Feminist Art Conference
In your artist biography, you mention your written focus on “cultural memory and grandmothers’ gardens” as vehicles for your (de)colonial, Indigenous, and Afro-futuristic activism. Can you speak further to your interest in gardens, whether literal or figurative? What is the relationship, for you, between an act like gardening and your political engagement with feminist, Indigenous and Black identities?
In centering Black and Indigenous wimmin’s voices and stories, it’s crucial that we find ourselves, our grandmothers and our memories where they are, in our places. My grandmother’s garden is one of the spaces to which my memories are connected. She had a relationship with her plants and her space that she didn’t have with many people. She gave her garden what she had left over of herself. Alice Walker, in her book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, talks about our mothers and grandmothers as artists, repressed and creative in their survival, dreaming dreams they didn’t recognize and often couldn’t articulate. Their stories are their legacies and become our words. In re-telling them we re-write our histories. I re-member my grandmother’s garden as lush, intense, sustaining and beautiful. She was proud of it and it was as useful as it was exquisite. My interest in her garden as a story and a re-memory is both practical in that it connects me to her place, our place, my sometimes-place, and representative in that I can find her there. I can hear her voice there. This is a portal for me to sitting with the meaning of re-telling my mothers’ and grandmothers’ stories as a way of fitting my own pieces back together, where I live, in-between places, spaces and times. This re-claiming of ways of being, knowing and doing is integral to decolonizing our imaginations so we can vision ways of being that aren’t grounded in, and don’t repeat, the same structures that oppress us. This interest in gardens, which I wouldn’t call figurative, since it’s tied to a very real story of belonging and survival for me, is tied to my own hereandnow praxis of growing food not lawns. Gardens and lawns are interesting windows into how a large part of this Euro-dominant Western society spends inordinate amounts of time and money on reproducing superficial and disconnected standards of beauty, in grooming lawns for example. Instead, people could use the space, time and energy to grow food and then to share it. I also believe that the tending gardens, harvesting food and preparing/sharing it connects us to land, our responsibility to it, and to each other. I see the insistence upon that relationship and the living of it as part of Black and Indigenous feminist praxis.
We care for each other, for the land, for ourselves.
