I feel the need to start this article by laying my cards on the table, so we are all clear about how I show up in this conversation about the natural (as opposed to built) environment: I have often struggled to relate to it. I don’t have a green thumb, or at least none that I have discovered yet. Keeping my indoor plants alive has been an ongoing struggle! And the outside plants? In the off chance that I do decide to plant, which I did try to do for several years, my yields are few and far between. I sometimes forget to water. And rather than doing the necessary research to understand what things can actually grow in my environment, I have often just dived right in to see what works. I do recycle—hey, at least there’s that—and don’t litter, and try to be mindful about my carbon footprint. Honestly, there’s not much more than that.

I say all of this to say that when I was initially asked to give a talk for EnviroThursdays, I hesitated. I wondered what I could share from a place of authenticity and honesty, given that my relationship with the environment—in my opinion—was less than perfect. I accepted because, even though I have struggled here, I come from a long line of people, people of African descent whose relationship with the environment was totally different than mine, and I knew that if I looked hard enough, I would emerge through their stories. I wanted to (re)member their legacies, specifically those of Black women, from a place of spirituality and an African way of knowing- things that are not often associated with the environment in the context that we live in.

Committed to the scholarship of Dr. Cynthia Dillard and her framework of Endarkened Feminist Epistemology (2006, 2016, 2022), which articulates “how reality is known when based in the historical roots of Black feminist thought” (2006, p. 3), (re)membering was so critical to me because it has given me the ability to (re)claim the pieces of myself that had been trained away from knowledge (Dillard, 2012) of the natural world as a result of institutionalization within academia and the Church. It was a process—no, a praxis—of literally putting myself back together – re + member. In embracing the act of (re)membering, I was turning to a practice routinely taken up by Black women of marshaling “the legacy of Black people in relation to our spirits, and those (re)memberings have required us to lean on the ‘substance of things unseen’ – on our spirituality” (Dillard, 2022, p. 2). The spiritual life, which includes our spiritual consciousness, sacred practice, and creativity, is what sustains “culturally relevant sustaining practices in educational spaces with Black students” (p. 3) and others from marginalized backgrounds.

Understanding the legacy that I was building on with my utilization of EFE and (re)membering as it pertained to the environment, I approached my process in three ways. (1) I started off with an initial inquiry in which I explored at a deeper level my own relationship to the environment through reflection and self-study; (2) I reflected on my travels to Ghana in 2019 and what they taught me about (re)membering our connection to the environment as African descendent peoples; and (3) I re-read a few texts by womanist and Black feminist scholars that also aided in the (re)membering process. 

I. My own inquiry
I started this process with my own inquiry, asking myself how I related to the environment. I did this through journaling over a period of months, realizing that in some ways I have felt betrayed by the environment as a Black woman because of the ways that we, as Black people, have been forced to produce from it (slavery, sharecropping) and have subsequently been punished by it in ways that it did not seem other communities were (Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti in 2009 to name just a few examples). My second journal entry, on January 19, 2023 went like this:

Naming this specific journaling experience is critical because it reflects the larger self-study that I have been engaging over a period of years, focused on the ancient narrative of Eve, in trying to make sense of the ways Black women’s bodies have been so disregarded and abused in our context. For me, Eve is a representation of that fragmentation that we as Black women experience because of the ways that we, like Eve, have been blamed for the oppression that we have endured. In this narrative of Eve, being told that the reason for her labor pains, tensions with her husband and his inability to work the soil, and the now disunity between her and the snake—a representation of creation—I see fragmentation take place not only within herself, but between herself and the environment, as the fragmentation within herself is ultimately a fragmentation with the environment. They are inseparable. On so many levels, I realized that I internalized that same fragmentation.

Using Eve as a proxy for myself in studying the environment, I realized the root of my disconnection and why I struggled to connect with something that was so natural: I was struggling to connect with my own self, which kept me from connecting to the environment as well as engaging in other somatic practices that would help me connect with and stay within my body. Through self-study and reflection, I had to come back to a place where I could love and accept myself, in the ways that Toni Morrison speaks about in Beloved—“in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.” I had to love myself, and believe my truth, as well as the truth of other Black women like me who had lived with a sense of fragmentation and betrayal. This led to a dialogue with my mother on February 7th, who is now living with Dementia. I realized that her connecting to the environment was one of the ways that she addressed the fragmentation in her own life. She stated,

As I look back over the life that I have had with my mother, I believe that it is the gardening—the environment—that allowed her to heal the brokenness within herself. It is only within the last 10 years, with decreasing access to the land as she sold the home that my sister and I spent our teenage years in, and having moved into an apartment, that I have seen my mother’s mental and physical health deteriorate. Through the reflection, which inevitably prompted me to interview her, I was beginning to (re)member.

