On Reclamation, Mythopoetics, and Excavating Our Collective Eco-Memory
Raina J. León in conversation with Lisbeth White.
Years ago, amid the flurry of AWP (Associated Writers and Writing Programs) in Portland 2018, I first met Lisbeth White through the introduction of a common friend, Jasminne Mendez. Jasminne and I were glorious in our full and pregnant waddles. There is a picture of us three, our curls folding into us, each of us beaming with effervescent joy. Even in that first meeting, I remember being so awe-struck by the ebullient light of Lisbeth walking in the world.
Later, as she was writing her first book, I was gifted the opportunity to offer feedback on her early drafts while I was on sabbatical, my son then a being just beginning to learn the workings of his limbs in crawling. I felt myself immersed in the gift of her world, its groundedness and energetic awakening, so it is poignant and perfect in time that in this interview, after American Sycamore (Perugia Press, 2022) has been published, my son makes an appearance with his own important toddler contributions to our understanding of our work. In truth, he, too, has been invested and engaged by Lisbeth’s truth and insight for years, all the time of his being.
This interview is wide-spanning: ancestral wisdom, energetic healing, dance, mythopoetics, relationship with trees, and more. I truly hope you feel welcomed in this conversation, that it fills you with the light that we shared in its unfolding.
Here. We start at the beginning.
Raina J. León: Where were you first published, and what's important about that first publication? What's indicative about that?
Lisbeth White: I think my very, very first publication was actually when I was a teenager. I talk about my auntie all the time because she was my writing mentor and my spiritual mentor at the same time. She was actually working in a mentorship program. She herself was a poet and a writer and started this mentorship program. Maybe because I was family, and also, I think maybe she just saw something in my creativity, she enrolled me in this mentorship program when I was pretty young. I think one of the first publications I was in was actually a publication from that mentorship program. I must have been 14 or 15. It was called Wordcraft Circle.
And that feels really important, because I think that it actually set the tone and the expectation for me going out in the publishing world, which has since been dashed but is now being recreated and informed. Through that publication, I was so connected to the folks and community around that publication. It was a community-uplifted literary source. I mean, this was about mentors and their apprentices publishing together, coming together, in this one place. I felt so much sense of community and family in that publication, and then I took a long, long break from writing. I didn't write and didn't start submitting things again until 2016, so that was 20-something years of doing that. And then I entered the “Publishing World” of"Oh, this is not a community the way that I was schooled into publishing." This world was like, you send your stuff out and nobody talks to you about it for maybe months and then you're sent one line back.
It just felt very discouraging and separatist to me in this way that was kind of harsh. But the first publication that picked up a poem from my book was Visitant Lit, and that was in 2016 when I first started submitting work out again. Their mission is so much about witnessing and being a visitor on the planet, and that felt very much in line with the kind of writing and work that I was doing. They communicated very sweetly with me, with a lot of feedback, and I actually remember the editor saying something about being a natural writer. And I was like, "Oh my God, that's wonderful." That's all I needed to hear is to have some affirmation and validation around that, because I didn't go the MFA route, so my entrance back into the writing world was very DIY.
RJL: I'm very interested about that DIY, but I'll try to remember to come back to that.
You mentioned your auntie as a literary influence. Do you want to talk more about her or any other literary influences that are present within your work that's coming out that might be important for us to go back to?
LW: Yeah. She obviously was the first and the main, and continues to be the inspiration. Her name is EK Caldwell. She's an ancestor now. I mean, just because I loved her and she was my auntie and we were so close, but she was also one of the first people that was showing me the different things that could be done with writing. She was a poet. She also did publish a book of interviews with community activists and leaders; that's informed my approach to writing and community. Then she also did some work where she just let her writing go where it wanted to go. She ended up writing a story, a short story like a fable, and worked with a local youth dance company to turn it into a dance production. So, really cool.
It's on my mind now, because they're actually just running it again for the first time since the mid '90s. It's in Newport, Oregon so it's very up and center.It’s like hey, she’s still out there, busy and still getting to work then. She is, of course, a major influence. There’s also Alice Walker, somebody I've just always read forever and ever. When I was younger, and I was reading a lot of what they call magical surrealism, I was interested in Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Octavio Paz. That kind of stuff. Anything that felt like a myth or a fable storytelling. Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell is something I remember reading again and again and again when I was younger. Oh, and Zora Neale Hurston.
