6 minute read
LISTEN & LAMENT
LISTEN AND LAMENT: LAND, RACE AND HEALING
ARTICLE BY JOEL JOHNSON
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About 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.
©FRITZ HENLE, CIRCA 1942
I mention this story, because our nation is desperately in need of a season of listening. So many voices are calling out 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: human and biological. But when intentional listening and observation lead us into sorrow—and we sit with that sorrow, we allow it shape us—we engage the healing process of lament.
“To lament means to express sorrow or regret,” Morrison continues. “Lamenting something horrific that has taken place allows a deep connection to form between the person lamenting and the harm that was done, and that emotional connection is the first step in creating a pathway for healing and hope. We have to sit in the sorrow, avoid trying to fix it right away, avoid our attempts to make it all okay. Only then is the pain useful. Only then can it lead us into healing and wisdom.”
So often we (and by we, I mean in particular, white Americans like myself) avoid this bond of lamentation because it makes us uncomfortable. When we sit with the sorrow, without ignoring or fixing it, we are confronted by our role, active or complicit, in allowing the pain to take place. Whereas challenging the validity of the sorrow or grasping for a quick remedy allows us to distance ourselves from the suffering.
Lament eradicates the buffer. As theologian Dr. Soong-Chan Rah explains, “Lament calls for an authentic encounter with the truth and challenges privilege, because privilege would hide the truth that creates discomfort.”
Lament is not a process I fully understand how to engage well, but the voices of my neighbors make clear how desperately I need to do so.
When a church member explains the fear he experiences walking the same streets I do, but in a Black body, my responsibility is not to refute his experience, or even to immediately try to fix it. My responsibility is first to receive his story—to mourn the brokenness and recognize my complicity in allowing this transgression to become commonplace.
When I am reminded by a sign on the door as I walk into work that the land I steward was stripped from the Yaqui and Tohono O’odham, it is my responsibility to actively grieve that reality, and then to let that lament guide me to a stewardship that seeks the restoration of not only ecological relationships, but also the communal relationships that have been marred by over five centuries of exploitation.
Lament does not offer easy solutions; it recognizes that there are none. Lament is also not immediately about doing something. It is about allowing something to be done to me— allowing my mind and my person to be reshaped by the pain from which I have benefited for so long. And only when lament has forged that deep connection can I begin to imagine and participate in real healing.
Saint Jerome, one of the early monastic Desert Fathers, wrote, “The desert loves to strip bare.” It is for this reason that we must seek out the desert. We must sit among its dry washes, allow them to expose us, and listen, as it teaches us how to love.
In the same way, white communities have a responsibility to seek out the spiritual, communal, and ecological deserts that have been left in the wake of our presence on this continent. They too will strip us bare as we listen to them and lament among them. The vulnerability they require will lead us into the posture of humility that healing necessitates.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joel Johnson is the Seed Production Technician at Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson, AZ. His work and writing can be viewed at www.NarrativesofPlace.com.
