I have spent the last two years, mostly in the company of strangers, to such a degree that I have sometimes questioned my own reality, my own existence. My voice and the way I write had hidden away because of the unwelcome environment, the judgement, the racialisation, categorisation, and wrong expectation. I have been outside of formal education for many years, and I was reticent to come back in because I did not want my creativity to be squashed out of me. As an older, you know, I have been carrying my creative self, my soul for 5 decades and that soul is sacred, that soul has carried me too, through so much and we, yearn to be in the company of souls. Decolonial is a land, perhaps, where we can continue to become, without borders and wounding, a place of sharing and exchange, a site of enrichment in kindness, with the earth. A place where we can sit in different spaces but still look to the same sky and where the cracks are so wide, so potent that we are able to breathe with ease.
I would like to share a letter I wrote to myself as a culmination to a three week summer school to which I won a scholarship. I feel priviledged to have worked with great scholars in decoloniality including; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Professor Walter Mignolo and Dr. Rolando Vázquez as part of University College Utrecht,
Learning to Unlearn Decolonially (Living, knowing, the university & the museum)
Dear Soul
As you know, living is not without its challenges. We have known each other for a lifetime but there have been moments when I have felt so alone, even with you holding me inside. I don’t know why I constantly find myself in soulless spaces, but I know the drum that beats there, and she calls. This hollowing of life has carved out the voice of the tree I used to be. The voice that spoke with the potential of tomorrow and passion of today, yesterday passed but not without leaving traces of memory, smeared across my back like swollen lashes of a time before. Soul of my love, we share a wound, without which, we would not need nor heed healing. This wound bleeds into her earth, and I want to dig in, to push my brown hands into the dark earth here, the red earth there to feel it pressing under my fingertips. Hunger drives this searching deeper below, I see with my skin, and leaning in, I find causal roots. I meet resistance as I try to pick through the entangled truths and lies that hide there. I’m surging this urge with curious rage, to pull up to the surface my questioning, but I’m just turning mud, it is time to listen.
Here in the forest of discontent, I sit with naked trees, unprotected, yet wonderfully vulnerable to the light between thirsty branches. Am I alone? Not if I consider the nature of the life of the trunk against which I rest, in equality, that she should have the right to be here just as much as me…. if not more. Not if I give thought to the fact that as I breathe, we breathe and make that crucial exchange with our earth, as I breathe in, she breathes out and so is the rhythm of life, our mutual concert. No, not alone as I look between the branches silhouetted by the light of the moon and realise the multifarious life of the sky world.
So Soul, walk with me and show me how to tread lightly on this earth so that I can hold too the knowledge she does. You are probably laughing at my ambition, my foolish desires and childlike wonder, knowing I will split that wound deeper and the pain will choke me further as I kick feet in the air. Soul, take me to a place that I am free to breathe, where I can stretch my liberation in the same direction, expanding freedom and singing the song.
Where do I sit? Soul asks. I sit with the trees I answer. How do you benefit? I am shaded in the summer; I am comforted in ancestral rings and majestic heights that make me feel tall. I mostly benefit though, if I listen, the sacred way, to the speak of trees shaken by the breeze but rooted, both above and below. What have you learned? Soul digs deeper. I have learned that I am no alone in our suffering, not alone in our choking or my kicking and not alone in our visioning and certainly not alone in our discontent and I have learned that the ‘we’ is not lost and that our ‘us’ is relevant and powerful, it feels good to belong. I have learned to remember with clarity and without guilt, shame, or fear. I listen with my body, to the stories of the bold, tales of the courageous, we listen with our hearts.
Has this changed you? Soul whispers No, I am remembered within remembering. Yes, the change is the revealing, I guess, the unveiling of what was there before, what I thought was there, I look back on and see differently now. I have been moved, the bodies of stories that lay on the ocean bed, that fell from life above or were thrown into the rage of the sea dead but not of spirit. Is this the new meeting place, will all of this be washed up and strewn on the shore laid out to pick up the pieces to choose, finally what we can reclaim, to toss the lies and the pain into the inaugural fire pit to burn into non-existence. Come dear Souls, let’s gather, together, pick up all that is us, echoing the wisdom of the rings, as we circle the night fire and feel the heat bathing our skins, the flash of firelight across our faces and the staccato sparks fly, a scattering of musical notes in tandem, perpetuate the familiar drumbeat. Shall we dance?
AmaSu 2021
