on self-reclamation
scholarship at what cost? - written with a 🌑 New Moon
EVER ALIVE by Fadwa Tuqan
My beloved home land
No matter how long the millstone
Of pain and agony churns you
In the wilderness of tyranny,
They will never be able
To pluck your eyes
Or kill your hopes and dreams
Or crucify your will to rise
Or steel the smiles of our children
Or destroy and burn,
Because out from our deep sorrows,
Out from the freshness of our spilled blood
Out from the quiverings of life and death
Life will be reborn in you again………
[from Poetry of Resistance in Occupied Palestine 1968 revised 2009]
🕸️ marginalia*
As an adolescent, I walked into the field of environmentalism/natural resources/ecology with the intention of coming out as a scientist. I spent all of my adolescence in pursuit of becoming an environmental scientist. On paper, it was environmental science; however, I was tracing and interested in connections & disconnection, and I was ultimately curious about relationships. I love drama! What has more plots and twists than learning? The characters I’d meet in compost samples under a microscope, from chemical compositions of river water to forested or grasslands, were unforgettable and so endearing.
The best part of the discipline, I could ask questions. I love a good question and then spending everything to unfurl it, only to have more questions come out in need of unfurling. A spiral, and I like spirals. Really lovely sensations show up in my body when I interact with spirals who get to be spirals. In the process of unfurling--lit reviews--I find people, teams, and labs sometimes half a globe away had a similar question 5, 10, 20 years ago, pulling the string of many someone else! They were looking at something similar as I am in the world and wanted to be with it. What an incredible feeling for a lonely 15-year-old who hid much of their internal world! And Gosh! What a lovely fandom!
I pushed aside my heart, my culture, the very source of my wisdom and tenacity, quieted what tended to me, my family, language, my language, my emotional landscape, and the ways I responded to the Land. That’s what the college experience means, right?
I had immigrant propaganda feed my aspiration. I could aspire, in the United States. I could build a little dream from my desires and build a life that could fulfill my maman’s dream for her kiddo, make the risk to leave all our family without knowing when we’d be able to even say goodbye to them when they transition out of this life worth it, work my restoration projects near my hometown. I could go back and show my community and my country. I left and brought something back that could be good for all of us, the rivers and the mountains too!
The sciences felt like they could offer me frameworks, techniques, and tools to make that dream into reality. It proclaimed to be a lineage in deep commitment of knowledge (aka tea from and by the universe). If I follow the path of the discipline, I could offer things. I could offer valuable things to the world, my world. I meeeean, bet!
I was captivated and sold. I was passionate! I had direction influenced by deep purpose. And I was a curious little chipmunk! So, I opened myself up to learning, and I learned and learned.
Once I made that decision, my education was bifurcated. To become an ecologist, as I saw and was told to envision in the United States, I was immigrating to a realm. That realm, much like the United States, was built for the ease and comfort of white people. I did not know. I offer grace to Little Flore had minimal capacity to understand the complexity of anti-blackness in the United States or the mosaic of identities they expressed that are marked persecution and marginalization in their new sovereign state—I digress.
I was trained to be a good student based on a colonial education model led to Haiti by the Catholic Church. Part of being a good student is a deep practice of obedience to external authoritative figures, parents, teachers, and adults, thoroughness in scholarship, and commitment always to get the right answer, which is what the teacher or person in the highest authority has to say, also known as the book. I learned the rules in the new realm I chose. I conflated facts for truth and validated what was measurable, repeatable, and legible on paper. My need for doubleness needed to become more robust. I was already practicing it from living in a Haitian household while leading an assimilated Americanized version with English-speaking folks. I had a deep practice of escapism through books, television & film. Shout out to the Brooklyn Public Library and K-dramas! I pushed aside my heart, my culture, the very source of my wisdom and tenacity, quieted what tended to me, my family, language, my language, my emotional landscape, and the ways I responded to the Land. That’s what the college experience means, right?
I made those choices based on what I deduced and internalized from how I was being taught and the orientation I was receiving from the ecologist/environmental scientist world. Suppose it is possible to know all that one can understand about a compost pile for a sample and generalize. Can I not be extracted from my compost pile and still be whole? Albeit, these moves and logic were playing below my consciousness and become to become and be an environmental scientist.
I was essentially dissociating and attempting to sever myself from my culture, my ways of knowing, my love of my people, and the creatures who deeply care for my well-being. The very things that birthed my dream and fed my passion and tenacity. Based on my learning environment, all those aspects of me, my world, needed to fall into the background so I could access the right research questions, framing, methods, and measurable, repeatable answers to the right question and be offered belonging to this world.
The only way I knew how to do that from the skillset and conditioning I received was to mask, compensate, repress, and dissociate while letting everything else fall in the shadow, covering them with such darkness I would not be distracted from them. In essence, I was attempting to terraform my mind to be aligned with a form of intellectualism that is valued and made valuable to by and for whiteness. The isolation and the process of self-effacement really picked up at university. There, it only took one semester to start experiencing the constant mind state called anxiety, 3 for my sleep to be so disrupted I needed professional support, 4 for the depression to kick in, and 7 for the suicidal ideation to become a consistent event.
My body was putting me on notice. It could not and would not become white. My emotions, my spirit, and my flesh rejected my perverse attempts of self-mutilation in a false pursuit of purpose, meaning, belonging, and satiated curiosity! The premises and promises offered by those disciplines I wanted to embody were/are as filling as an empty bag of potato chips. My body, my ancestors, and my relationships were being starved in my striving to inhabit and embody the persona--environmental scientist.
In my hometown, under the tutelage of my aunties and Grann, it was always demonstrated to me that if someone comes at your door thirsty and hungry, you have food and water…no matter how little you share. You offer water and serve it even when it is a spoonful. How could I keep depriving my lineages, my beloveds, and myself?
I could not. So, I jumped ship. It would take a few years wrestling with carrying scientist as an identity inside me without giving it firm boundaries. I did not learn of that possibility until I jumped right into the mystery of death through a suicide attempt. It was there, I jumped into my skin, my interception. I jumped and knelt at the feet of my inner teachers, my impulses, my blood knowing. I jumped into my Blackness and the black of the cosmos.
As I keep exploring the blackness. I look forward to sharing more of the ecologist who’ve gone into the/their black.
My emotions, my spirit, and my flesh rejected my perverse attempts of self-mutilation in a false pursuit of purpose, meaning, belonging, and satiated curiosity!
*if you are having mental health difficulties or experiencing suicidal ideation. Please share it with someone. This piece does not talk about my process of navigating my mental health in my adolescent years. I had help. I had support. Even when it was not in the shape I wanted it. I asked for support explicitly and sought it out because I/we deserve to be well and know our wholeness. I accepted a ton of support from all the sources that offered it in the capacity of mentors, teachers, friends, comrades, bodyworkers, cultural workers, parents, and grandparents. My heart and body sought community even as my thoughts and logic refused to acknowledge what motivated those choices.
🌾 florilegia - impression
🌱 gratitude & grounding
Shout out to all the captive Africans who jumped ship.
My beloved Queer and People of the Global Majority, you deserve a life free of suffering, you deserve to know freedom, and you deserve to be well in your body.
*the text is, as always, our entanglement