Keynote Address
Global Atlantic Fellows Annual Convening, Rhodes House, Oxford, July 2024
Durkhanai Ayubi, Atlantic Fellow for Social Equity
Thank you to the Atlantic Institute for the invitation to share something with you, and for all the care and emotion you have gifted to us in creating this space for us all.
I begin with acknowledging each of you, the depth of the stories you carry and the ways in which you have shone a light on the dark corners of these corridors with the melodious reverberations of your guttural truths. I acknowledge the ancestors and descendants you hold within you at this moment, and I acknowledge my own. I live today on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people in Australia, and I acknowledge them too. The land they stewarded and cared for in a continued cultural relationship that spans over 65,000 years in the lifegiving land that embraced me and my family as we departed our own ancestral lands of Afghanistan in search of refuge amidst war. And I acknowledge the open wounds of Palestine; it is not possible to soothe wounds still open and gushing, nor would I try. At the very least, I seek to name the depth of the grievances and the senselessness of the suffering being unleashed by racialised state systems that violate the very sanctity of life.
It feels to me as though we are all in a collective moment of overwhelming suffering. We sense it in the heard but ignored cries of despair, in the stifle of the air, in the chaos of the climate, in the rise of strong-arm populism and the seeming impotence of institutions meant to respond, in the lack of recourse despite the unprecedented awareness of injustice, in the waves of helplessness that gnaw at our spirits. To stand before you today against the threat of this kind of high tide, it felt difficult to conceptualise what might be worth saying.
Then, I was reminded of what perhaps brings each of us into this room, into these high-walled halls, with all the pains they may raise. Amidst our many differences, there is also a profound commonality that binds us: each of us in our own way and for our reasons, each of us refuses to turn our back on the imposed indignities to life and the curbed possibilities that fray at the edges, and sometimes cut through the heart of the people and communities we love and serve. Each of us, no matter how imperfect, has turned our attention to being a bulwark against the desert of indifference, and in a world full of loud and brazen injustice, this really matters.
This remembrance led me to a small kernel within me that informs what I share with you in this moment we have together. It led me to ask, “What’s in a seed?” When everything that blazes around us does so with an ostentatiousness, with an encouraged artificiality, bent on the mirage of control, when the monolithic riptide within which we are all caught drags us away on its undercurrent of rampant loss: loss of diversity, of lives, of species, of knowledges, of tangible connections. At this moment in which we find ourselves, it felt most right to me simply to ask, amidst this cacophony, “What whispers emerge from the quiet?”
The quietude within me carries me to my seat at the kitchen table of my childhood and to the deepening connection to my ancestral foods that was unfolding around it. It was my lifeline amidst the loss that shapes the refugee experience that led me to an excavation of myself, to a slow conscientisation of the root distortions in collective narratives that generate skewed and disproportionate suffering for some while absolving others. It led me to unearth the eclipsed abundance of my homeland. The quietude within me led me to a scent of the retrieval of buried liberations embedded in my ancestral ways, that sidestep the obnoxious materialist incursions that permeate our world, through a remembrance of our very nature; a quietude that perhaps holds reflections too for us as a global community with an ethos of global solidarity at our core.
When a land like my ancestral lands is exposed to long campaigns designed to scramble our nature and subject us to the horrors of war and its dispossessions, there are many violations and resulting needs that arise. For Afghanistan, one of the most pernicious impacts of decades of war has been our scattering all over the world, where we are suspended in liminal and unfinished spaces of emotion, time and memory. But most of all, I have realised our corrosions arise and perpetuate according to a mass erasure: of ourselves from our own self-understanding; from the vastness, beauty and depth of our knowledge and our histories; from our ancestors’ dreams.
Through decades of war and the impositions on our collective psyche, not just ours but the entire world’s, we have been induced into a mass forgetting. There is so much work to do and not many tangible scaffolds to hold onto as we do it because it has all been ruptured. With the current patriarchal extremist regime, the barriers have only been amplified. Amidst all this, I thought about how I respond to the call of this moment with the most potency.
