Yesterday we gathered

a group, of many walks, many lives,

to share failures, dreams, and actions;

to compare notes; to contribute strategies; to collectively hold grief.

 

We sought to explore what it means to reimagine land outside of the notion of it as property—and to seriously think through models and examples of work from our own experiences, from organizing, from our contexts, and from our own practices, to redefine our relationships to the land.

 

We shared that . . .
. . . in the spaces of strategies for land justice: failing, dreaming, and doing are not mutually exclusive. It is from failure that we dream and do.
. . . any contemporary spirit of militancy and abolition necessitates an acknowledgment of impossibility. It may sound paradoxical to advocate for “doing” while acknowledging impossibility, but failure is a part of doing and dreaming: there is no separation.

The greatest failure in fact, is alienation from the land. A once existing relation has been violently ruptured through colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—and from which further violence follows, in power and in labor. Across the earth.

Because of this, that alienation becomes a kind of death—for the failure of alienation continues. It is a perpetual cycle.

Our response must be a continuous rehearsal: a perpetual cycle of resistance, a commitment to always respond to failure with dreaming and with doing. We must continuously seek out, ask how to make life in proximity to death.

How do we repair ourselves, even without the prospect of the law enabling justice, and, particularly, despite the law?

Notions of resistance and refusal are the articulation of failing while dreaming of otherwise possibilities beyond ruination: giving a horizon to a possibility of non-property and of return.

 

We shared that . . .
. . . abolition must include liberating ourselves from the language of the state and of property: not seeking language alternatives, but rather liberating ourselves from the current grammar of colonialism, capitalism, and the state. For a commitment to land justice—to redefine and to imagine and dream otherwise—we must use different languages. For the language we have been given and that is imposed upon us is a language that structures alienation and violence.

We must ask ourselves, when does “earth” become “land,” and when does “land” become “property”? Similarly, in the contexts of the commodification of land, when do “human beings” become “labor”?

 
What are the languages that enable our land struggles? What lifeworlds are enabled through a liberated approach to how we make meaning?

The word “place” in the Arabic language is related to a constellation of other meanings and derivatives that mean “to remain,” “species,” “capabilities,” “mastery,” “to be,” and “universe.” Even beyond words, what other forms of language are available to us, in action, or in the body? Can we map the land based on how it carries the body of human sound cast within the landscape, affiliating ourselves and our kin by our association with particular animals and landscapes in names and totems—an intimacy with the land? Naming the more-than-human based on our relationships with them, can “land” be understood in an expansive sense? “As a web of relations and an act of making place,” rather than as an object with which to have a relation of ownership, domination, and exploitation?

 
We shared that . . .
. . . a re-imagination of language also enables a reclaiming of belonging to and with the land.
. . . the concept of “right” in Arabic is Haq, which is “right” in legal terms, but also “justice” and “truth.” And yet justice and truth are not strictly answerable through the law, but rather through struggle for truth and justice as a way of life.
. . . the struggle to a “right to life” and a “right to land,” both of which are central to Palestinian liberation, exceed the limits of the law.

 

Land law, as discussed through many examples in our conversation, legislates precarity. It is in conflict with life. We must redefine our relationships of land outside of notions of the law and therefore, inherently, outside of property. We thought together beyond the land as property, a thing, a noun, and rather about “landedness” as verb. “Landedness,” as opposed to being landless, implies having land and being rooted (having “landed”) somewhere. We spoke of land-workers reclaiming a sense of belonging to the land through “place-making,” disrupting labor relations with land owners. We spoke of others using language and orality, dance, song, embodied ritual as a way of bringing into being ways of relating to land, waters, and non-human lifeworlds that displace private property.

 

We discussed landedness as “being or becoming with” the land, not feeling you are outside of it. Engaging the land in a manner that does not privilege the eye and vision—avoiding an ocular-centric relation—landedness is instead an aural and embodied relation to the land. Again, this embodiedness goes beyond existing paradigms of colonial and commodifying language.

 

We shared that . . .
. . . land justice is always in solidarity with other places, thinking with other places and lifeworlds in the way we dream and do. For land alienation, the stories of how we have arrived here, and how it works in different places in the world is somehow very similar. And we might learn from each other’s failures or from each other’s dreams and ways of doing; there are many different ways of doing, of enacting abolitionist ideas. When we understand each other’s stories, we also understand an important reality: return is not the reversal of leaving or expulsion, but we have to understand that the returnee has also been changed by the processes of capitalism and alienation from the land. We must also understand the extent of our loss and alienation from the land. To understand our relationship with land as belonging and as being is to also understand the severity of the loss that many of us have experienced and the effort that will be required to reconnect with the land and to begin to undo the alienation. What is to be done with the changes in us?

 

We shared that . . .
. . . a fundamental site of resistance is in everyday practice: just doing is resistance.

 
For many, land justice is about insisting on being there, belonging and being present. This insistence is resistance. We learned of Aunt Azziza, the matriarch of a family, who faces an ongoing threat and violence to her land and culture in Palestine—and who shares and teaches, handing over knowledges to younger family members through oral traditions. Creating a space for both material and spiritual nourishment, producing our own food, eating together, walking together, thinking together, laughing together as everyday practices on the land: Aunt Azziza reminds us that resistance is present in creating spaces where freedom is lived and not imagined.

 
We learned of the practice of burying umbilical cords as a symbol of belonging to the land, and as an assertion of returning to that land to join one’s ancestors through burial.

 
We shared that . . .
. . . land—earth—acts as a protagonist, carrying the past and future lives of the disappeared. Earth is a carrier for the ghosts dwelling in the landscape, a carrier of the exiled, and the rehearsal of return.



But importantly, us who live here don’t regard the death of our people as the end of life . . .

 
Thina sizwe esimnyama

Sikhalela izwe lethu

Elathathwa ngabamhlophe

Sithi mabawuyek’umhlaba wethu