In 2015, Toni Morrison wrote:
“For most of the last five centuries, Africa has been understood to be poor, desperately poor, in spite of the fact that it is outrageously rich in oil, gold, diamonds, precious metals, etc. But since those riches do not, in large part, belong to the people who have lived there all their lives, it has remained in the mind of the West worthy of disdain, sorrow and, of course, pillage. We sometimes forget that colonialism was and is war, a war to control and own another country’s resources — meaning money. We may also delude ourselves into thinking that our efforts to “civilize” or “pacify” other countries are not about money. Slavery was always about money: free labor producing money for owners and industries. The contemporary “working poor” and “jobless poor” are like the dormant riches of “darkest colonial Africa” — available for wage theft and property theft, and owned by metastasizing corporations stifling dissident voices.
None of this bodes well for the future. Still, I remember the shout of my friend that day after Christmas: No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”
∞ ∞ ∞
Consider, for a moment, the warp and weft of the outrageously rich and magnificently varied tapestries of our lives and cultures, our ways of knowing and being. These too are rapidly being reduced to “data” — yet another resource to be mined, another landscape to be colonised and manipulated. (Now with the fearsome machinery of AI, and its attendant alphabet soup of technological powertools, which are being tasked, again, with the unquestioned agenda to monetise everything and everyone.)
Unless… unless… we choose instead to heal ourselves back to wholeness: our lungs and our spines, our senses and our voices — our own, and those of our planet.
Inwardly, at first. Then outwardly.
We can choose to simply turn away from the endless, futile games of domination and conquest that we have allowed to traumatise us for millennia.
We can move, patiently, through our healing journeys into new ways of being a planetary species. (Even a harmonious one.)
And we can choose — at last — to embrace ourselves as humans: loving co-stewards of this place where we belong, this achingly beautiful, and mysterious, and generous Earth.
∞ ∞ ∞
N.B.: Fight, flight or freeze is the biological response to perceived threat, and many of us have been frozen along the way. It is not apathy, nor powerlessness; an internal shutdown was triggered when our coping mechanisms were overwhelmed, often when we were children, and certainly via our ancestral lines, whose imprints can (in other-than-conscious ways) affect our behaviours. Illumination and compassion, not shaming, is called for. Especially within ourselves.
Joanna Macy has famously said that our proper role at this time in human history is to hospice the old world, while simultaneously midwifing the new.
In my book, no truer words.
∞ ∞ ∞
