PAPER
with commisioned writings by:
TOMKE BRAUN
NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS
ZARA JULIUS *
ZAYAAN KHAN
MAHRET IFEOMA KUPKA
LINDIWE MNGXITAMA
MAGNUS ELIAS ROSENGARTEN
KATHY-ANN TAN
Grounding
“If the olive trees knew what is happening to the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears”
— Mahmoud Darwish
*
I was not raised Hindu, but I grew up participating in a fair amount of yajnas in my mother’s backyard as a child. Yajna is a Vedic devotional and sacrificial ritual in which offerings are made to Agni, fire, for the maintenance of cosmic order, or to commune with the gods. Timed with each collective incantation of mantra, each participant in the ritual successively pours gee, grain, incense or the like into an open fire as oblations, imbued with the intention of the mantra. After which the ashes, pregnant with the sonic, the spiritual and the sacrificial, are returned to the earth.
Throughout Vedic poetry, the word yajna is used as a symbol that affirms a multiplicitous world in which the divine, cosmic forces, the lived human experience, and the mythical not just coexist but also coordinate. Yajna, and this excess it implies, is in many ways a refusal of individuation; it insists on a relationality that applies not only to the macrocosm and microcosm simultaneously, but also multiple concepts of time; past, present, future and cosmic — all in the continuous tense.
*
There exists no grammar outside of ontology to describe the paraontological — that which is outside of the paradigm of modernity. To know ourselves and the world, we must engage in a different kind of work. *
Santiago de Cali, Colombia is often touted as the second largest ‘black city’ of Latin America, but walking through the city, one would never think it. Much like the topography of Cape Town, Cali is a bowl surrounded by a series of hills that form a lip around the city. On the western outskirts of the city is Cerro de los Cristales (Hill of the Crystals) where — surrounded by quartz rock — stands the statue Cristo Rey (Christ the King). At 26 metres in height, the statue depicts Jesus Christ with his arms stretched out, towering over the city. North-east of this sculpture lies another 26-metre tall monument on Cerro de las Tres Cruces (Hill of the Three Crosses). Once you reach the top, you’re greeted by an expansive view and three imposing metal crosses. The story of how these crosses came to be, is a wild one...There once lived a “demon”, Buziraco, who plagued the city of Cartagena. It’s said he was worshipped up on a hill by indigenous and African maroon* societies** amidst the sounds of drums, dances, tobacco smoke and liquor. When an Augustinian monk arrived in Cartagena on a civilising mission, he declared that it was indeed the devil who lived on this hill. So he gathered a group of men, and together they summoned the demon, who had been incarnated as a goat, for an exorcism. And expelled him from the city. A few years later, Buziraco emerged in Cali and extended his power by taking the shape of a dark, billowing cloud that stretched over a hill in the city for the next 300 years. In 1837, Cali was shrouded in death due to smallpox, dengue, leprosy, fires, plagues and poor crops — all, in the opinion of two Franciscan monks from the Royal Court of Quito***, attributed to the power of Buziraco.
On May 3 1837, the monks went up the hill closest to the dark cloud in procession, carrying bamboo crosses with the idea of exorcising the Buziraco from the city. The moment they planted three big crosses into the ground, a deep voice emerged from the hill, cursing the city. It was the Buziraco, now held captive in the soil of the hill. The processions continued every year, and the bamboo crosses were renewed to ensure the demon was held captive in the hill. In 1925, however, there was an earthquake in Cali, and Buziraco liberated himself from the ground, knocked down the crosses and destroyed several churches in the city. In this way, the ancestral demon returned to the city with renewed strength. Permanent metal crosses were built 12 years later, some 400 years after the initial procession, to finally capture Buziraco once again. Every night, they are illuminated by the globes set in their structure.
It was maybe my third day in Cali when my host and I hiked up the hill to visit Buziraco, trapped in the soil. Pointing out the city’s different urban landmarks, my host said “…y eso es Cali negro / and that is black Cali”, as he gestured far into the distance. Whilst the Caleña population is about 27% Afro-Colombian, urban spatialisation has occurred mostly along class and racial lines. Like many sites of settler-colonialism, the co-implication of race and space in Cali presents the realities of de facto racial segregation, labour migration, and unequal service delivery.
During Spanish colonisation of Colombia, Cali held a strategic position for trade with its location between gold mining regions and the still active sugarcane plantations that surround the city’s bowl. Of course both sectors profited almost exclusively off Black and indigenous labour — the labour of those who fled the plantations and the mines to commune with Buziraco on the hill.
Santiago de Cali, is often touted as the second largest ‘black city’ of Latin America, but walking through the city, one would never think it unless you knew where to go.
But at night, you’re reminded…
Like in the Natal region of South Africa, most sugarcane plantations in Colombia still rely on manual labour to harvest it. The cane is burnt before it is harvested. And at night the hills surrounding the city glow with the embers of the cane, illuminating the silhouette of Cristo Rey, and creating a mirror to ‘las Tres Cruces’ illuminated. Nightfall, the crop, fire, Buziraco, and ultimately the ground itself remind us of not just the enduring haunting of racial, missionary enslavement and anti-Blackness, but also of Black life, resistance and its co-presences. Past, present, future, and cosmic.
*
Due to its nature as a grass, cane can be cut off, and still, it regrows an extended stalk to be harvested in the next season. This regrowth is called a ratoon. Every cane variety that is produced has a parent variety, going back many many years, and often to distant geographies. In this way, sugarcane is often thought of as a generational crop.
*
“Searching is an act of repair. Searching is an attempt to seek out - even if not to find - what has been lost in the landscape due to multiple phases of expulsion from the land. What has been lost may be the memory of loss itself, and as such, searching is in part an act of memory repair. Searching is ritual…Searching is an act of reclaim that is tangible when memories feel ethereal, when the hills are misty and our vision is blurred…”— MADEYOULOOK
*
Indeed when we think with the ground, with landscape, we can traverse time and space, and allow ourselves to complicate our worlds. And hold new (and old) ones, simultaneously. The landscape remembers…and re-members, even if there are prevailing systemic structures that aim to obscure this memory and searching work. In These Bones Will Rise Again (2018), Panashe Chigumadzi grapples with the memorialisations of anti-colonial heroine Mbuya Nehanda**** and her own late grandmother Mbuya Chigumadzi in the wake of what she dubs Zimbabwe’s 2017 “coup not a coup”. She writes, “There are many questions and I am looking for answers. The kind of answers that slip past the facts of history books or analyses by pundits and experts. Answers that are not party politics…Instead, the answers I need are answers to politics that are about how we live, hope, dream, cry, laugh, pray and believe. As I search, I realise that if I want different answers, I need different questions.” In her quest for answers, Chigumadzi’s work unpacks the fraught binaries of birth and death; and of teleological time. She writes, “In this battle for time and history, the ancient civilisation of Great Zimbabwe built out of the landscape’s granite stones was a thorn in the side of the Rhodesian settlers, who defended their right of conquest on the grounds that the very same native tribesmen whose ancestors had built the city had only recently come down from out of the trees.”
*
Fire, quartz, smoke, crops, bamboo, granite and the ground offer us a humility before time. They ask us what it might mean to valorise the immaterial as a legitimate pathway to piecing together who we are and where we are — in flesh, spirit, and landscape beyond the unreliable facts of history, and the colonial pursuit for permanence and time-dominance. What does the ground remember and how does the ground speak?
*
“If a black landscape aesthetic can perceive from the sky, can it also know the sky from the ground?”
“If a black landscape aesthetic can perceive from the sky, can it also know the sky from the ground?”
— MADEYOULOOK
*Maroons are descendants of Africans in the Americas and Islands of the Indian Ocean who escaped from enslavement and formed their own settlements.
**Of course the demonisation of the cultural practices of racialised persons and runaway slaves is a tale as old as missionary-colonialism and the racial project.
***The Real Audiencia of Quito was an administrative unit in the Spanish Empire which had political, military, and religious jurisdiction over territories that today include Ecuador, parts of southern Colombia, parts of northern Brazil, and parts of northern Peru. It was created by Royal Decree in 1563 by Philip II of Spain.
****Mbuya Nehanda is a female figure who not only led Zimbabwe’s First War of Liberation (First Chimurenga) but also, in another manifestation, is said to have provided guidance for the Second Liberation War.
*Zara Julius (b.1992) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and vinyl selector based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is also the founder of Pan-African creative research and cultural storytelling agency, KONJO. Her work is concerned with the relationship between performativity, frequency, concealment and fugitivity in the settler (post) colony, with a special focus on what we call the ‘Global South’. Working with sound, video, performance and objects, Zara’s practice involves the collection, selection, collage and creation of archives (real, imagined and embodied) through extensive research projects. She is especially engaged in thinking through the internal workings of the Black sonic, and how they might help us imagine new futures, and experience different present(s). The bulk of Zara’s projects have focused on mapping the sonic and spiritual mobilities of spiritual rapture and rupture with congregants of syncretic religions, and on (post)apartheid narratives around race and place as they pertain to intimate archiving practices. She holds a BAHons in social anthropology from the University of Cape Town and a MAFA in Fine Art by Research and Practice from the University of the Witwatersrand. Zara has exhibited and presented her work across South Africa and internationally.