II. Ghana 2019: Year of Return

The more I engaged in my initial inquiry about my connection to the environment, the more I (re)membered the ways that I have been connected to it. One of those ways was for me going to Ghana in 2019 for the “Year of Return” with a group of about 10 people. I am forever appreciative of the experience because it gave me the opportunity to re-engage with a piece of myself that I was seduced to forget (Dillard, 2012) as a result of the Maafa, or forced enslavement of African peoples.

Thinking about Ghana, I (re)membered the text that I produced as a result of my going. Incomplete Stories: On Loss, Love, and Hope (2021, Aya Media and Publishing, LLC), details my experience in this country known for the slave trade. Visiting the slave dungeons, as well as the Assin River—where our ancestors took their last baths prior to being sold—was of particular importance. In addition to these sites, however, reconnecting with the land that my people had been ripped away from was a critical healing moment for me. I (re)member standing on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, marveling at its sheer beauty while at the same time, praying to our ancestors who had come from this place. These ancestors not only felt a connection to the land and the water; in many ways they were inseparable from it. I reflected,

In going to Ghana, I began to crave the unity, the oneness that they enjoyed with the environment that we lost through the brutality of slavery where our resourcefulness was used against us. We were forced to use the environment to work and produce at the ultimate level, but no longer able to access it from a space of spirituality and knowing. From the time that we were enslaved and forced to work stolen land across the Americas, we were seduced to forget our own creation narratives grounded in our ancestral cultures under the penalty of violence should we resist, and instead, forced to adopt Christian beliefs and practices. At the center of these beliefs is the creation story which again paints Eve as to blame for the misfortune that women experience. In centering her story, we were thus taught, over the span of generation, why we could no longer trust the environment as a source of renewal and practice of spirituality.

In order to heal, I understood, we needed to connect back to this land from which our ancestors were taken, if not physically, in our hearts and minds through ritual and ceremony. Standing on the shores of the Atlantic as the waves washed over my feet, singing songs to ancestors who may have stood in that very same space centuries before, I began to understand. Being in that space and time in 2019, during the Year of Return, was not only an act of (re)claimation of my humanity, my existence, and the existence of my people; it was an act of (re)membering that long before the intrusion of the slave trade, we were. We lived, we thrived, and we existed on land where we were free to practice our spirituality and sacred rituals.

Coming home from that experience, I entered into the church that I was attending at the time. Called on to lead the congregation in worship, I (re)member going to a song by India.Arie that has since held so much meaning. I lead the congregation in the following refrain:

The song that morning wasn’t for the congregation. It was for me. I could not forget what I experienced during those brief days in Ghana, I committed to forever (re)member the meaning of the moments on that land that held me and allowed me to bring myself back together. And in (re)membering, I felt displaced. Uncomfortable. I could no longer be in environments where the sacredness of our history was not honored, or places where, in order to exist, I had to take up sacred narratives that did not belong to me. In coming back home, I began the excruciating process of sitting those down. Again, I was (re)membering. And it was all because of me going back to the land from which my ancestors were ripped and walking back through the door of no return, letting my people know that I survived. And I made it back home.

III. Sacred Texts

In the religious tradition that I practiced for nearly 30 years, I learned to believe that the Bible was paramount. It was considered the word of God, incapable of error or wrongdoing, incapable of any fault. However, over the years, I began the process of backing away from that line of thinking, revering the Bible as one of many sacred texts useful for reflection. I did this because the more and more I studied the biblical text, the less and less I saw myself. I began the practice of writing into the text, stories where I could correct this. This is what gave way to the short story at the end of my book, The Gospel According to a Black Woman, called “Forgetting Sodom,” where I rewrote the wretched story of Sodom and Gomorrah. This is also what has undergirded my self-study on Eve over the years, going back and through her narrative, and the narratives of other women like her in the biblical text to better understand who they were.

As I did this, I also religiously took up the work of Black feminist and womanist scholars, thinkers, lyricists, eracists, theologians, who I felt were passing on divine knowledge that I, as a Black woman, could see myself in. I was naturally drawn to folks like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and bell hooks, Black women who everyone know and love. But I was also greatly inspired by Renita Weems, a womanist theologian who in many ways helped me began to see the patterns of abuse and misogyny that are so present in the biblical text, which has helped me to contextualize Eve in a different light. So when I took up the task of turning to sacred texts for understanding my relationship to the environment, I naturally went to the Black women who I already knew were writing about these things. 

One of those women was Melanie Harris. I specifically engaged her work on “Ecowomanism” (2016), which highlights the “necessity for race-class-gender intersectional analysis when examining the logic of domination, and unjust public policies that result in environmental health disparities that historically disadvantage communities of color” (5). This piece was important for me, because in speaking about the environment, Harris not only centers Black women’s ways of knowing, but suggests that earth justice has always been a part of who we are. Based on the knowledge that we have long embodied a commitment to the earth, Harris argues that Ecowomanism helps us to resituate that commitment, interrogating the “structural evils that African American women have historically faced” (6), evils that have argubly separated us from the environment. She likewise grounds our commitment to the earth and environment in a deep-seated spiritual consciousness, stating that among Black women, there is a “deep value of the earth as sacred,” (6) and that our bodies are connected to the earth, and thus that sacredness. 

