There is a grounding exercise that I have loved ever since it was introduced to me at a National Council of Elders convening by Shea Howell, a revolutionary elder and one of the founders of Riverwise (I’ve also heard tell that Brother Vincent Harding liked to begin meetings this way as well…so clearly it’s in good company). We go around in a circle, announcing where we were born, and then each person tells us their maternal grandmother’s name and where she was born. It provides one of the quickest and most profound ways to expose many of the assumptions we hold, contradictions we ignore, and Truths about what it means to be in any given place at any given time. Indeed, some people have no clue of their grandmother’s name, or if they do, they don’t know where she was born, or they may know nothing about her at all; many people reveal roots in far-away places, others that their family has been in the same area we happen to be for generations. It is a practice that produces a new and intimate space for people to be with one another. All at once, it evokes sadness and empathy, solidarity and connection, history and memory. It breaks down boundaries people in the room may have been establishing about who belongs and to whom they most closely identify. It centers our shared humanity over the bordered biases we may hold. I urge you to put it to use at your next meeting and see what kinds of new understandings you gain about those around you.
As the daughter of a mother who was an immigrant from the Caribbean and a father from North Carolina who settled in the Midwest, I have spent much of my life traveling to find family, to find connection to land. From flights to Jamaica, to hauls down I-75 South to see Grandma, to getting back to Michigan, I have lived much like a migratory bird who knows that the idea of home has its various seasons and iterations. I have learned that much like the vast mycelium networks in our forests (which our dear friend Anjelica Jade discusses in this edition) your life, your wellbeing, your sense of “youness,” your relationship to the land and love for it, can be intertwined with many different beings and many different places all at once.
And, in a seeming contradiction, given the face of a fascist neo-liberal capitalist geo-politics which denies the truth of such an existence because it forces us to establish and defend borders in order for our humanity to be validated, demands that we become wary of outsiders lest they “steal” our jobs, which necessitates cries for land back because otherwise it can’t be protected and preserved from the violence of degradation and destruction and deportation, there is also a powerful call within us to stand firm in our right to be where we are, where we have been, where our ancestors called home. This dialectic, of both migration and attachment, reveals to me the fundamental conflict we are truly addressing…that what most of us actually want isn’t to be walled off from one another, fighting for scraps, arrows pointed at the castle gates, but a complete upending of the systems which cast us enemies, which cut us off from being in the world, which turns land against us as we turn against it. Indeed, just a drive around Detroit and seeing all the various restaurants, cultural centers, houses of worship from around the world reveals that when we all find ourselves in one place, we learn more, grow more, enjoy diving into what makes us unique as a way to realize we’re all actually pretty similar.
This sense of pushing past nation-state based ideologies for figuring our identities (which cast them as static and rigid and unwelcoming of “others”) and instead embracing the ways in which the movement of people, ideas, other species, has always been a part of the earth’s story, is why we focused this edition on the theme of “memory and migration.” From haunting poetry like that of Katelyn Rivas and Mary Gagnon, which speak to the horrors occurring in Gaza, to the stories of African return like those of Fatou Sou, we are reminded of the deep spiritual and ancestral longings and belongings we hold for our homelands and how such memories connect us across time and space. We also offer the tales of two “native sons” of Detroit, musician Charles “Buddy” Smith and the revolutionary elder Baba Charles Simmons, whose work to cultivate and nurture the best parts of Detroit’s rich culture and fierce spirit is also wrapped up in the stories of Black migration from the south to the north. And across the art featured in this edition we feel in our hearts what at times can’t be expressed in words, a primal knowledge that the disconnection we feel from others and the land, the inability to see ourselves as a part of an extended web of life going back eons, is not inevitable, is not natural, is doing us no good. There is a nefarious reason the Poor, Black, Brown, and Indigenous are often connected to stories of (forced) migration under capitalism, don’t let the greed of its narrative turn you against your most likely fellows in struggle.
As I am often reminded by the amazing poet, author, and Detroit organizer Triniti Watson of the Midnight Care Collective and Co-founder of Black Salt Press, who does deep memory work within community and whose work is featured in this edition, to remember is revolutionary. Under oppressive systems that break families apart, kidnap and murder babies, rewrite history in order that we forget the atrocities committed in service of sending billionaires to space or into our most pristine and sacred spaces to mine for minerals or build luxury hotels, resisting that noise is a directly rebellious act. As they attempt to erase the spirit within that knows we are not above nature, that just like the flowers and bees, we are a part of nature, we fight back by loving one another and our earth even harder.
Though we may picture revolution as a fiery upheaval filled with chaos, I believe it is more often a quiet reflection and reminiscence in our hearts. Revolution is a brave and unending chain of memories, handed down and carried forth. They tie us back to the Truth of who we are and where we’ve come from and lead us to where we want to go, no matter how long the journey. Take a moment today and think of your mother’s mother, your father’s father, an auntie protecting the children a war has left orphans, a brother in a distant land fighting to be free. Hold their memories in your heart, carry their stories forward. And just remember the good guys always win, so if the bad guys are winning, the story ain’t over just yet. Hearts up, friends, we got us.
