size of Belgium as his personal estate. I\u2019m thinking of the cruelties of work among my people. I\u2019m thinking of my ancestors who were enslaved. I\u2019m thinking of rest, I\u2019m thinking of slowness, I\u2019m thinking about reclaiming time:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I am talking about reclaiming what middle-<\/p>\n class people call leisure.<\/p>\n I realise now what I have missed all these<\/p>\n years.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Poetry is the expression of a profound connection with life. Listening and seeing are our avenues of connection, and this is poetry\u2019s gift: that through poetry I can stop, listen, observe and participate, rather than simply react<\/em>. The purpose of racism is a life that is constantly reacting, being affected, being hurt, being angry. Poetry\u2019s gift is a different sense of time, not one marked by utility, accumulation, greed and blind progress\u2014in a word, the logics of capitalist accumulation and its bourgeois ideals that produce wars, genocides, various human catastrophes. Poetry\u2019s gift to me is a sense of deep time, and that is its sense of wholeness, of connection. Poetry is a reclamation of time. Of connection, rather than reaction.<\/p>\n Inevitably, the poems do sometimes convey my sense of unease and uncertainty while in the veiled, hidden spaces of the woods. But they also highlight the fact that I must be there.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The sun splashes its light on the trees. Their exposed skins glisten. The evening glow penetrates me and I move into it. Inside me a living thing is ripening. In this month of December when night falls in early afternoon, it is a struggle to get here. And now that I see it, I am living. I was made to live. Not to schedule appointments or solve clashes on an online calendar. I was not made to spend a day in front of my computer.<\/p>\n There is a sadness that returns. A sadness for the boy I once was, growing up in Porus. What was my poverty? Wasn\u2019t it living in a space that was too little, not being able to go very far? The poverty of being blind to living and a slave to always doing:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We had no time to waste<\/p>\n To go far might have been just<\/p>\n to enter the woods<\/p>\n behind the house.<\/p>\n But there was a wall separating me from it.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The positioning of the Black body always outside of land<\/em>, with all its privileges in regard to leisure, well-being, health, and so on, is a key aspect of the narrativizing of power and of the determinism that shapes geographies of Blackness that inscribe Black culture as always already within urbanized space, and much less within the \u201coutside spaces\u201d of freedom, leisure and escape.<\/p>\n The consequences of the disproportionate exclusion from land (and land as leisure<\/em>) have been powerfully demonstrated in recent times, through the inequalities revealed throughout the Covid pandemic. The issue of the pernicious effects of unequal access to land (on physical and mental health and wellbeing) have suddenly become no longer a matter of theoretical gesticulations but of vividly obvious power structures and embodied realities. While everyone was \u201cunder lockdown,\u201d at least in theory, the access to natural space, anywhere from a backyard garden to a manorial estate, was clearly not a given for everyone. Likewise, therefore, the ability to \u201ccope\u201d with the state of exception that had been created.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019m really not interested in hearing any<\/em><\/p>\n more middle-class people screaming that<\/em><\/p>\n people shouldn\u2019t be going outside <\/em>at all<\/p>\n when your back garden is the Hundred<\/em><\/p>\n Acre Wood.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2013 @SammiLouui, Twitter<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Let\u2019s return to the question posed earlier: How does a history of colonialism that has weaponized land against Black lives in the Caribbean, America, Africa, and Europe, how does a Black history of exclusion from land, influence how we think about Black futures in nature and the environment?<\/p>\n I propose that a Black future in nature must include an altered relationship to time.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I believe this can be achieved, collectively, through art. Art offers to racialized people an alternative space (a counter-analytic) to Babylon. And art for us must be togetherness, community. A way in which humanness becomes a matter of connection, again. We must form connection around the type of consciousness that frees us from the System, from the consciousness of the capitalist machinery that seeks to devour us. Can this be a point of departure for new forms of socialities for Black lives and of political awareness based on our sense of deep time? That implies the need for solidarity. And if solidarity involves connection to the more than human world, then it is also, necessarily, connection amongst ourselves.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n Ferdinand, Malcom. Une \u00e9cologie d\u00e9coloniale: Penser l\u2019\u00e9cologie depuis le monde carib\u00e9en<\/em>. Paris: \u00c9ditions du Seuil, 2019.<\/p>\n Pollard, Ingrid. \u201cHow She Had to Fight for Black Representation: Interview,\u201d Elephant Magazine<\/em>, no. 42 (Spring 2020): https:\/\/elephant.art\/ingrid-pollard-fight-black-representation-glasgow-international-womens-library-lesbian-archive-photography-rural-landscape-britishness-07022020\/#.XqgFNGJm23C.twitter.<\/p>\n Moten, Fred and Saidiya Hartman. \u201cTo Refuse That Which has been Refused to You\u201d Chimurenga<\/em>, 19 October 2018: https:\/\/chimurengachronic.co.za\/to-refuse-that-which-has-been-refused-to-you-2\/.<\/p>\n Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society<\/em>. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.<\/p>\n Wynter, Sylvia. \u201cJonkonnu in Jamaica: Topwards the Interpretation of Folk Dance as a Cultural Process\u201d in We Must Learn to Sit Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays 1967\u20131984<\/em>, 192\u2013243. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, forthcoming 2022.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n This text was first published in\u00a0PN Review <\/em>257<\/a>\u00a0(2021), republished here with permission of the author and PN Review. Jason Allen-Paisant\u2019s poetry collection Thinking with Trees<\/em>, published by Carcanet (2021), is available here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In \u2018Reclaiming Time: On Blackness and Landscape\u2019 (voor het eerst gepubliceerd in PN Review<\/em> issue 257 in 2021), bekijkt dichter en schrijver Jason Allen-Paisant de geracialiseerde maatschappelijke contexten en moderne milieuconstructen die \u2018Zwarte levens disproportioneel beroven van de voordelen van tijd.\u2019 Hij put uit zijn po\u00ebziebundel Thinking with Trees<\/em> om een koloniale epistemologie van de natuur te schetsen, en de rol van po\u00ebzie te benadrukken in het genereren van vormen van Zwart verwantschap en politiek bewustzijn, gebaseerd op een hernieuwd gevoel van \u2018diepe tijd\u2019. De vraag of het mogelijk is om middels po\u00ebzie \u2018tijd terug te claimen\u2019 staat centraal in de tekst. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":36102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"focus":[301],"prospection_category":[179],"class_list":["post-35568","prospection","type-prospection","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","focus-no-linear-fucking-time-nl","prospection_category-tekst"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection\/35568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/prospection"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35568"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection\/35568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36660,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection\/35568\/revisions\/36660"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"focus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/focus?post=35568"},{"taxonomy":"prospection_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection_category?post=35568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Coda<\/h2>\n