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PART 1 “Rocks Are Our Oldest Teachers” Everything starts in the middle. Consequences of the roads before, pave the way for what comes next. Always in the middle. This piece started two years ago. It’s not finished. It’s in the middle. I wanted to answer her question: Where do you come from? But without words. I could’ve written this piece with thousands of words. Hundreds of metaphors. But I made the decision to: Turn away from words. The only languages I’m fluent in are colonial ones. It’s been enough of their phonemes. Enough of their syntax that binds. Turn away from words. I look instinctively towards my hands. What could they do? My ancestors made these hands. They author with me. My child, too. All hands on deck! I’m here in the middle. Between generations. Consequences of the roads before, pave the way for what comes next. Always in the middle. This piece is not finished. It’s in the middle. The Continents
There’s a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh saying that “rocks are our oldest teachers”.
I’ve sat with that statement for a while now, and it has animated innumerable theories, but none quite as vivid as that from May 18th, 2021. At 7:30 AM, Montrealers woke up to a 3.9-magnitude earthquake. My son said it felt like a truck rumbling through the room. We had completed a homeschooling unit on Pangaea back in March, and remarked that the continents all seemed to fit together like a puzzle.
Today was the day when I was going to explain how it all fell apart.
Earthquakes happen when tectonic plates move away from each other to create valleys (divergent), push up against one another to form mountains (convergent), or simply brush past the other (transform). Geologists view the earth as either snapping, sliding or colliding—and, if rocks are our oldest teachers, what are they teaching us?
This art project is an attempt to answer that question.
So, let’s talk about life here on the lithosphere.
During my time on earth, I keep six histories inside of me.
I rarely share my ancestral stories with people. While they’re simple to me, they’re complex to them, and conversations usually end with me fielding reactions to these stories or correcting assumptions about them.
My ancestors came from five of the seven continents—most of Pangaea has nourished me. Each ancestral homeland has a unique history, as does the land that some of them were forced to live on. If my child is to keep our story, then he is responsible for getting the details right.
And it is precisely because our story is complex to others that I need him to understand the intricacies of our origin, including our departures & arrivals, so that he is able to manoeuvre through the reactions and assumptions.
How do you explain colonialism to a seven-year-old? You start with the land because it’s always been about the land.
i. Self-locating on the Land
Self-locating my son on this land is a combination of teaching him where his ancestors all came from, the processes they were subjected to in the making of “America”, and what it means for him to speak English for as long as we have, and to now be a third-generation “Canadian”. It’s been a journey to get here.
For my family, it all started on the continent of Abya Yala (South America).
In this orientation of the map, everything occurs in the south-western region of the land mass, home to one of our ancestors, the Arawaks. The Arawak-Lokono people resided on the mainland, spread across the highland shield. Their relatives, the Arawak-Taíno, resided on the islands just below the continent.
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and met the Taíno people, causing a continental impact that has been snapping, sliding, and colliding with the worlds of Indigenous peoples across Abya Yala and Turtle Island ever since.
Stretching from west to east, Portuguese, French, Dutch, British, and Spanish colonizers all carved up the Arawak homelands, forcing them and others into neighbouring regions and further into the Amazonian interior.
The focal point for my family is the place of contact: Guyana, a territory chiselled into Abya Yala.
On European maps, everything occurs on the north-eastern shoulder of the South American continent on a formation called the Guiana Highlands. Colonizers took turns extracting resources from the Highlands, each claiming a portion of her territory as their own, and re-baptizing the land as: Suriname (Netherlands), Brazil (Portugal), Venezuela (Spain), French Guiana (France), and Guyana (England). With the exception of La Guyane, currently considered a département d’outre-mer or “DOM” by France, all other nations are now independent from their European mother colonies, but in all casestheir colonial languages and legacies persist on the land.
Indigenous peoples have an orientation for Abya Yala.
Europeans have an orientation for South America.
Being mixed involves understanding the angles of our many orientations. And if rocks are our oldest teachers, then we needed a map that could describe people like us—so, we snapped, and we slid, and we pulled apart the land with scissors and sticks.
ii. Diverging the Land
The lithosphere includes both continental and oceanic crusts.
My son and I started this project by preparing the waters to host the land. Water has memory and is a life source to all—it connects everything. The raindrop that readies our food and the cup that quenches our thirst are the same waters that undulated and rippled behind the rudders that transported bodies across the globe.