By the nature of the trajectory of my life, heeding the call from deep within me has emerged through writing and food. Writing because the literature, the zeitgeist and even the most progressive of discussions represent us and speak over us, constructing in paternalistic ways how we might be, with time and billions of American dollars, aided from out of our uncivilised and impoverished postures. Writing because I’ve often wondered if I can’t find traces of myself in all that was gesticulated about me, how will the future generations of Afghan children, subjected now to even more layers of horror, find and see themselves. How will they dream if there is no-one gazing towards them with tenderness from their past? And food because I’ve understood that I can best be in service by thoroughly immersing myself in the life-affirming role of my ancestral foods. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to pair my two loves, writing and food, to reach for something beyond the narrow confines we’ve been trapped within, towards the more that I believe is possible.
Today, the focus of what I want to share with you is the power of food in my life. Food is many things: from a primary sustenance that fuels our organic bodies to a broader proxy for culture. Encoded within it and its surrounding rituals are expressions of the histories, people and geographies of our landscapes. So precisely because of how essential food is to our very existence, its disruption is a major but often under-acknowledged weapon of war, designed to break a population. Its absence can mean immediate starvation, malnutrition, depopulation and destruction of the land, through to the longer-term ruptures of loss of cultural knowledge and the introduction of ongoing dependencies on the oppressive generosity of aid systems. In my lifetime alone, all these things have happened in Afghanistan, and we, of course, see them happening now in Palestine and other parts of the world.
When my family abruptly left Afghanistan in 1985, the same year I was born, it was at the height of the Cold War — a battle between the U.S. and the then Soviet Union for global dominance that was playing out on Afghan soil and many other countries worldwide. For us in Afghanistan, it was an era that saw the killing of millions and made refugees of over half our population. This led to the creation of extremist ideologies that were then propped up and funded by the competing superpowers, in ways that suited their objectives, with impositions that cling to us to this day.
One of the percolating erasures in the refugee trajectory is a severance from ancestry. I never met my ancestors; in fact, through the heartbreaks of war, many of them died well before their time. My maternal grandmother, Bibi Hamida, died at 39, the same age I am now, leaving behind my mother as a five year old and her four young siblings. In the late 1980s, my uncle, Majroh, was killed on the eve of his 60th birthday. His death is widely thought to have been the work of intelligence agents supported by the American CIA. There are too many more examples of such losses.
In Australia, through my coming of age, these early disruptions were compounded by what was being normalised about my “Afghanness” by the outside world, in a devastating Global War on Terrorism that began in 2001. The norms designed to justify the invasion of Afghanistan included dehumanising images of us as either savages that need taming, or hapless victims that need saving by the civilised world. On the eve of the invasion, former U.S. President George W. Bush declared, “Today Afghan women are free”. We drowned in a representation of us made to focus primarily on our worthlessness and render us bystanders in our own lives, which began as a narrative and resulted in our real-world eradication. I can assure you, after all these years and the many people dead and displaced later, a feminist utopia has never emerged.
I’m sure the crux of these narratives rings with painful familiarity for many of us in this room. They are not new, and they ricocheted in the ears of our ancestors too. The long labour of European imperialism over the past half millennium birthed the fatal entwinement of capitalism and colonialism, and its ruptures continue to this day. Central to its justification of the mass violence and the exploitation of the planet and bodies in order to redirect resources and enrich a shrinking few, was the creation of a dominant narrative that elevated the knowledge and ways of some while also silencing and obliterating that of others. Most devastatingly, normalising the extraction and exploitations required a breaking and false remaking of the collective consciousness. It relied upon making us strangers to and masters over the nature we have always been part of, creating racialised hierarchies of worth, fragmenting us into artificial silos and disconnecting us from ourselves.
