Agricultural Poetics: Practices for Transformation
Octavia Butler
Mapmaking asks us what to show. Do we illustrate “potential use or lack thereof?”[1] How do we render transdimensional components like topography, inhabitation, and affect? Where can a map take us?
One square inch of topsoil takes 100 years to form. The anthropocene migrates the earth’s jetstreams. Our epigenetics transmute trauma across generations. Processes of becoming (re-generation, movement, refusal) are slow and adaptive. From these processes, our material world offers us memory.
Toni Morrison describes her book Beloved as the process of “re-membering the body and its parts… the family, the neighborhood, our national history.”[2] Morrison’s authorship engages with the matter of memory by uniting estranged elements, dynamics, and geography through body, haunting, and story.
Author comes from the root augeo, to increase or nourish. Nourish as root implicates care (responsiveness to needs, desires, potential) in crafting matters of memory. Increase suggests antecedent. We connote authorship with creative dominion over a new or singular source, but our roots tell us we are interdependent continuations of creation rather than static masters. Creation requires reciprocity.
Alice Sparkly Kat says, “Authority is fundamentally located within the people and is [resultant] of a stable relationship between humans and land as well as between agriculture and nature.”[3] To nourish stable relationships between the elements and our elemental selves requires a primordial understanding of oneness, balance and reciprocity—the conditions of authorial creation. As we nourish our relations with this care, we begin to destabilize hierarchy and exploitation, and we become self-aware of causality and conservation of matter, attuned to ancestral knowledge, and accountable to psychic wounds of colonization.
If culture means science/art/practice, and agri- means field, agriculture is the practice of cultivating and communing space. These spaces are affectual and elemental, shaped by and composed of erosion and reproduction, land and vegetation, animals and fungi, history and grief. Yet drought unfolds across our landmasses, crops fail, and communities hollow from exodus and gentrification. Across the United State’s capitalist colonies, we are alienated and anxious.[4]
bell hooks says, “healing begins with self-determination in relation to the body that is the earth and the body that is our flesh…to tend the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom and our hope.”[5] What are practices of self-determination and tending?
Because culture arises from hunger,[6] agriculture must be deliberately attuned to cycles. Rituals, seasons, transformations. If we do not know the rhythmic practices of venerating the divine, sowing seeds, and doulaing birth & death, how are we to sustain, nourish, and create ourselves? Agriculture is aware of primordial debt, and that the same elements which brought us into the world can take us from it. So it’s better to work with them than against. Here, agricultural poetics, self-determining practices which embody the knowing that we create are created slowly, collectively, in perpetuity, with aliveness and presence.
Poetry is folklore. Poetry delivers the news. Poetry engages the senses. Poetry is a rich oral tradition that imparts the actions and stories which compose and contextualize matter-making. Repeated again and again, across generations and despite borders, poetry is a potent conduit of self-actualization, cultural reproduction, and community building.
In a creation myth by gale jackson, an artist-mother transports dirt through her city with a shopping cart. At home, she turns the dirt to mud using water in a refrigerator drawer. From the mud comes “stiffened cloth. the flesh.” As she sculpts, she ritually fashions flesh. She animates “the imagination of a tribe.”[7]
This ritual, this animation, this poetry is not a luxury, as Audre Lorde says. “Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?”[8] Real flesh needs real food, like the people’s knowing. Real food like seeds braided into hair. Real food like fruit.
MELISSA FERRER(&)
Melissa Ferrer(&) is one of the dynamic multitude of community practitioners and organizers who champion the cause of KC Tenants: “a multigenerational, multiracial, anti-racist base of poor and working class tenants in Kansas City, [organizing] to ensure that everyone in KC has a safe, accessible, and truly affordable home.”[9] Ferrer(&) themself is a poet, educator, and facilitator. Their poetry, presence, and politic exude deep belief in food for thought, joy of the spirit, and solidarity across difference. Ferrer(&)’s poetics embody the self-determining practice of “sitting in [my] sovereignty / cultivating the land of [my] life,” cultivating love.[10]
SANKARA FARM
Founded by multimedia artist and farmer Ryan Tenney in 2017, Sankara Farm produces organically grown vegetables, fruits, and herbs; organizes community supported agriculture; and houses AgroArt and AgroEcology workshops. The farm invokes Burkinabé pan-Africanist revolutionary Thomas Sankara and embodies correlating politics.
Sankara Farm cultivates “emancipatory community action practice of sustainable agriculture through seed keeping and collective action.” Here, artists, farmers, community members, and movement builders work together “at the intersections of environmental justice, black agrarianism, and cultural healing practices for the development of strategies in building cultural, spiritual, and food sovereignty.”[11]
STRANGE FRUIT FEMMES
“Strange Fruit” is the anti-lynching song written by Abel Meeropol and originally sung by Billie Holiday.[12] Kansas City’s Strange Fruit Femmes go on to introduce themselves by invoking the Combahee River Collective, a lesbian, socialist organization founded by Barbara Smith in 1974. The Collective’s name evokes revolutionary Black and Indigenous struggle.[13] The river Combahee is named after first inhabitants who stewarded the coast of present day South Carolina. At this river, in 1863, Harriet Tubman led a Union military raid and liberated over 750 enslaved people.