RJL: And I think about the piece of myth and fable, and also the more of an embodied relationship to one's work. That comes through in your work too, these threads. If you were to say that you are in relation to or in association with a literary movement, would it be magic realism or surrealism or something else?
LW: I think that everything I write all the time is becoming part of an ecowomanist, mythopoetical manifesto. I feel like that's what I'm always, always writing from poetry to essays. I've started doing longer form prose, and I'm actually working on something that's like a mythopoetical memoir, I guess I would call it. I feel like all of my writing moves within that. I don't even know if that's a real genre.
RJL: It is now.
LW: That's what I would call it, yes.
RJL: And that is fantastic... The definitiveness of circle and circle and circle and narrow it down, and this is where we are. I really appreciate that specificity of the ecowomanist, mythopoetical memoir. I like it! Especially for me, thinking about your work which has such incorporation of history, genealogy, ancestry, healing, and energetic work, there's so many different layers. There's also a thesis kind of structuring within scholarly work. There's bridge working and now, knowing more about your auntie and her work with poetry and the connection with dance, I'm really interested in how you are thinking about collaboration and co-creation. I wonder if your work may actually be extending that way as well or if it already has beyond the limits of the page.
LW: I hope so. I really, really want to. I'm considering the writing itself as a ground for all these other expressions to be able to come out. I mean, part of this also comes from the fact that I didn't get my MFA but I did get my master's in counseling psychology. I focused on expressive arts therapy, which is a very multimodal-intermodal approach. And in fact, the whole approach, the goal of the approach is to be intermodal, is to move from one creative modality to another because again, it builds on itself, it shifts where it needs to. It's a very organic, intuitive creative process and creative way of being.
I think my fantasy has always been that any kind of literature or writing work turns somehow into some kind of ceremony or ritual or embodied activity. That’s how I think some of our deepest knowing comes through, is when we can put our bodies into action around it. And dance, I also grew up as a dancer so that's something that really connects to me. Being able to feel the energy of words or stories moving through the body through dance is really important. Then again, the ritual and the ceremony. I'm actually working right now on an anthology with two other poets, Tamiko Beyer and Destiny Hemphill, about Poetry as Spellcasting. Then we're putting together this really cool anthology of essays from other contributors, writing prompts, and poems that could relate to the connection between poetry and spellcasting as languages of liberation and making magic and creating social transformation.
And again, my fantasy for that work is that, "Okay, we're going to have all these. Now, we're going to have this handbook for other people to buy so that when we get together as poets, we can make rituals together. We can make something happen. We'll have a common enough lexicon around this that we can cast some spells or just do something." Again, embodied with the work.
RJL: I did a similar practice, gathering together writers and folks, oriented by oracle engagements and ritual at the National Women's Studies Association.
It was such a wonderful conference that happened to be in San Francisco at the time. Folks just gathered in this circle and had this exploration of Afro-surrealism and Afro-futurism within our work. So yes, wonderful. I'm so excited for this anthology that's coming.
LW: Yeah. And it feels so good, doesn’t it? It feels so organic. It makes me think of griots and just how storytellers used to move through community, right?
RJL: Fele is offering his [raspberry-chewing sound] contributions.
LW: I'm going to take that as an affirmative, as an affirmation.
RJL: I am, too. He's bouncing on the bed. It must be affirmative.
LW: Look at this curly head. Oh my goodness.
RJL: There's a bunny bouncing on the bed. Talk about collaboration in an interview.
LW: There you go. It's like embodiment.
RJL: Yes. “I'll show you exactly what embodiment is.”
Fele: I love it.
RJL: And breath, okay. He took a big breath. Such a big breath to do [raspberry-chewing sound].
LW: I heard it in that one, yeah. That's a deep one.
RJL: I just dropped the quotes from your bio, which I loved. “she is certain”... [You] are certain our collective liberation is intricately tied to ancestral earth wisdom and that [you] firmly believe each of us has the boundless capacity within to be our own wisest healers.” What does liberation look like and feel like for the collective? But what does it look like and feel like for the collective liberation?
LW: I feel like it looks like your child right now.
RJL: This is liberated expression.
LW: A little bound by exhaustion but it's totally liberated.
RJL: I don't how much of this is liberation or exhaustion.