These separations are now entrenched as given in the roots of the systems and structures that regulate our lives, often in invisibilised ways that have managed to transform the violence so it appears as noble — from the concept of the modern nation state that was co-constituted with colonialism; to our very notion of human rights that emerge from Eurocentric ideas of both what it is to be human and what rights are; to normalising the suffering of Black and Brown bodies as inevitable, and making our movement unnatural and a crime; to creating a Eurocentric concept of progress and modernity cleaved from the accrued wealth of colonisation that enriched it into being; to undermining and then appropriating our knowledges; to measuring, schematising, labelling and ordering in the blind pursuit of yield and unmitigated growth; to irrational ideas of rationality that cleave us from the natural cycles of life death rebirth we are; and, importantly for us as Fellows in spaces of social justice work, to capturing and corrupting the vista of even our solutions.
Even after the dismantling of the British Empire after World War Two, these narratives have never been reckoned with. The mantle has been passed on by the British to the U.S., which capitalises on weaponisation and militarisation within its own borders, and of course across the world. Its military “power” is amplified further by technology designed to surveil, enrage and fragment us in increasingly non-transparent ways. Today these narratives seem to have approached the limits of their logical conclusions of destruction, no longer aimed only at those it originally sought to shatter but dragging at the ankles of the entire world.
My diasporic life, born in Afghanistan and growing up in Australia, was an acute conscientisation of the existence of these fabricated hierarchies and their consequences. My lens was developing across the abyss it created — and I saw a gulf seeping in and distorting even our own image of ourselves. It was by entering the mouth of these imposed absences that I retrieved my greatest gifts.
From those early days of our exile amidst the disorientations of loss, around our scuffed kitchen table at home, food was etching the traces of shifted possibilities for my future self to find. In ways and exchanges that felt incongruent with the image of infertile silence that was being socialised about us, food was slowly ebbing me to the depth and expanse of the obscured shores of my inherited abundance.
Though we had left behind much else, my mother had carried with her a sense of home in the flavours, rituals, knowledge of and love for food that she had experienced since she was a child. She would always tell us that Afghan food was a treasure and something to pass on to us, for us to hold on to, to cherish and share. Precisely because of its evocative power, food took on great poignancy in our displaced lives. For my parents’ generation, who were adults at the time of their leaving, it was a direct and emotional link to the weight of their lived memories — reminding them of times when they had complete extended families and were in deep symbiosis with the terrain of their ancestors. For us as children, food was a fragile tether that could link us to a lived practice of an otherwise non-existent connection to our homeland.
In those early years, I listened (admittedly a little disbelievingly) to my parents wistfully lamenting the lost sights and tastes of Afghanistan: their memories of life amidst awe-inspiring, snow-capped peaks, with mineral-rich, glacial snowmelts that created rivulets of pristine brooks that irrigated the land; of pomegranates so large you needed both hands to hold them; of grapes of rainbow hues, luscious and sweet; of wheat dense
with nutrition and flavour; of the delicate native citrus narenj whose blossoms would fill the air far and wide with its complex and bittersweet perfume.
My four sisters and I, all under the age of ten when we first departed, would gather around my mother, jostling for the most sought-after jobs in the preparation of our meals — sometimes just for us, other times for special occasions or larger community gatherings known as mehmanis. As we folded intricate mantu dumplings, kneaded dough for our morning naan, stirred oversized pots on our tiptoes, filled and pan-fried our favourite stuffed flat bread bolanis — though I didn’t know it at the time — my fingers were creasing and folding in the same patterns as the ancestors I never knew, the aromas filling our home the same as those that filled the kitchens of my foremothers, subconsciously drawing on latent memories of joys and sorrows, on generosities and invitations through time.
Ultimately then, food enabled me to step into layers of excisions, with the talisman of tenderness. Without consciously directing it, food became a deeper and increasingly revelatory part of my life. Food was not a proclamation of answers, but rather a realisation that first, I reject the very terms of the questions that have been set for us. I rejected being forced to respond to systems that don’t actually want to listen, that position us into existing in the cutaneous superficiality of its realm, that arrange us into an exhaustive depletion of our energy and our bodies and our minds according to its destructions, that extend only false generosities. Such “generosities” come at the expense of the vastness of our aura, at the expense of reconnecting to and elevating the deeper knowledge that has always been held within us, at the expense of the beauty we need to cultivate to bring our potency and transformations into full bloom.