Strange Fruit Femmes host free community programming in Kansas City that centers and uplifts Black, Brown, and Indigenous Femmes. Their “intentional happenings, shared resources and programs” include Black Arts Freedom School workshops, A Seat at the Table Cultural Theory Book Club, Soulful Safespace Sundays, and an oral storytelling audio archive called “here we are. we are here.”[14]
Anne Carson says poetry is "an action of the mind on a page, and the reader, when she engages it, has to enter into that action. The reader’s mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, so by the time you get to the end you're different."[15] Poetry is not transmuted only by ink and paper; nevertheless, poetry is action. Organizing, dancing, storytelling, warmth from the kitchen, dirty fingernails from the farm. Regardless of form, when engaged, practiced, ritualized, poetry changes us.
“Writing is a long-form neologism for the memory… every step is a new one, and ancient as the geological record.” Anna Beatrice Scott
i grow up watching day break over every morning / sun / flowers / steam wilt over man-made lakes man made contaminated / my sister and i bury a time capsule in the field next to the garden to replace a sea shell fossil i find embedded in the alley. we hold hands and do a momentous, spinning dance screaming, we stop dizzy finding mice bodies beneath our feet.
not so long ago, i had debilitating panic attacks every day
i couldn’t breathe / cptsd / abuse / intimate / intergenerational / poverty war illness
i am 14 when Michael Brown is murdered
16 when i encounter Angela Y. Davis and 19
before i realize i’d been holding my breath the whole time / i had to re-member
how to breathe / like songbird / i practice / yoke / plane / unknot
all that bound up / solar-sonar / throat / plexus / i begin to breath
deep enuf to start running / i fly for miles / whenever i begin to tire
i set my mind like a street medic, arriving to the next wounded / i make my body like the wind / which carries weeping, because we cannot / because we are knotted / because we can’t breathe.
when i am an elementary school literacy paraeducator i become certified in basic life support
how to keep a heartbeat / open an airway / i learn bearing witness to, facilitating, and disrupting
social and historical reproduction is a psychic undertaking / every day
after school the kids ask for a nature walk / we traverse the chain link borders of the playground with awe, i catch crickets to dispel fear / they chase dragonflies and each another / one among them wonders if four leaf clovers lose their luck when they are taken from their growing place.
later, when i lead creative writing club for high schoolers, we start sessions with ujjayi pranayama
blk grl student requests lullaby of birdland by Ella Fitzgerald to start our free-write time / the same day
Breonna Taylor’s killers walk free / the course of our lives ever the same / like we are in a vessel being
lowered slowly down lightless / well / tunnel / composition and ending
in water or soil or worms / molten earthen core / my students and i talk about the wildfires / the scarring at our southern border / our school is on Troost Avenue / during antebellum the avenue was the border of a fruit plantation / during Jim Crow, the segregating line / now, the redline /
i want my children to know that they have known rivers, far deeper and beyond.
cicadas are singing bugs, born in the grooves of tree limbs / after hatching and feeding on tree fluid, the cicada's topple to the earth and dig for sustenance at the root / they stay underground for two to seventeen years. not hibernating, but nourishing / we are at the edge of a forest, i ask you if you’re ready to enter / there is work to be done / mending pickling and carrying / communities vegetables and firewood every day / the imperative of Time becomes dispel wrath / decolonize and survive / together / flora fauna fowl, fragrant and fluid / i ask
do not become monument / statuesque stone or immovable / instead
know ancestors, know yourself as ancestor, ask why, act rhythmically / to diverge from degenerating, integrate synchronicities / name déjà vu / express gratitude for innumerable joy / to last here, re-member rivers / bird eyes see flight paths home by electromagnetic fields, sinuous / and underground / our bodies innumerable sand and tree ring deep / precious beneath, our brief singing.
[1] Wendy S. Walters. “Post-logical Notes on Self-Election” Black Performance Studies. Ed. Thomas DeFrantz, Anita Gonzalez. Durham: 2014. 153.
[2] “Home.” The House that Race Built. Ed. Wahneema Lubiano. New York: 1999. 167-72.
[3] Postcolonial Astrology. Berkeley: 2021. 76-77.
[4] 181 million acres of crops in the US are experiencing drought conditions.
John Kamaal Sunjata offers theory, criticisms, and case studies of “Gentrification as Settler-Colonialism.”
Six Theses on Anxiety as the dominant affect of contemporary United States.
[5] belonging. New York: 2009. 47, 117, 229.
[6] Postcolonial, ibid.
[7] “rent.” Sisterfire. Ed. Charlotte Watson Sherman. New York: 1994. 313-316.
[8] “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture. Los Angeles: 1977. no. 3.
[9] Learn about KC Tenants here
[10] “Broke Girl Purples.” Voicemail Poems. Online: 2022.
[11] Learn about Sankara Farm here.
[12] “Strange Fruit” was first published as the poem “Bitter Fruit” in The New York Teacher, a teacher’s union magazine, in 1937. “Strange Fruit”’s first performance by Billie Holiday at Café Society in 1939 heralded the Civil Rights Movement.
[13] Read their 1977 statement here.
[14] Learn about Strange Fruit Femmes here.
[15] “The Art of Poetry No. 88.” Interview by Will Aitken. Paris Review: 2004. Issue 171.
