Read Online Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks - Free Book Online
Authors: bell hooks
Ads: Link
journeyed the world of environmental activism was characterized by racial and class apartheid. In those locations no one ever assumed that black folks cared about land, about the fate of the earth.
Meanwhile in the small town Kentucky world of my upbringing the elders were dying and the young had no interest in farming, in land. The organic gardens, the animals raised both in the country on farms and in city limits that were a way of life for my grandparents were a legacy no one wanted to preserve. And the bounty their labor brought to our impoverished and needy world was soon forgotten. Wherever I lived I made an effort to grow vegetables, even if just in pots, to garden as tribute to the elders and the agrarian traditions they held to be sacred and as a way to hold on to those traditions. Like my maternal and paternal grandparents, I wanted to be self-reliant, to live simply. My father’s father had worked land in the country, sharecropping. From him I learned much about farming and rural life. My maternal grandparents lived in city limits as though they were living in the country. They all believed in the dignity of labor. They all taught that the earth was sacred.
No one talked about the earth as our mother. They did not divide the world into the neat dualistic gendered categories that are common strategies both in reformist feminist movement and in environmental activism. The earth, they taught me, like all of nature, could be life giving but it could also threaten and take life, hence the need for respect for the power of one’s natural habitat. Both grandparents owned land. Like Booker T.Washington, they understood that black folks who had their “forty acres and a mule” or even just their one acre could sustain their lives by growing food, by creating shelter that was not mortgaged. Baba and Daddy Gus, my maternal grandparents, were radically opposed to any notion of social and racial uplift that meant black folks would lead us away from respect for the land, that would lead us to imitate the social mores of affluent whites. They understood the way white supremacy and its concomitant racial hierarchies led to the dehumanization of black life.
To them it was important to create one’s own culture — a culture of belonging rooted in the earth. And in this way they shared a common belief system with that of anarchist poor white folks. Lots of poor Kentuckians black and white never embraced the renegade beliefs of the backwoods. But for those po’ folks who did, they lived with a different set of values. And contrary to negative stereotypes those oppositional ways of thinking, those different values were more often than not life sustaining. In Dreaming the Dark feminist activist Starhawk shares this powerful insight: “When we really understand that the earth is alive, and know ourselves as part of that life, we are called to live our lives with integrity, to make our actions match our beliefs, to take responsibility for creating what we would have manifest, to do the work of healing.” These were the values taught to me by my agrarian ancestors. It is their wisdom that informs my efforts to call attention to the restorative nature of our relationship to nature. Collective healing for black folks in the diaspora can happen only as we remember in ways that move us to action our agrarian past.
Individual black folk who live in rural communities, who live on land, who are committed to living simply, must make our voices heard. Healing begins with self-determination in relation to the body that is the earth and the body that is our flesh. Most black people live in ways that threaten to shorten our life, eating fast foods, suffering from illnesses that could be prevented with proper nutrition and exercise. My ancestors were chain smokers, mostly rolling their own smokes from tobacco grown locally and many of them were hard drinkers on the weekends. Yet they ate right, worked hard, and exercised everyday. Most of
Meanwhile in the small town Kentucky world of my upbringing the elders were dying and the young had no interest in farming, in land. The organic gardens, the animals raised both in the country on farms and in city limits that were a way of life for my grandparents were a legacy no one wanted to preserve. And the bounty their labor brought to our impoverished and needy world was soon forgotten. Wherever I lived I made an effort to grow vegetables, even if just in pots, to garden as tribute to the elders and the agrarian traditions they held to be sacred and as a way to hold on to those traditions. Like my maternal and paternal grandparents, I wanted to be self-reliant, to live simply. My father’s father had worked land in the country, sharecropping. From him I learned much about farming and rural life. My maternal grandparents lived in city limits as though they were living in the country. They all believed in the dignity of labor. They all taught that the earth was sacred.
No one talked about the earth as our mother. They did not divide the world into the neat dualistic gendered categories that are common strategies both in reformist feminist movement and in environmental activism. The earth, they taught me, like all of nature, could be life giving but it could also threaten and take life, hence the need for respect for the power of one’s natural habitat. Both grandparents owned land. Like Booker T.Washington, they understood that black folks who had their “forty acres and a mule” or even just their one acre could sustain their lives by growing food, by creating shelter that was not mortgaged. Baba and Daddy Gus, my maternal grandparents, were radically opposed to any notion of social and racial uplift that meant black folks would lead us away from respect for the land, that would lead us to imitate the social mores of affluent whites. They understood the way white supremacy and its concomitant racial hierarchies led to the dehumanization of black life.
To them it was important to create one’s own culture — a culture of belonging rooted in the earth. And in this way they shared a common belief system with that of anarchist poor white folks. Lots of poor Kentuckians black and white never embraced the renegade beliefs of the backwoods. But for those po’ folks who did, they lived with a different set of values. And contrary to negative stereotypes those oppositional ways of thinking, those different values were more often than not life sustaining. In Dreaming the Dark feminist activist Starhawk shares this powerful insight: “When we really understand that the earth is alive, and know ourselves as part of that life, we are called to live our lives with integrity, to make our actions match our beliefs, to take responsibility for creating what we would have manifest, to do the work of healing.” These were the values taught to me by my agrarian ancestors. It is their wisdom that informs my efforts to call attention to the restorative nature of our relationship to nature. Collective healing for black folks in the diaspora can happen only as we remember in ways that move us to action our agrarian past.
Individual black folk who live in rural communities, who live on land, who are committed to living simply, must make our voices heard. Healing begins with self-determination in relation to the body that is the earth and the body that is our flesh. Most black people live in ways that threaten to shorten our life, eating fast foods, suffering from illnesses that could be prevented with proper nutrition and exercise. My ancestors were chain smokers, mostly rolling their own smokes from tobacco grown locally and many of them were hard drinkers on the weekends. Yet they ate right, worked hard, and exercised everyday. Most of
Similar Books