My experience of my Afghanness through food helped me conscientise that my duty is not to respond to the intentional distortions laid out for me, but to shift the very nature of the questions — to generate my own sentiments, by reaching in, scooping up from the millennia a deep terrain of rich soil that is our past, the possibilities that have always been ours. In this retrieval, food, like the diversity of life and copiousness it mirrored, was my language of reimagining.
On its own march, my immersion in food spilled from inside our home to the outside world as a broader offering to the community we lived in. We established my family’s restaurant, named “Parwana”, which translated into one of my native languages, Dari, means “butterfly”. The restaurant has mosaic and terrazzo floors, vibrant pink and teal-coloured textured walls, and black and white family photos pinned throughout. Here, I watch marvel flicker across people’s faces with each bite — the rich flavours and abundance, the natural call to gathering, incompatible with the image of the wasteland they have internalised. Around this table, the first stitch of ingrained biases is subconsciously unpicked. Soon I would write a cookbook sharing my mother’s ancestral recipes — a collation and repository of cultural knowledge seeking to remedy, in some way, the intrusive impacts of repeated disruptions to the continuity of Afghan lives.
With a commitment to using our own primary sources that see through our own eyes to better contextualise our present, while writing through the long cycles of life inherent in food, I could burst us out of the confines we’d been imprisoned within, into our own sweeping histories and ways. My life in food was allowing me to excavate my own concept of myself while offering an entry point to Afghanistan otherwise largely absent to the public. The bridge that food built across the fabricated binaries in my world created a deepening reciprocity amongst my community that we have often called upon to autonomously raise and deliver funds when people in Afghanistan have been made hungry and denied their sustenance.
On my writing journey, as my research deepened, I encountered the countless underrepresented works and intellectual efforts of Afghanistan’s own — they held deep narratives of resistance that were steeped in the language of self-determination, that waxed lyrical and were moved by the land’s bounties, and conjured ideas of freedom as vast and as epic as our mountainous terrain.
Amongst this treasure trove, I found and translated my Uncle Majroh’s works. Immersing myself in my ancestor’s writings, they began to visit me in my dreamscapes; my teachers were their ghosts. His incredible epic prose and treaty on the human condition, “Ego Monster”, was written through the unrest of the 1970s and ‘80s. It challenges the emerging extremism and its materialist drivers of ego and a thirst for power in Afghanistan and it foresaw, in eerily prophetic and prescient ways, the damage such drivers would inflict. In the prose, a voyager tries to warn of the impending catastrophe of the ego monster now at the helm of once vibrant lands, lands that once danced, adorned in the green tunic of spring. The voyager pleads with the inhabitants to resist the lure of the ego monster — and its corruption of spirit that was readying them for voluntary sacrifice. My uncle Majroh was murdered on the eve of his 60th birthday because of his lucidity and his language of love as he saw the necrophillic emerging forces, who despite their ostentatious displays of outward strength had only rot and fear at their core.
What such fearful and narrowing ways have obscured for most, is that our lands sitting at the centre of the Eurasian landmass have for most of their expansive history been a heartland of profuse diversity and exchange. Over millennia they have seen many types of belief systems, starting with an Indigenous Afghan identity that has been completely erased from our self-understanding — a people steeped in fierceness but also fairies. Peristan is a millennia-old culture in the mountains of Afghanistan where one of the oldest wine-cultures in the world flourishes. Their wine is pressed from ancient wild vines, Vitis nuristanica, by people steeped in understanding their world according to the fairies and the spirits of the mountains, trees and rivers. Different belief systems abound — from identities of early agropastoralism and nomadism that still survive in pockets, to the nascent inklings of monotheistic ideas in the fire-worshipping Zoroastrianism, to pantheons of ancient Persian and Greek gods, to Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi flourishings and beyond. There are paths upon which, through time and the heat of close proximity, nodes formed that were beacons of wonder. Their ways and flows subvert the imagined Western monopoly on knowledge that today shapes the dominant norms.