LW: Or reaction, yeah. Liberation, I wrote that, and that's such a big statement. I wrote that. What is liberation? I think of liberation in a few different ways. The primary being just the unwinding and deconditioning of... How to say that? Of the most authentic expression of humanity. That sounds good. That sounds like what I think liberation is.
Fele: Idea.
RJL: I wonder about the unwinding, how that comes through in your work. How might your work be a connection with a mission of collective liberation? I think I—, as an outsider, as a reader— can see those threads but I'm curious about your conception within your own work.
LW: This is one of those things where when I'm in the writing, I'm doing the writing and I'm following what the writing is doing. And half of them, I know what I'm doing and what I'm writing, right? And then later, I can look back and see, "Oh, this is something that is unclear that was operating." Or, "Oh. Of course, I wrote..." Mostly, it's like, "Oh duh. Of course, I wrote this." Because I have this platform that I'm sometimes unaware of that I'm operating from or this template that I'm operating from.
I think this is also informed by my work. As a healer therapist, what I found and it came to me to find is that most healing, especially when I was working with the populations I work with which are mostly people of the global majority, right? Folks of color and also, mostly women. People, women, identified folks of color. And that what feels like what impedes the healing so much is just other people's social conditioning.What we've been told how we should be, and we get told that in some very benign ways and we also get told that in extremely violent ways, right? All these in very violent systemic ways, we're being told how we should be and what our worth is, depending on how the story that's being told about us.
I think when I'm writing, I keep trying to peel away another layer. Like, what's underneath that? You do research, right? So you know that there's this one level of research and that's one. It's the crust of the story. Then if you dig a little more, you get to another level and then there's a whole other set of associations with the story. And then you get down again. You just have to keep going down and down and down, and peeling back and peeling back, and unwinding and unwinding and unwinding to get to something that actually feels in your knowingness, in your body, is something real and true and authentic. We've just got, again, so much trauma that it fakes out our knowingness and makes it hard to discern.
RJL: How are you living your liberation and how does that play out within your work?
LW: I am constantly thinking that I had liberation towards, right? I think there were a few years where I was like, I want liberation from. I just want to get out of this shit. I just wanted to get out of all this craziness through me. Then I actually had a healer that I was working with who is a practitioner for me, who said, "Okay, but what are you going towards? What are you wanting? If you're not just escaping from something but you’re moving towards, where are you headed and what do you want? What do you want? What do you want to embody? What do you want to feel?"
That changes for me every day, but I think the way that I approach living out my liberation is to be continuously checking in with, "Okay, what am I liberating towards right now? What is this action? Is it helping me get more free?"
Oh my gosh. I actually have this reminder on my phone, this Audre Lorde reminder. It goes off every day: “Which me will survive all of these liberations?" The other question that goes along with that is in this moment, “Am I closer to liberation or am I further away?” And those actually go off on my phone every couple of days, just as a check-in of like, "Okay. Am I living towards what I say … I mean, am I living into the future that I want for myself, or where am I? Just where am I? And it's hard to keep it as just a curiosity check but that's the goal, to keep it as a curiosity check. Just like, "Okay. Status check, where am I? Where am I going?" And that, as a judgment. But it's a helpful one, for sure, to keep me in line with some of my values.
RJL: This is your present practice. I'm curious now, that question about time and ourselves in time before time and times to come. If you could tell yourself something at five, what would it be? 15, what would it be? And what about 85?
LW: At five, I don't know. I actually have a picture of my younger self on my altar, because she was just so cute, and I don't think she knew that.
RJL: She is.
LW: She was just very precious and had a lot of wonder and instance about her. So, I don't know that I would have a specific thing to say to a five-year-old about that other than just, "Yes, just keep going with that. Be yourself." I think young people, especially young girls, have such magic. Just complete magic, right? I mean, I can see why Black girl magic became the hashtag that it is, right? And just that even if it goes away for a little bit, remember that you have that, because you'll want to come back to it and it's something worth coming back to you, for sure.
I would probably actually say the same thing at 15, because I think I was probably just repeating some of that dance of, "What is myself and what feels good about myself? How is the rest of the world relating to me and does that feel in accordance with what I believe about myself or not? Do I need to change what I believe by myself so I can feel some coherency between the way that the world reacts to me and the way that I show up?" And I think again, the affirmation I would offer would just be, "No, just keep going. Keep going. Just stick close to yourself. Just keep going. It's also going to be hard but you'll have somebody to come back to them and control that."
