photo by Matthew Smith on Unsplash
One of the most insidious accomplishments of the state has been to sever our connection to the land. When Leah Penniman said this (using the terms white supremacy and racial capitalism, which are of course synonymous with the american state) on multiple podcast episodes that I listened to recently, I was devastated to realize that this is deeply true of me.
I have little to no connection to the earth. In my life I have had no training or even motivation for agricultural action, for food cultivation. But far from seeing this as a weakness or a tragedy, I was socialized to see this as a victory:
“My ancestors were forced to make food for other people, now someone makes my food for me and I buy it with the money that I make with my mind. I’ve overcome. The way to respond to the trauma of slavery is to put myself in a position where I never have to be on the land or even think about where my food comes from. Society has evolved and thanks be to God. This is what my ancestors wanted for me, this is the non-agrarian life that my maternal grandparents fought to maintain and my parents were able to take for granted. To work with my hands would be retrogressive.”
But that’s not what my ancestors wanted. They wanted me to have the choice to do whatever work was fulfilling and meaningful to me, to be sure, but they would not have wanted me to have no connection to the land or to look down upon agricultural lifeways and eco-relationships.
But the trauma response of many Black families to slavery and its afterlife, as well as our later assimilation into capitalist ways of thinking and relating, has led to this earth-alienation which undermines the foundation of any revolution we would seek to organize. There is no revolution without food freedom. There is no anarchy without agricultural autonomy. There is no lasting solidarity without subsistence self-determination.
I’m coming to see my alienation from the earth similarly to my lifelong alienation from the other beings whom it was most important for me to know. I was alienated from myself and from other Black folk in spaces where whiteness was normative and in spaces where Blackness was gatekept and constructed specifically to exclude people like me. I was alienated from my extended family, elders, and ancestors, by estranged relationships on one side and nonexistent relationships on the other.
For a few years I’ve been consciously receiving and cultivating the gift of reconciliation with my kinfolk. I still have a very long way to go in my healing, in my reframing, in my reengaging. But there’s one kinperson to whom I have scarcely begun to reconcile—one I have not even recognized my need to come to know again, one I have not even recognized as a being with whom I can have a relationship.
The twenty-first chapter of Revelation starts this way:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.
Then verse 5 says:
And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’
I’ve written elsewhere about the way this sequence confuses me—is God making a new earth (v. 1) or making this earth new (v. 5)?
Of course, ultimately this is an allegory, yet I’ve always secretly clung to a more literal interpretation of this chapter. I saw this part as more portrayal than poetry. I wanted a new earth. I didn’t want this one. I wanted heaven to come down to earth from above because I didn’t truly believe that the kingdom of God was already among us (Luke 17:21) and could therefore emerge from within. I didn’t really want God to make this earth new; I wanted a new earth entirely. And I felt that way in large part because I saw the earth as a vessel that could be replaced, not as a being that could be resurrected.
And if this earth is going to be replaced by a better one, why invest in any relationship with this one?
When my ancestors’ relationship with the land was violently transformed from one of loving relationship to one of painful alienation and forced objectification, this created generational trauma that led to my seeing the earth as an object with which I have no connection. When the earth was forcefully presented as a material to be worked by peasants, or later as a means of production to be worked by wage laborers, this made it incredibly hard for us to hold onto the eco-spirituality that has always been a part of Black and indigenous culture.
When I was socialized by a statist and capitalist society, I came to believe that the further away I got from the land, the freer I became. I was taught that my best interest was to transcend the earth, not to love the earth.
I first believed in eschatological resurrection for all evangelical christians, and eschatological incarceration for everyone else. Then I believed in resurrection for all christians. Then all human beings. Now I’m working on believing in resurrection for all living beings, and on believing that the earth is a living being.
The resurrected Jesus was not an entirely different Jesus but one representing both incredible change and unfathomable continuity. I hope the same will be true of every other being—that we will be new creations, with the old—not us ourselves—having passed away and everything within us—not separate or discontinuous from us—having become new.
We’re all going on this journey together. Universalism includes every part of the universe. Resurrected, not replaced. Healed, not hidden away. This earth. This body. God loves it all, so it’s all coming. My desire is to likewise come to love it all, and to see the life in all of creation, and to see the potential for relationship in every being, and to do all within my power to restore and rebuild those relationships. Especially with my friend and kin Earth, in relationship with whom I will find the God-given basis for all the abundance, all the liberation, all the solidarity, and all the freedom I seek.
this was really incredible! just wondering what your thoughts are on the rapture of the church from an anarchist point of view
damn i loved reading this