Afghanistan is a land of unacknowledged fertility that is far from the barren desert we are constantly associated with in the public imagination. Afghanistan is a historical, global centre of diversity with an outsized proportion of endemic plants and high genetic variations in landraces that include grains, fruits, vegetables and nuts — many show the earliest signs of cultivation here before spreading further east and west. The climate and the country’s diverse topography, with its changing altitudes in its mountainous terrains that create a dense multitude of ecosystems, is a cradle for life, biodiversity and food knowledge that traces back millennia. This richness of life is all erased in the narratives that surround us because they would be an inconvenience; it is much easier to justify killing and war in a place rendered dead.
All this is to be noted not for an imagined sense of exceptionalism that mirrors destructive dominant norms, but simply to say that we have existed and we have acted and we have contributed, for good or for ill, to the world we all inhabit. It is to note that flowing through us all is not the imposed story of lineal dominance, but one of repeating cycles of interconnection and exchange. It is to recognise ourselves as millennia of fused conversations and minglings that, even if repressed, still bubble over and manifest themselves in our ancestral foodways and the melding of the global ingredients that underpin them.
The ethos and rituals that surround Afghan cuisine emerge too from this dynamic cross-pollination. Despite the invasions and everything that has been taken away, a long history of exchanges with many travellers means that we remain steeped in a culture of giving and a sense of hospitality, with a psyche of plenty that mirrors our landscapes, that extends as an ancient and luminous invitation.
Late last year, beckoned unexpectedly by this very ethos of invitation, in an impromptu trip I returned to Afghanistan. Food had reunited me with my ancestors and the land — it was burrowing deeper now. It was an otherworldly invitation that arrived with lucidity, reaching through the thin and precarious veil that allows us to imagine as separate the realms of the living and the dead.
The poetry of my late grandmother, Bibi Hamida, found me and asked me back. I had uncovered her work as one of Afghanistan’s celebrated female poets over the years. Her work in Afghanistan in the 1950s encouraged women’s emancipation. It fought for an autonomous homeland undistorted by the incursions of outsiders. Her invitation was not one I was going to ignore. At a time when I was working on my next book “ Missing Moons, Hidden Blooms”, it pulled me towards my homeland, overriding any potential niggling concerns about returning to a land with patriarchal extremists now at its helm.
Working currently on this book feels like my next layer of meditation around the interrogation of knowledge and possibilities through the illuminating power of food. Through excavating even deeper into the trails of my ancestral ingredients and botany, and how they manifest in my diasporic life, I am retrieving the diluted memories of my ancestors and the narratives of our land. It is a land we have long been imagined as being separate from, a land that so many forces through time have attempted to make hostile to us.
As I travelled through Afghanistan, winding my way through the snow-capped mountains, making pitstops for street vendor grilled corn, cardamom-spiced chai and crispy-shelled sambosas, I shrunk in awe as I watched the epic landscapes roll by on our way to Kunar, my maternal homeland. Set against the canvas of the mountains were fertile, vibrant green valleys through which snaked glassy rivers; fields were laden with persimmon trees drooping heavily with their auburn fruits, and roadside stalls were stacked with a colourful array of the land’s bounties, including pomegranates so large that I held them with both hands.
Also on these lands was a distinct and disjointing shadow of the contemporary, with checkpoints every few kilometres manned by men with guns and flaming but deadened eyes, with tyranny at their fingertips, emboldened and made possible not in ways, as widely imagined, in opposition to western modernity but emerging from within its hypocrisies. They come not from a past but from this very present made possible only in an era of globalised currencies and weaponisation that perverts and warps ideologies into something antithetical to life.