RJL: And 85-year-old is?
LW: I hope I could just say, "Good living. Good job doing that life thing."
RJL: Good job living, I like that. Shifting a little bit, but I think not too much, because [the phrase] “good job living” also recognizes a more recent past, too, for the self that is you now. You write in that one essay, “Santuary: Rock: Mountain: Home”, EcoTheo Collective Social Justice Folio Autumn 2021, "The summer of 2018, I ran away to the mountains living at the base of the Piscos, a part of Blue Ridge mountain range in North Carolina."
What does it mean to run away and what did you find in the running? Because that idea of running away comes into your work too, right? And running toward.
LW: Running towards and running away. That particular essay does have a lot to do with fugitivity and dreaming. That also happened during a time of my life when I was at my most nomadic, and I was basically traveling for about three years. And it was an incredibly profound time for myself, traveling alone for about three years. That's actually probably when this reminder on my phone came about, "Am I moving closer to liberation or farther away?" Or what me is going to survive all these liberations, right? The running away aspect of it, which was at a certain point needing to very clearly step out of the realm that I knew, very clearly leave the village. I needed to leave the village. Absolutely, because of so many years of feeling inundated with such close feedback or mirrors. Or again, ways of being related to that were starting to not actually feel good, just good to my system.
There was very much the running away, which is I just need to extricate myself and step out of this. This is where the dreams come in, this dreaminess, intuitive pull. This possibility that I don't know what that means. Then I found more and more that I was running towards the earth, again, and what does it mean to be known on the earth without all these other human systems entangling up my sense of who I am and what's possible.
There's the running from and the running towards. Running from the known to the unknown, I don't know that things got necessarily more known, but I ran into more of a capacity for reveling in the mysteries, the unknown, the unknowable, the constant edge of creation. This has made me think of Bayo Akomolafe. Actually, he speaks way more eloquently about fugitivity than I would be able to. But he talks around fugitivity as this escape towards a mystery or an unknown or to the edge of what we can conceive of as possible. Or fugitivity towards rupture, which is actually the place where more possibility can come through. He uses this phrase about being broken open by a world that exceeds us, that I’m always like, “Oh, my God!” My brain can just barely latch onto that, but there's something in my body’s knowingness that understands this: "There's a world that exceeds us. There's so much more out there." And that when I can get to those places of rupture or unknown to myself, it's just, the sky is the limit.
I don't know if that answered your question at all.
RJL: No, it absolutely does. It absolutely does answer the question, and I'm really interested, too, in this running towards the fugitivity, towards rupture, and the unknowable and being at home with that. Also, thinking about this nomadic searching and intuitive responsiveness to the call to be in different places and recognition of the learning that will be in welcome to one in these different places. And home, to leave the village but also carrying home. I'm curious about where that home is within your work and the world that you are creating and in connection with. There is a bridge between what is familiar and what is not.
LW: Home. It's so tricky. I'm actually also writing this other project now, writing about the home that I grew up in, and it's very present on my mind about what's the difference between house and home? What does that mean in terms of homeland? And what does that mean for people of diaspora, which makes me... it immediately brings this ache into my chest. I don't know if this will answer your question, but this is absolutely what's coming into my mind. I was in this book group recently, and this issue of body and home came up, and I guess maybe this is ecowomanist book group so I wouldn't necessarily call it that before this interview. We ended up in this discussion around human beings as a part of the natural ecology of this planet. And I personally think, and also my healing work is really oriented this way, that one of the biggest singular traumas that we have experienced through colonization and imperialism and racial superiority and all of the bullshit, is this severing of our relationship to landscape and land, the earth. That's a spiritual abuse and an issue of spiritual justice. In this group, which is a very diverse group, there are folks who were of that diaspora we're talking about, being torn away from the continent and the spiritual impact of that. Then folks indigenous to what we are calling North America and the land genocide that happened here, and the trauma of being separated from homelands. And what it means to live in such close ecology that there's not very much separation. If we think about it, even now we are exchanging cells with all of our surroundings all the time, right? Every time I touch this plant, we're exchanging cells. So, where do I end and where does this plant begin? It’s getting fuzzy now.
These deep ties to land are very, very real. And I also think about what has happened as that's become more localized, as we've been restricted to villages or reservations or very specific geographies about where we can live and where we can't live. And how some of what's happened there is another rupture of our sense of belonging on the earth and being able to go to different landscapes, and still feel the deep connectivity to and feel belonging at home wherever we are. I have a friend who says, “But what if we belong to the earth?” Yes, and I also have this very human longing for specific places that I've developed relationships with.
In this nomadness that I was doing, that was part of it. It was like, what happens if I feel very connected to the place that I grew up — and those skills of relating and being a connection to that landscape — do they translate into other landscapes and how does that happen? Then, is it possible to feel at home there wherever I am? So much of this also has to do with being of this mixed race ancestry and doing a lot of healing among lineage but also growing up in a place that was predominantly white and just all of the identity bullshit that got thrown at me in terms of enoughness. Where do I fit? What class do I go to? Where do I sit? All these tensions around belonging and where I belong were really getting healed through being able to go to these different places and apply what I know about being in a deep relationship.
RJL: And in your work, too, there is the choice of that, you said “nomadness”, which is super interesting to me. Then there's the reality that there isn't a choice in some cases of movement, right? You speak about the tension of witnessing folks who are in migrational crisis and then also recognizing your own lineages of the past, robbing from ones and stripping of lineages and the rise of fugitivity as a resistance strategy. I'm curious about how that also emerges, that tension between the choice of being in these different spaces and the position of witness for a descendant of not having a choice and also witnessing that rupture for all the loss of home and the grieving and loss of rights that continues to happen within crisis, right? Ecological crises that also fuel refugee crises.
LW: Yeah. What was the question? I'm like, "Yes, all of those things."
RJL: I'm curious about how you negotiate between the choice and then the lack of a choice.
LW: Okay. Yes. This feels like it leans towards a question of privilege in many ways, and who's privileged around place and how that happens. Yes to all the paradoxes and conditions you mentioned around the ecological crisis, political borders, boundaries, policy and all of that, and humanity. I mean, I'm thinking this brings me back to the particular essay that you read and I was really feeling into that capacity I had to be able to follow this dream knowing. There was a time where immigrants coming up from the south were called Dreamers, right? And I was really struck by both that contradiction and beautiful phrasing.
Then also, feeling very limited in my ways around safety about being able to travel. There's this mix of privilege that goes on, that I think is a constant negotiation for all the ways I show up in the world. There's ways I show up that really mark me, limit me, and boundary me in moving about the world because of systems and oppression. Then there's definitely some ways that I have that afford me a lot of privilege in that. When I think about privilege, it is just a constant negotiation. I don't know much else to say about that except that it behooves me to be very aware of the constant negotiation, to not be taking it for granted and to be noticing the impact. And again, also putting that into my questions around liberation, right? When I move in this way, what part of me is moving towards liberation, and where is that moving within collective liberation? Where is the overlap or where is the gap or where is the weaving?
Really, to be honest, sometimes it's a bummer to be constantly negotiating, the individual and the collective. I can see why there's certain groups of people who just don't want to do that. I would say it's a labor. It's a labor and if you are somebody who's already belabored with a lot, it can feel really hard sometimes. When I was moving around, there were some times where I was exhausted emotionally, not just because of my own personal thing but because of going through these landscapes.
No matter what's going on, our personal journeys don't happen in the vacuum, right? So, going through these landscapes and having even eco-memory or eco-story come up from a landscape about what has happened here before and what am I now a part of because I have cued into that or I'm moving through this place. I think actually, part of my negotiation of all this stuff is my writing. That's it. That's part of the way I think through it and feel through it and try to make sense of it. Weaving and trying to pull those threads together and become aware of what is the tapestry that I'm working through or pulling together or weaving in this moment.
RJL: I want to read “American Sycamore” to you and I want you to tell me everything about it. I love this poem so much:
American Sycamore
did they not remember
the smell
of our necks?nor the vibration
of our throats
humming
in the shade?did they not delight
in my sister's
climbing habits,
nor stretch their limbs
to lift her?didn't they
hear us
whisper secret
into peeling trunk,
breath past
into the white
bark beneath?didn't we live
as a forest
& didn't we die
also the same,
our lives
mere material
for an other
living?we ran &
didn't they
camouflage
our brown bodies
with their own?we swung &
didn't they want
to offer us
to god
like the gifts
we were?
