LISTEN AND LAMENT: LAND, RACE, AND HEALING
Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed.” ~ Wendell Berry ARTICLE BY JOEL JOHNSON
©Fritz Henle, 1942
A
bout four years ago, I asked a former teacher of mine, a gifted Navajo artist, how he came to know the Sonoran Desert so well. His answer surprised me. Several decades prior, he moved from New Mexico to Arizona for a position teaching art. But this land of saguaros and bean trees was much different than the high northern desert in which he was raised. He told me—and I think about this all the time— that he could not paint this new desert until he learned to love it. Of course, as an artist, this was not a process he could simply wait on. He had to cultivate this love, as he quite literally depended on it for his livelihood. So, every day for months, when the final bell rang and his teaching duties were complete, he walked out into the desert to a quiet wash bed. He sat, and he listened: to the calls of the cactus wrens, to the movement of the wind between the mesquite trees. He noticed how the light filtered between the twigs of the palo verdes and how the texture of the Santa Catalinas changed as the shadows lengthened. And day-by-day, minute-by-minute, he learned to love a second home in a way most of us never know our first. By listening to it. I mention this story, because our nation is desperately in need of a season of listening. So many voices are calling out PG. 38 :: FALL 2020
injustice—sharing painful and intimate realities of what it is like to navigate this American world as a Black man, as a Latina woman, as an immigrant or refugee—and at least in my experience, the overwhelming response from white majority culture (of which I am absolutely a part) is to talk back. To question, to justify, to offer another story. But here’s the thing—when we are talking, we are not healing, because we are not listening. As agrarians, we are taught the importance of observation. We watch the rain work its way across our land and notice where cold air settles with the first frost. This observation is a beautiful act, one that is either born out of care or facilitates it. But for these observations to be truly formative, they must also be accompanied by sorrow as we notice changes we wish were not so. The monsoon rains come later and later, and we are told it was not always this way. The riverbeds are dry, and we must imagine what life was like when water was always within reach.
“When we lack historical understanding, we lose part of our identity,” Latasha Morrison writes in Be the Bridge. “We don’t know where we came from and don’t know what there is to celebrate or lament. Likewise, without knowing our history, it can be difficult to know what needs repairing, what needs reconciling.” To live without a thoughtful, and often painful, exploration of who we are and how we came to be in the places we call home is to live out of a fractured and placeless identity, a reality that has plagued white settlers for generations. As Wendell Berry notes, “One of the peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America has been how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be.” As Berry describes, white culture as a whole has historically viewed land as a resource, an exchangeable means to an end, in sharp contrast to many indigenous cultures in which land is recognized as both a sacred member of the community and a defining attribute of an individual’s life. The placeless language of ownership lends itself to exploitation rather than stewardship, and that lack of intention has often had destructive consequences for all surrounding communities:
