#monstersorphansrobots

“Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” -Audre Lorde from “Poetry is not a Luxury”

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Glossary of Haunting:

Poetry: It is not one of hundred year old white men who speak in technicalities and dissection. It is queerness, communities of color, disabilities, poor-ness and anyone else whose lives are on intersecting marginal planes. It is a way of resisting, re-telling, re-living, world-making. It is being when the rest of the world tells you not to.

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One of the monstrous presences in academia is often exposed in the questions of knowledge production: Who gets to record and what methods are seen as legit? Who gets to speak and be heard enough to be documented? Whose stories are made into the hegemonic knowledge that we call history? Barbara Christian tackles these questions in her piece, “The Race for Theory” where she challenges Western constructs around theory and the ways things are interpreted as universal. She tells us of how the writings of black, queer, disabled, indigenious, womxn and other folks are devalued and excluded from being part of what is known as the literature and the philosophy.

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This is another example of orphaned beginnings for communities of color, where their participation in creating/recording their histories are dismissed by westernized theories that scream the message of “this is how it’s supposed to be and if it doesn’t match it doesn’t matter” as Christian explains it. This is often emphasized through who gets rewarded money, acceptance, and cited in other works.  

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I had a previous professor who told me how citations can be a practice of feminist resistance. I couldn’t grasp what exactly she meant by that until I read Christian’s piece. She writes, “I know, from literary history, that writing disappears unless there is a response to it. Because I write about writers who are not writing, I hope to help ensure that their tradition has continuity and survives” (62). Citations are not just a way to give credit to the author for their ideas, it is a way of affirming, listening, and validating them. It leaves a trail, a way to follow back to the epistemologies of many womxn of color writers who have given us tools of survival passed down.

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This connects to the film, Paris is Burning, by Jennie Livingston and our discussion around Bell Hook’s article. The positionality of Livingston as a white women inevitably calls in power dynamics of whiteness. I appreciated how one of my peers explained the ways it commodified blackness and profited on their vulnerability as black gay men without giving any reparations. It ties in to how Hook points out the ways whiteness thinks it is helping underprivileged communities by making it the subject of a film, however, ignores how it performs white saviorism and is in fact perpetuating the same oppressions that put gay black men in the situations they are in. It then becomes crucial that we ask, like I stated before: which stories are being told and who is telling them?

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“Future agricultural development projects in Maroon villages should also be aware of the value of their unique landraces and think twice before advising to replace traditional crops with new, high-yield varieties. Promoting the cultivation of ‘first-time crops’ would create awareness among Maroons on the value of their traditional agriculture. In the end, they are still the sole guardians of many crops that their ancestors once grew in the Botanical Gardens of the Dispossessed.”

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Glossary of Haunting:

Botanical Gardens of the Dispossessed: A way of resisting settler colonialism and protecting one’s culture, tradition, and origins by planting the seeds of your motherland. These gardens were grown by slaves within the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and maintained many of the important crops that we identify today like rice, banannas, taro, okra.

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The orphaned beginnings found in the reading, “The ‘Botanical Gardens of the Dispossessed’ revisited: richness and significance of Old World crops grown by Suriname Maroons” connects to last week’s discussions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As previously mentioned, the slave trade dehumanized African people to the point where they were stripped of their own families, countries, histories and origins. They became orphaned of being human. Yet the reading focuses on the opposite and how these slaves were able to protect their culture and traditions through growing the crops of their homeland. The reading calls these gardens, “Botanical Gardens of the Dispossessed”; gardens that not only shaped much of the future crops we have today, but also a form of resistance to the violence of settler colonialism. The crops were a way to maintain their traditional meals and their medicinal and spiritual practices.

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However, even as how the authors tell us about the existence of these gardens, it also tells us of how much information lacks around these crops and how some of them are becoming more scarce where only certain families hold the seeds for them. We are told that is was difficult to track the various crops because of the lack of record as well as where they came from in the first place (whether they were introduced through the trans-Atlantic slave trade or later during the immigration of Asian agricultural laborers). This is the haunting presence of settler colonialism: the ways in which African culture before Western slavery is erased and excluded from history and that, if nothing is addressed, the gardening resistance of these slaves may be forgotten, only to be known as weeds or completely erased from memory.

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