Last month I attended a “Decolonized Feast,” an event organized by Emilio Rojos, the Live Arts Bard Biennial Artist in Residence, and Rebecca Yoshino, the Bard Farm Coordinator. The Feast was an opportunity to enjoy food harvested from the Bard Farm; we shared tamales, various salsas and hot sauces, roasted butternut squash with a maple syrup glaze, cranberry-mushroom wild rice, and hibiscus tea. Attendees also explored Rojos’ land-art installation, Naturalized Borders (to Gloria).
Rojos and Yoshino planted two, 72-foot parallel lines of corn in the shape of the US-Mexico border. At the beginning of the installation, near “California” on the map of the border, is a planting of a gateway plant, teosinte. Teosinte is also known as mother corn, and is native to Mexico, where Rojos is from. Yoshino planted Dakota Flint corn from a seed native to the Hudson Valley, but that she “rescued” from a museum (or some kind of repository) in Minnesota. Rojos and Yoshino planted Buffalo Creek squash, Iroquois Cornbread bean, and Seneca Cornstalk bean around the corn, thus completing the corn-squash-bean “three sisters” crop combination common to the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous nations. However, as you walk along the border, the planting of corn becomes a monoculture.
A homecoming story
When settlers colonized the Hudson Valley, it was home to Munsee and Mohican nations. Bard College is located on the unceded homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, who were forcibly displaced to Wisconsin by New York state officials (with the help of missionaries), and then by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, in the mid-1800s.
Stories often serve a bridging function. The story-teller brings something into appearance that the audience might not have considered before from that perspective. Yoshino’s story of rescuing the seed did that for me. The story taught me about the reality of the land I have been visiting during my time in the Hudson Valley at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. It encouraged me to look up more information on my own. With other feasters, I witnessed a home-coming story: the return of rescued seed to its native land, where it can be cultivated anew.
On stories and bridges
The “Gloria” referenced in the installation title is the Chicana poet and theorist, Gloria E. Anzaldúa. She uses the bridge is a metaphor for both solidarity and for connecting across difference throughout her work. Bridges are temporary and fragile constructions. In “La Prieta,” from the 1981 anthology The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Anzaldúa writes about the wounds of internalized oppression. The violence can follow one home. She writes, “The black moods of alienation descend, the bridges we’ve extended out to each other crumble. We put the walls back up between us” (p. 206). Anzaldúa insists that it is not the job of women of color to help white feminists along, but she also resists a conception of politics that separates people through identity categories.
In “(Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe spaces,” the preface for this bridge we call home:radical visions for transformation (2002), Anzaldúa describes bridges as follows:
They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and changing perspectives. Bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. [ . . . ] Change is inevitable; no bridge lasts forever. (p. 1)
On sharing tables and sharing worlds
In the Human Condition, Arendt describes the world as the shared space of human activity. She uses a table as a metaphor for how the world both connects and separates us. We each have our own distinct space around the table, and are connected by sitting around it.
Although I think about Arendt’s table often in academic settings, I think about it less often when I eat, even though sharing food is an activity that seems, for many as well as for myself, to bring people together. Arendt, as far as I am aware, doesn’t discuss sharing meals philosophically in her books or essays, though the concept of taste is important for her.
Perhaps I don’t think of sharing meals when I think of Arendt because sharing food is intimate. In the preface to A Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga connects sharing food with friendship and intimacy. As a Chicana lesbian, Moraga says she often had felt excluded from black lesbian circles. But then, she recognized a tension: she knew little about the experience of Black lesbians. Moraga relates something that Barbara Smith told her about knowing the other: “It’s about who you can sit down to a meal with, who you can cry with, whose face you can touch” (p. xvii).
Anzaldúa’s description of bridges as a metaphor for crossing borders and transforming one’s perspective reminds me of how political theorist Lisa Disch describes aspects of story-telling in Arendt’s philosophy. According to Disch, story-telling serves as a way to bridge and to maintain distance. We have to know the stories of others (bridging), while also refraining from collapsing or assimilating their perspective into ours (distance).
Feasting together
As my friend and fellow contributor Rita Gardiner reminds me, tables are anchored to particular spaces. They are not crossings. Yet, neither tables nor bridges are permanent. Arendt, like Anzaldúa, recognizes that political space is fragile and must be renewed by those of us who sit around tables and who build bridges.
If I understand Disch correctly, our current world is not an equal place, and we need stories and bridges to make sure the Arendtian table is prepared for us all. The world, our collective home, is strengthened through the vibrant participation of unique persons. I think again of the three sister crops. As Yoshino talked about the plants that comprised Naturalized Borders (to Gloria), she remarked that the corn growing with the beans and squash was larger and more vibrant than the monoculture corn.
Notes
For those of you in or near the Hudson Valley, there will be a Return to the Land Ritual on Sunday, November 24 as part of the Live Arts Bard festival.
Feature photo by Mohau Mannathoko on Unsplash