There was a palpable stifle in the air. People were worn and wearied, having suffered generations of uncertainty. The women and girls I met, so bright and brimming with potential, were devastated by the patriarchal dormancy forced upon them. There wasn’t an ordinary person this tyranny didn’t touch — from the men and women to the youth and elders and everyone in between. Their jobs, their homes, and their hopes had all been taken and redirected through cronyism. They abhorred the regime that made a sin of being human that now overshadowed their lives. This was, I knew, the deadening of the soul that my Uncle Majroh’s voyager foresaw.
Despite the land’s fertility, there were streams of World Food Program aid trucks, whose presence seemed like a taunting ode to the false scarcities we’d been trapped within. Synthetic fertilisers — themselves a byproduct of fossil fuel-heavy industries and of chemicals of war — have been heaped on our soils since the 1970s, smothering and depleting their natural richness. “Improved seeds” too had been hoisted upon our farmers through corporations and paternalistic international development programs, containing us in unnecessary cycles of dependency.
In the 1970s, the World Bank’s International Development Association ran a series of projects heralded as beacons of progress and modernity. They funded the industrialisation of Afghanistan’s food sector, which until that point was largely self-sufficient, organic and always about small-scale farming with no need for mass plantation, and based on the long accumulation of agricultural knowledge through time. Fertiliser companies were built, farms were mechanised and farmers who now to plant these improved seeds were forced into taking out loans they couldn’t return; our ancient, sustainable ways were being scrambled.
These improved seeds are, in reality, lab-modified and hybridised seeds. They are produced by a handful of corporations that have — as manifestations of the historical dominant norms that see nature as dead matter — commodified industrialised and mechanised food systems, creating monocultures that have driven global agricultural biodiversity to near extinction. While the ancient seeds of our homeland developed through millennia of patient, slow-burn symbiosis and reciprocity with the terrain, the “improved seeds” are stripped bare of nutrition, primed only for yield and to help corporations centralise profit.
Yet as I walked the lands amidst all this, something more endured and pierced through: the stronger and more pervasive presence of the timeless and irreducible could not be completely snuffed out. Its enormity echoed through the life-affirming landscapes and all that had unfolded within them over a timespan that reduced the moment I was in to an unfinished blink. The mountains hovered overhead, brimming with secluded and untold tales, the land still farmed in small subsistence plots that provided in localised ways, lush with the life that continued to push through despite it all. The people with next to nothing gave with an unassuming generosity that emerged from millennia of insurmountable abundance — of history, of diversity, of exchange all still beating within enlivened hearts. Amidst this terrain, in these moments, I was the beneficiary of the traces of a fading pulse that still, somehow, boomed.
Nestled in a fertile valley between the mountains, I arrived at Kunar, my grandmother’s childhood home. It was a beautiful adobe building perched atop a hill with sweeping vistas of crumpled green peaks, with a manicured garden enclosed in courtyard walls that had been tended over the years – with lawns, fruit orchards and a vibrant medley of velvety roses, jasmines, chrysanthemums and creeping bougainvillea in full bloom. A short walk from the house lay the ancestral burial ground. I found the grave of my grandmother, Bibi Hamida, and just a few plots away that of my Uncle Majroh. Here amidst the towering narenj trees that released their heady bittersweet perfume into the air, heralding it seemed our reunion with just the right aroma, I sat at their feet and wept. I wept for the depth of their compassion and their love that had searched, not just through time and space but also planes of existence, to find me and bring me to them. I wept for the years of distance I had imagined between us. I wept for all they had sacrificed and for their dreams that now, fused with my own, still pounded through me.
It was here, at this end, that I felt the stirrings of another deeper beginning. Feeling with fullness the extent to which the land is in my bones, my focus now is on the land of my homeland — understanding it, rewriting and remembering it, resurrecting in our spirits the full potentiality it has always been, even if at first that is only in small pockets. Using our own networks developed through time, we have bought small plots of land and handed to those within the country to steward. So far, we have created an organic community farm, that sustains not just the families who run it but also freely feeds and irrigates the whole village. There is another block that has already had its first harvests of wheat and rice that go directly to the farmers and the communities. I’m also thinking about how we retrieve our own ancient Indigenous seeds from seedbanks, so we can reunite them with the land that they, like so many of us, have been exiled from.