Tell me everything.
LW: I've never heard that read back to me. That was really nice. That was really special, thank you. Thank you for reading that to me. I've never heard that read back to me. I love this poem, too.
There's two starts to this poetry collection. The first start was the poem “Seeds from my grandmother's hair”, because that was the poem that I wrote where I was like, "Oh, I think there's a whole series of ongoing poems around this line." And then this poem was the first poem I wrote where I was like, "This is the other major thread." And it is the heart of the book, I would say.
I grew up loving trees. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. The home I grew up in, there was four maple trees outside my window and I loved them. I loved them. I was this very daydreaming kid, so I spent a lot of time gazing out the window and these leaves were there. The trees were there and they gave shade, and I could go up on the roof and just be in the sun-dappledness. They were super soothing. When I woke up in the morning, I loved hearing the rain. So, I loved these trees.
Then I also have this grandfather who also had a very strong relationship with the trees, so he just taught us that. He just brought us into the woods and taught us that these were kind of beings that we were with. I was so in love with trees, and it never occurred to me that trees were not also in love with me. Because I was like, "These maple trees, we spend so much time together. They must love me." That's how it goes, right? It didn’t occur to me for a very, very long time. And then as I grew older, I began encountering a more diverse range of people and I began seeing folks where the natural world and the wilderness was actually a very scary and traumatizing place for them, with very good reason.
There are some folks who were fugitives and maroons and ran into the wilderness. And there are some folks where that was absolutely not a place of safety. I began encountering that which prompted me to look into what's going on. Of course, so many people don't feel comfortable being out in the woods. Of course, it was never a place of safety. I was integrating that story and thinking about the trees that I was in love with and that I was sure were in love with me, and in some moment I was just like, "Wow. What is it like for the trees to know that there are whole groups of people who are uncomfortable because of the role that these trees have played in our history?" I have family from South Carolina. My dad grew up in the South, so I was thinking about launching really specifically around it.
Oftentimes, we are to have a relationship with these beings on the planet that I think are actually like kin because of the way that they were weaponized. This took me into a bigger question of the natural world in general. These trees didn't make themselves weapons to us, right? They were utilized by other human beings to become a sight of unsafety, and death, and violence. How are the trees implicated in that or not? What does it mean with all these layers of dominance that go on in earth's relationships that come through these weapons of dominance and oppression. What does it mean to take something that occurs in the natural world, like an aspect of the earth and turn it into a weapon as their own kin?
That's where “American Sycamore” came from. This question of, “I bet the trees didn't want any part of that, really. I bet they really didn't.”
So, what would the discussion be? What would the dialogue be? I, as somebody who has this history in my lineage of lynching and not feeling comfortable around the sycamore tree had to ask myself what reconciliation would look like in that. What's the conversation there?
RJL: That is wonderful. The question, what would reconciliation look like to be in conversation with figures of earth that have been weaponized? I saw all of this is written within the wonder but also the despair, the recognition of violence and weaponization. And at the same time, childhood delight, right?
And the possibility that even the swinging of language is swung, in play and violence, play and death, life and death. Yeah, it makes perfect sense as the hinge, as the heart of the book. That's why I wanted to know everything.
And then you have in the poem, “Swamp Cypress”, the passage,
"... for the whisper of the land
itself, the swamp's heart
as it is, rhythm by insects &
the murky glass of water smoothed
between fog & shores my daddy fished
when he was still
a son."
That cultivation of patience, and seeing, and waiting. There's such a regard for witnessing the wonders of the world and the time that it takes for wonders to reveal themselves. Not on one's own timetables' like, "Oh, and this is going to happen." But like, "Let me be open to the expansiveness of the sky without a tent and let me witness what happens."
I wonder, rather than the question that I was going to ask, but what advice do you give to someone around how to cultivate that patience, especially within the world we live in, right? With bells and whistles and phones and things. How do you cultivate the patience to wait for the whisper of the land? And why should we?
LW: And why? That's a good question, too. Okay, let me start with the why. Because in some ways I think that's a little bit easier than the how. The why stems from what I was talking about now with what a reconciliation looks like. What does the relationship of reconciliation look like to the earth that we're living on? People can believe me or not; I think it's definitely bound to our collective liberation. If we are trying to not just survive these systems but actually get out of these systems, then we need to come back to ways of being that existed beyond these systems, right? Prior to and be what we go back to and never go back to, not to be totally apocalyptic.