With the waters prepared, it was time to separate the continental crust from the oceanic.
So, I open the scissors’ mouth and close their steel beak: Snap! Crackle! Pop! They sing across the laminated map’s skin, as I carefully cut along the narrow isthmus connecting the northern and southern continents. I follow their tectonic borders, provide some shoreline, but eventually cut away the islands close-by, despite knowing that mainlanders and islanders communicate.
Once excised, the continent dies in my hand, as I hold the scissors.
Its limp image sags, disconnected from the oceanic crust whose water-filled arteries keep it alive and thriving. But I’m a good little scientist, and I tack its corpse up to the board for further observation.
If rocks are our oldest teachers, then attempts to isolate and excise land show us just how violent and impossible that endeavour really is. We can only ever diverge, converge or transform together.
iii. Converging the Land
We immediately begin to repair Abya Yala, removing her colonial borders, and drawing attention to her voluptuous eastern mountain ranges. Now isolated, we affix her and Turtle Island to the flatly-painted waters, facing a direction their inhabitants have always known–down side up.
Guyana itself, however, is left un-repaired; its relative size must be noticeable compared to the continent that surrounds it.
As the first continental contact is with Africa, my scissors follow, slicing away at the land.
Orchestrated by the Dutch in the late 1600s, the first trafficking of bodies to Guyana is sourced from West Africa. Since we couldn’t be sure which nations to exclude, we had to take all of her.
All other contact follows Africa, resting on her back, so she must be properly affixed, but she is magnificent in size and won’t reign in so easily. Africa resists being wrangled down to such a small landscape. So, we twist her image, we spear through her—several times—to pin her down, and even consider accordioning her to make her comply. Africa doesn’t budge, she keeps bouncing back. We settle on a single piercing near her horn, and the image arches backwards from the point of puncture.
We position our scissors and prepare the next continent.
Two hundred years later, after changing hands from the Dutch to the French, and back to the Dutch again, Guyana is now being actively colonized by the British, who have begun trafficking bodies from India, a territory it is concurrently colonizing. When my maternal great-grandmother was taken, her land would have been intact. I ignore the man-made territorial line that is Partition, and I take all of her, hacking through her Himalayas. Once liberated, we learn from our previous dealings with Africa and push decisively through her middle; the image lies stiff on the spear.
Madeira is next. It belongs to Portugal, who colludes with England to traffic its agrarian population to Guyana. It is but a dot on the map compared to Africa and India, yet its presence is tangible in my family as its peoples are found on both sides of my parentage.
We take the island, and the lance shreds her image completely.
The Opium Wars bring England and France together in China, and by the end of the 1800s, Engliand begins trafficking the rural men who ventured to the city to trade, later trafficking the women to Guyana. China leases Hong Kong to England for 99 years, making it the major port of exit and entry for trade. We don’t know the exact region my paternal grandfather comes from, so we take all of China. It is the last image in our ancestral collection, and we stab her in the heart.
Continents and countries spilled from Pangaea’s body like limbs onto the floor, all barbe-au-cul’d and skewered into Guyana. Every incision on the paper resurrects the spectre of colonialism, that strategic plucking of people from their lands, and placing them back down to die by extraction for Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
If rocks are our oldest teachers, and these acts of isolating and excising show us just how impossible it is to collide the land as we have done, then the movement of our people should seem equally impossible. Yet here we are, my son and I, diverging, converging, and transforming together.
iv. Transforming the Land
From continents to islands, Guyana bears the weight and history of it all. From Africa to Asia, bodies floated across the waters and were hosted and hoisted atop of this small body of land.
It has been through these calculated continental collisions, this big bang theory of colonial contact, that my body emerges from empires and walks on this lithosphere. I am here because of the ingenuity of my ancestors’ inter-generational survival from a process designed to work us to death.
I keep six histories alive inside of me. These are five of our histories. All from unique homelands. Each with particular histories to the land. My child is responsible to those histories.
And in order for him to tell our stories, we needed to start from the beginning and look at the rocks.
The movements of our people seem complex to many, but they are simple to us. If rocks are our oldest teachers, then the land has taught my son how his ancestors diverged, converged, and transformed together to make him.
Always in the middle. This piece is not yet finished. It’s in the middle.
Reflections from the second phase of our art project, Plants are our second oldest teachers, will discuss the plantation process on the land in Spring 2022.