Because of the millennia of uninterrupted memory within the seeds that withstood drought and other environmental extremes through natural adaptive mechanisms — ironically, for all the desertification and barrenness imposed on us — these seeds are now being scientifically explored. They are now viewed as the seeds with the inherent genetic variation that could feed a climate change-devasted world. Unsurprisingly, the synthetic improved seeds with their thin and artificial histories and fossil-fuel hungry methods are not up to the task. It would be a travesty for these seeds to feed the world, but not those whose ancestors lovingly coaxed them into being.
So then, what’s in a seed? I see the essence of an enlivened global solidarity in a seed. In the same way that without artificial impositions, a seed naturally tends to diversity – producing resilience to external stresses by drawing on millennia of genetic memory embedded within it to adapt, to flourish into a thousand forms of life — so too is deep and pulsating global solidarity about conscientising that every living ecosystem — including
the universe of people, ideas and hopes, actions and dreams that is this community — depends on unbound multiplicity, on knowing that monocultures lead to extinction.
It is to see through the guises, to understand that it is the very same historical forces that have long purposely fragmented, indented and arranged us in ways that would pit us against ourselves and one another, and that it thrives on keeping us oblivious to the same root causes that connect our grievances. It is to work towards a reassemblage of ourselves that does not replicate, but sheds, the infectious tyranny of ego and its false dawns; that reanimates our limbs according to the curves of freedom.
As we’ve heard, the generosity at the root of the vision of this community is steeped in seeing the potency of people as the carriers of transformations our world needs — and what more are we as people than a manifestation of the memories and stories we hold, forged in the image of our ancestors and our landscapes embedded within us. To me, our potential as a globally connected community lies in the possibility we have to crystallise a deeper sense of ourselves through the gift of our proximity to one another and the exchange of the many ways this community makes possible with vulnerability. It lies in accessing our stories unmasked and elevating the interconnections that have long bound us, to create ways based on a healing that emerges from a reckoning with the suppressions normalised within ourselves and our communities. It lies in the weaving of a shifted canvas from which potent questions can emerge, making possible the transformations in consciousness necessary if we are to be even within grasp of a global sense of untainted justice.
My call to food, in hindsight, with all its luminosity, has always held the botany of my reclamation. What it has deeply embedded within me is an effort, no matter how imperfect, to the pursuit of generating my own sentiments with a lucidity that emulates the endurance, repetitions, seasonality and long cycles embedded in food and the land — to recognise our eviscerations not as evidence of our unworthiness, but a rational outcome of longstanding systems and structures designed to undermine, dispossess and accumulate unquenchingly at our expense.
It taught me to recognise that the biggest blow to the ego-driven materialism and the noisy fleetingness it encourages that fuels today’s injustices, that seeks to stain even our memories of ourselves and to limit the potencies of what our questions could be, is not to internalise or replicate its externalities and futile deceits, and instead, to embrace the metamorphosis of decay and rebirth we have always been.
It taught me, amidst seasons of heavy loss that find us all, to reach for invigoration even in the face of gaping despotism — to liberate the ethereal magnitude of the quiet, to nurture the seeds of generosity it contains, that germinates into life unseen in the dark.
From one season to the next, as flesh falls away and all else decomposes, a seed endures. This trusted pilgrim through the ages, this benevolent carrier of deep memory, this harbinger of next lives, this maker of inner gardens filled with the light of the sun and the shimmer of the moon that lies beneath our feet — ready to douse our waking world in the fragrance of its infinite blooms. Amidst our raging calamity, I have found this is the smallest but sturdiest of truths.
The Atlantic Fellows are courageous, compassionate and collaborative thinkers and doers, who collectively seek to bring lasting improvements to their communities and the world. As exceptional leaders in their field of work, they each carry a deep resolve for a more equal and just world. The global community of Atlantic Fellows exists to takcle the persistent inequities across the globe through collective action and leadership to achieve systems change.
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