That's the big scope of why. The closer in why is that I have seen access to tremendous peace come to people when they've been able to sit in a park or sit by a stream, tremendous peace that is not connected to any doing. It’s a bit of a meditative practice, for sure. I feel it's a meditative practice that is very expansive, too. Not just about calming and centering, but also opening the gentleness, sweetness. All the things we talk about with reconciliation. That's some of the why. The how is a little bit harder, because material realms and what it takes to implement a practice. I mean, even if you're not going outside and sitting and listening to the earth, but you're just trying to sit down for 15 minutes is difficult, right?
There's logistics and things I think that can help folks around that in terms of setting up a time and going back and revisiting a place, or knowing you can revisit a place in your mind. But I think the thing that's probably most helpful in activating this practice is that you have to let go of what you think you know about time and then you have to reclaim your own knowing of time. This is very Auntie Maxine like, “reclaiming my time.” Which I think is a lot of what we're seeing in social culture right now, too, as the pandemic has been doing its thing. I know in the beginning when people were on lockdown and weren't able to move about as much, the world stopped in some ways. I know a lot of folks were like, "Oh, shit. I can't believe I used to do all of that in a day. That's crazy. How did I do that?"
And now that we're moving into a different phase of how the pandemic is working, I think a lot of people are still in this question of, "Where is time valuable to me? Is it valuable in work? Is it valuable in sleep? Is it valuable in sitting?" And I think it's really, really hard, because this culture does move so fast with so many bells and whistles to remember that that is one layer and one conception of time, that time moves. It gets a little bit into quantum physics, which I've also been reading about in Race and the Cosmos by Barbara Holmes. It's amazing. But if you get into quantum physics, time is actually different for each being. The trees that have been around for 250,000 years, time moves really differently for them.
I actually remember seeing some short animation about these two stones having this conversation. For them, they were just having this conversation real time, but in the background, you could see a civilization rise and fall and then a natural disaster come through. All during this time, these two stones were talking about, "I think I'm growing some moss." Time was moving very differently than we are often even given permission to think about, because we're forced into a place of such urgency. I think the bigger work around coming back to cultivating this patience is really just decolonizing our sense of time or what that means.
RJL: I think that's a great connection to one of the other questions, which was around what does it mean to re-member? Because that language appears within American Sycamore and this connection to decolonizing time, I think is in conversation with that conception. So, what does it mean to re-member?
LW: I can’t even spell re-member without the hyphen any more. To me, it does come back to this decolonizing and re-knowing and reclaiming. That particular way that I started using that phrase comes out of mythology. It actually comes out of the myth of Isis and Osiris, which is in Egyptian mythology. So, various things happened, as happens with deities and gods, and Osiris is torn limb from limb and scattered throughout the whole world. Isis goes very carefully, full of care, and brings back all of his limbs and re-members him, brings him back into wholeness. I think about that in terms of decolonizing but I also think of, specifically in the trauma that happens in decolonizing. This also comes up in some of my healing work, this sense of repairing trauma. One framework of looking at trauma is the part of us that can get away from unsafety will get away. It will try to go and preserve itself somewhere else, maybe a little farther from us.
Part of healing is finding where these losses have happened and finding where they might be scattered about in the ethers or in memory or deep in the body or deep in the ancestral line, and calling them back into the present. That's how I think about re-membering. What was my original knowledge about this? Beyond what I've been schooled or the education system told me, what's the original knowledge that I had? What's the knowledge that came through my DNA or through my ancestry? Or comes from, again, the earth itself? How do I call them back and pull them in and attach it to my system?
RJL: I'll offer you this story around re-membering, especially in relation to what you just shared around calling back. And I love it, the connection to Isis and Osiris, and I think of Toni Morrison also thinking about how the river remembers its pathway and the sight of memory. It floods but the river remembers where it's supposed to go, right? People try to put up these dams, the river remembers. And I do a lot of ancestral work and I recently learned about one of my great grands. I knew Harry Logan who was notorious as a blacksmith. I had never heard the story and all of the pictures of him have him wearing this kind of cowboy-ish typical hat.