I appreciate Harris’s reading because she helps us as Black women to (re)member that connection to the environment is part and parcel to who we are. It is not out of reach, but deep within us. Fleda Mask Jackson’s (2001) essay “In the morning, when I rise: My hands in spiritual soil” in many ways, builds off of Harris’s work helping us to collectively (re)member how our ancestors engaged with the environment.

Jackson (re)minds us of the ways that our African ancestors, who founded civilizations and created temples of thought, knew how to not only exist within the natural environment, but knew how to be in harmony with it. Lakeesha Harris (2017), in her essay “healing through (re)membering and (re)claiming ancestral knowledge about Black witch magic” goes one step further and shows us that not only did our ancestors know how to live in harmony with the environment, but also drew their sense of spirituality and their ways of navigating the world from it. She teaches us that though these ways of knowing were forbidden in the name of dominant religious practices, that many of our ancestors did not abandon these sacred practices. Instead, they integrated them within dominant frameworks, including Christianity. This enabled them to hold onto a degree of this ancestral wisdom and practice, even as they professed a nonthreatening faith practice in the eyes of dominant culture. Harris reflects on the experience of her mother who concocted potions consisting of herbs, berries, and rum to heal a variety of sicknesses based on what she saw her own mother do. Harris also details her aunt Joyce’s experience, someone who she regarded as a root worker and agriculturalist, who through the use of Black witch magic was able to keep herself “sane and whole” in the midst of an abusive situation.

Reflecting on these texts brought me back to my own mother, and how she instinctively knew how to heal herself through gardening. It is only now that I can understand that what she did was a healing practice and allowed her to stay sane for so long. It is only now that I understand that her ability to be present was so deeply tied to being able to be in the soil in the warmth of the sun. And it is only now that I understand that in order for me to be well, I must do the same. In doing the same, I (re)claim my own magic, and (re)member myself in the space of internalizing texts that assisted in fragmenting my being. I no longer have to be cut off from my being, I no longer have to be cut off from the earth; I, like other Black women, can begin the process of (re)membering ourselves whole (Dillard, 2022), and no longer define ourselves in the misappropriation of Eve’s personhood.

***

It was in interfacing these three components—the self-study, traveling to Ghana, and reading key texts—that I realized that my disconnection with the environment was also a reflection of how much I had been fragmented from my own self. When this dawned on me in the course of study, I almost felt like weeping because I understood in greater measure the totality of what had happened to me and my people—but I also felt like a great weight had been lifted. It was only in the process of (re)membering that this could have happened.

I thank my mother. I thank my ancestors. I thank the land for helping me to get there in participating with me in the journey back to myself, back to (re)membering that my people have always had this connection to the earth. I will hold on to this, and use this knowledge of self from which to strengthen my own relationship to it.

I am forever and eternally grateful. 

References:
Adedayo, E.J. (2020). The gospel according to a Black woman. Aya Media and Publishing, LLC.

Adedayo, E.J. (2021). Incomplete stories: On loss, love, and hope. Aya Media and Publishing, LLC.
* This text will be re-releasing in August 2023 under Aya, instead of Adedayo. Please look for it at ayamediapublishingllc.com.

Dillard, C.B. (2006). On spiritual strivings: Transforming an African American woman's academic life. State University of New York Press.

Dillard, C.B. (2012). Learning to (re)member the things I learned to forget: Endarkened feminisms, spirituality, and the sacred nature of research and teaching. Peter Lang

Dillard, C.B. (2021). The Spirit of our work: Black women teachers remember. Beacon Press. 

Harris, L.I. (2018). Healing through (re)membering and (re)claiming ancestral knowledge about Black witch magic. In O.N, Perlow, D.I Wheeler, S.L, Bethea, B.M. Scott (Eds). Black women’s liberatory pedagogies: Resistance, transformation, and healing within and beyond the academy, pp. 245 - 263. Palgrave MacMillan.

Harris, M. L. (2016). Ecowomanism. Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture & Ecology, 20(1), 5–14. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26552243

In our mothers’ gardens. Directed by Shantrelle P. Lewis, produced by Shantrelle P. Lewis and JaSaun Buckner. House of the Seven Sisters, 2021. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/title/81354661

Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Alfred A. Knoff.

Jackson, F.M. (2001). “In the morning when I rise”: My hands in spiritual soil. In G. Wade-Gayles (ed). My soul is a witness: African American women’s spirituality, pp 48 - 54. Beacon Press