Modern science fiction by African-American authors show an imagined, vitalized Earth that thoroughly disrupts colonial narratives.
In my early encounters with water, I met it as it is: living and pulsing, playful, moving in ancient patterns, shaping itself with and against its containers, flooding, pushing, and holding. Water had its own sensations and textures. It had its own personalities and ways of relating to the world. I would meet one lake which was reserved, folding in on itself, and another mischievous, always splashing at its shorelines, overflowing. In dominant Western narratives, these knowledges are rendered myth. Always, some greater, objective science prevails: the water moves like this because of these molecules, the lake takes this shape because of this geologic shift, and so on. The lake becomes a material object, which of course can be sold and bought, poisoned for some greater good, and stolen from.
This is an effort of the colonial project, which validates, naturalizes, and insists upon itself through the creation and maintenance of an Earth-wide illusion that implicates the violation of human bodies, more-than-human kin, and land. Settler colonialism and imperialism imagine that these violations and extractions are inherent, a perspective that is reliant on the belief that land is unliving. An unliving Earth is passive and inert, can be acted upon, but cannot act itself. This illusion also allows for colonial infrastructures to position themselves as an eternal status quo. A stone building built by settlers, for example, seems to have been there since the start of time. Dominant colonial narratives ignore previous materialities and create “mytholog[ies] of disassociation” from livingness and livelihoods that have inhabited land and space for eternity. When the Earth is unliving and passive, coloniality can dissociate itself from its histories of theft, extraction, and violation, while imagining itself as an inevitable material condition. The systemic subjugation of Black, Indigenous, and Brown bodies is inscribed into the illusion that organizes matter in the categories of human and resource.
The unliving Earth is the spine of the settler colonial narrative and its afterlives. The illusion assumes a life that engulfs our relationship towards land, the self, and others. It crafts an alternative reality that imagines the world as we know it deriving from nothing and coming from nowhere. That house has always been there. The stones used to build our cement sidewalks are little more than resources. Their millennia of lived experience are rendered hollow.
In the face of this prevailing narrative, how do land and our more-than-human kin articulate themselves? How do these articulations unsettle and disturb the illusion? What methods can we use to tune into these articulations and languages of being when colonial forces have spent centuries conditioning our ears against such listening? In imagining and crafting future worlds, what happens when we remember and reassert the Earth as a living and breathing being with its own particular way of being and knowing?
Science and speculative fiction authors have long worked with these questions. In author N.K. Jemisin’s /Broken Earth Trilogy/, Father Earth is a living and sentient character with his own histories and motivations. He articulates his grief and anger at the forceful alterations of his body through fifth seasons: massive world-altering geological events. Jemisin and Father Earth reimagine climate collapse as a lived and embodied dialogue rather than a change in material conditions. Father Earth possesses agency through feeling the pain of extraction, dispossession, and violation in his body, and by grieving the pain of other Earth-beings.
The fantasy of an unliving Earth cannot contain these articulations of livingness, but the delusion is vast and overwhelming. How do we listen to a living Earth in the mirror-maze of colonial delusions and constructions? I work with a lineage of thinkers employing the metaphor-turned-practice of tuning into a different frequency. Our Earth, like Father Earth, has its own particular way of knowing and being, as do rivers, stones, trees, and animal-kin. Each has their own ancient knowledge systems and methodologies, which we are incapable of understanding. Perhaps dismantling the colonial illusion begins with listening for the senses and textures of these knowledge systems. Scholar Natalie Diaz imagines this through a snake, who communicates with its kin by feeling their movement on the land, much like how the vibrations of a moving body works with and changes its environment. River, the veins of the Earth, work “in rush, flow, and current; in hold or carry; crystallizing; vaporing.”
That we speak and exist differently does not implicate Earth-beings’ sentience and sensations as absent or unliving. The snake, the river, and the Earth are always speaking in their own languages. I imagine a future that extends love to these languages and encourages listening for their frequencies. I remember that our bodies are sedimented and layered the same way that the Earth is. I remember that our bodies are full of water the same way the Earth is. The Earth is a relative that holds the long memory of the textures of livingness of its water, rock, plant, and animal-kin. In this overwhelming sensation and texture of remembrance, a crack in the illusion, I wonder: what are our responsibilities and accountabilities to a living Earth? How do we greet the Earth as kin? This is a relationship that we are responsible for stewarding with love and reciprocity. In the dreamworld of coloniality, we must work with Earth and our Earth-kin as collaborators as we tune into alternative, Other frequencies of knowing and being.