But when you find him in the records, he's listed with... I don't know, something like eight, 10 children. They all have different last names in the first census, the 1870 census, that tracks people's names right after the end of the Civil War.
And it's clear that his children had been separated, that the family had been separated, but he brought them back. This re-membering of kin all together, and they're all listed as daughter and son and so on within the census. I had not heard another part of this story which was that I knew that he had been a founding member of this church, a hush arbor Church, and had got the land from the people who had kept him in as kin, my kin, and bonded right in slavery. I had heard the story that somewhere, he had tried to escape. And when he was found—he was a blacksmith, probably the only one in the county, so very valuable for that skill—and to ensure that he would not leave again, they amputated an arm.
I hadn't heard this story before. I was down in South Carolina a few weeks ago and heard this story from one of my extended cousins. I went to the funeral home expecting obituaries but it ended up that the funeral director, a cousin many times removed, ended up calling everybody we were ever related to and this story came up.
But I think about this man who has brutally changed and survived, and with his skill was able to bring back his family to buy the land ultimately from the son of the person who would have done this horrible thing to him. In many ways, in body and in family, to ensure that he would never run again. And then created a church, created a space.
I've been to that church. I've seen where he's buried and seen many of his kin buried next to him. And there are many graves of folks from that period, from the 1800s and beyond, Black communities that are now derelict or are not taken care of. But with regard to that space, everything is well-manicured, very well taken care of. And it's a small church and yet the gravestones are pristine. Pristine. And that idea of re-membering the memory and as you spoke to bringing together Isis and Osiris, it strikes a chord with me. So, I offer this story.
LW: Oh my God. Thank you for sharing that. I just have goosebumps several times as you talk about that. I'm always like, "Man, humans are so just capable of magic." To me, that's magic. Not in terms of a whimsical thing but a deep potency and a deep efficacy. That's beautiful. That's just beautiful. Thank you.
RJL: And the last question I'll ask you, there's a poem where you write, "Never was I speaking to the dead but naming those who lived." And I love that idea throughout American Sycamore of this intuitive connectedness to ancestors as stone ancestors, as those in memory ancestors, as those walking as vitally around us as anyone else in the spirit of breath. Why is that distinction of naming those who lived rather than speaking to the dead? Why was that important within your poem?
LW: One: I think mostly for all the reasons that you just said, right? I mean, we've lived in this dominant culture that's been going on for a long time that would really have us believe that things die. That they are dead, which is not untrue. Things pass. But again, if you get into quantum physics and spirituality they just shift form. And most of us, again, as people of diasporas and people of the global majority have lived longer in systems and cultures where it was, that kind of death was a transition. It was just a movement into a different state, and I think it's been important for these caste systems to call the dead, dead, because if something is dead, then we don't want to pull it back. We don't want to re-member it. We don't want to pull it back close to us.
We don't want to summon the energies of all that's possible around us if it's dead and decaying and not useful, or if it doesn't exist anymore at all, right? The sense of wiping memory comes to me when I think about naming something dead. If there's no remembering, there's no bringing back together. That distinction is important for me and also in this collection because what am I calling to? What am I calling back, and what's the response? Why am I engaging in that unless there are things that are continuing on and then allowing myself to be a part of that, too? I think that's the future trajectory there is, that I am also a being who is responsive and will continue to be responsive in that way unless I let death happen beyond that transformational gathering.
RJL: Thinking about all of these lessons, right? Pulling these different themes of mother and child, and refugee and refuge, and element and myth, and multiplicities and the divine, and remembering and memory and grieving. And we've got the scholarly framing, origins, song, and sanctuary. There's so much that's vitally alive within the thematic threads of American Sycamore. What is your hope for the experience of the reader, the life of the book beyond you? What is your hope for American Sycamore?
LW: Yes, my ecowomanist mythopoetical manifesto. My hope is that folks read it and some part of it feels like medicine. Really, that some part of it feels like a medicine. And maybe it's not all of those threads, maybe it's just one thing, maybe it's just one, "Okay, I feel like I want to talk to this ancestor who I haven't thought of before." Or, "Maybe I feel like I want to go buy a tree." Just some kind of medicine, whatever that means. And medicine is different for everybody, right? Some medicine is soothing and some medicine is purging. But that there's some medicine in it, for it.