A space at the end of the road | ethnographic experiments in ecofeminism
or ‘sensory polemics in auto-ethnography,’ perhaps
Thinking with:
Kathleen Stewart | A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America
In her ethnography A Space on the Side of the Road, Stewart approaches West Virginia as a narrative space that “stands as a kind of back talk” to America’s “mythic claims to realism, progress, and order.” This “space” is as much epistemological as it is imaginary, as it is real. Her ethnography:
Tells its story through interruptions, amassed densities of description, evocations of voices and the conditions of their possibility, and lyrical, ruminative aporias that give pause.
I center a space of urban territory in Philly likewise - to situate an embodied creative practice of writing and making and breaking and reckoning and back talk to fascism.
Joanne Barker | “Territory as Analytic: The Dispossession of Lenapehoking and the Subprime Crisis,” Social Text (June 2018): 19-39.
In this piece, Barker addresses the coproduction of US imperialism, racism and debt in the “dispossession and indenture of Indigenous peoples,” with a focus on the fraudulent dispossession of Lenapaehoking, including the Walking Purchase. Understanding “territory” as an analytic positions Indigenous dispossession as formative to US empire and to contemporary economic disparity for Indigenous people and others who are “indentured within/to the state.” Barker argues that any anti-imperialist movement demands a reckoning of “territory.” Lenape stories embed values about territory, including “individual and collective responsibilities to and between multispecies and the land on which we live together.”
Thinking about:
marginal, in-between spaces | places | people and what thrives therein
refusing presumed measures
collectivity, mutuality, land | terrain
being in-place, being emplaced, multi-sensory embodiment
What Anna Tsing calls “friction” and Kathleen Stewart describes as “what being rippled by the minute can do for our attention to ecologies.”
What the Institute of Queer Ecology calls “critical optimism” or a “coping mechanism for the pain of living in, engaging with, and loving a biodiverse world that is being undeniably annihilated.”
Lauren Berlant’s term “cruel optimism” to explain how we hold onto what diminishes us (the false promises of capitalism? the false promises of heteronormative happiness? the violent beliefs in individual accumulation and prestige?).
Milton Almonacid’s imperative that westerners reject “happiness” as a naive construct, its pursuit always at the expense of something or someone else.
“de-growth” (Almonacid) and the “feminist snap” (Ahmed): breaking bonds with what and who diminishes us
“The question I ask, over and over, is who is profiting from this?” - Audre Lorde
local legacies of settler colonialism, forced displacement of Indigenous people and lifeways, immigration, the Great Migration, (de)industrialization
Palestine
climates | ecosystems
mycelium as methodology
biodiversity | endemic and invasive
decay | swamps | carbon | brackishness
“the americas” | Mayan & other healers I know, restoration, reparation
bounties versus hoards
fugitive geographies, fugitive methodologies
nonbinary existence, growth
desynchronizing from linear time as decolonization
feminism/s and ecofemisms
haunting/s
“Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.” - Winona LaDuke, as quoted by Jason Clark in text about his piece Winona and the Big Oil ‘Windigo’ exhibited as part of Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always
BLOODROOT
I shut my eyes. Chuff my hands, dirty from planting trout lilies and trillium, bloodroot and jack in the pulpit—sweet talking spring ephemerals to coax them elsewhere. Dark dark dark comes and the train pitches by with its rust sounds and clouds. Quarter moonlight and early night is too tight with too soon and too hot breathing. It’s coming, the panting of summer, hotter than it need be, than it should be. Hurry hurry. The tricked out cool blue lights of a quad rolls by, some sort of 60s soul haze of notes drags behind it, and I pause, shovel in hand. Sweet hot spring in the city.
Aptly named, bloodroot is a native perennial that seeps red-orange sap when its roots are cut. Bees and other insects pollinate it, but bloodroot can self-pollinate if necessary. Once pollinated, it produces elongated pods that, when ripe, scatter seeds that attract ants. Ants in turn disperse the seeds when they carry them home for snacking.
For humans, the roots are handy for dyes and body paint, and have been used to ease many conditions, including for menstrual health and as an abortifacient.
Plant-knowledge comes best from observation, from respect, from knowing that a plant has many necessary functions beyond human ones and that these in turn protect collective habitat. The human use a of plant, in my mind, is also an exchange between plant and animal, one in which human bodily autonomy—what we choose to put into our body/what we decide to keep in our body—is assumed.
In PA, in Lenapehoking, in this age of vitriolic violence against women and women’s bodies, bloodroot blooms and abortion remains legal. Like bloodroot, however, (legal) access to abortion and to body autonomy depends on its defense; it relies on pollinators to remain robust, even though, if need be, it will self-pollinate to support rhizomatic growth underground.
Bloodroot vegetarian restaurant and bookstore in Bridgeport, site of one of my first encounters with feminist collectivity as a teenager (thanks JB)
Devil’s Walking Stick
Among other alarming actions, this week:
IRS agrees (cooperates? capitulates?) to share migrants’ tax information with ICE
The Supreme Court upholds the deportation of Venezuelans, citing the 1789 Alien Enemies Act while students from Muslim-majority countries continue to have visas revoked
3 of 4 branches of the Division of Violence Prevention eliminated
All staff working on intimate partner violence prevention and sexual assault prevention dismissed
Most of the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Heath laid off
Thorns rip my hands until I put on gloves; they rip my gloves. Uprooting Aralia elata, not to be confused with Aralia spinosa, devil’s walking stick. Turning roots upside down to make window bars. On the nose? Yes. AND. The current US administration is mostly white men with documented histories of sexual abuse. They are not behind bars. Thinking about: bars on the windows of the domestic violence shelter where I worked for five years. The crisis hotline there that never ceased ringing. I would hear it in my dreams. Sometimes it rang me out of sleep and into a crisis, a literal matter of life or death. The years I facilitated peer sexual assault prevention education and accompanied assault and rape survivors through police and hospital encounters. The years I provided counseling and resources for sexual and reproductive health. The years I worked as researcher on studies that value women, that save lives. The women and children I met and knew and loved; the ones that didn’t make it.
Mahmoud Kahlil. Behind bars in an Ice private “detention facility” in Louisiana. In his words: “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
I turn with sticks thorn-ed to my gloved hand. The devil is in the details. She asks if this is the end of the road. I gesture vaguely with my bouquet of rage. Sure. End of the road. Beginning of the road. What do I know? She has to walk, she says, because of this new dog leaping at the end of the leash. It has one blue and one green eye. Her sweatshirt says ‘Little Saigon’ and I Philly-love her for it. Watch for the foxes, I say as she pushes away, meaning: foxes, watch for this dog. She does not seem to notice that I’m making window bars with thorns in the old foundation.
He asks, does the trail end here? I gesture around. Sure. End. Beginning. Wtf and why would I know? Jeezus, what is with these end of road-ers today? He doesn’t notice my hand clippers or the rooty sticks paused on their way to join the others.
In eastern North America, devil’s walking stick is native but is often confused with its close relative, the species Aralia elata, native to eastern Asia and brought here sometime in the 1830s. Here, in this space at the end of the road, along the rails and among the fox holes, we find Aralia elata but it’s really hard to distinguish it from its devilish cousin. In parts of Asia, people cook and eat the tender crowning leaves of Aralia elata in early spring.