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
The land that holds us
Clay is the matrix that holds soil, the smallest particle in the sand and silt mix, touching rock and fossil and even plastic these days. Here in this part of the southwestern Cape, South Africa (although geology does not consider the frivolous natures of colonial borders), these clays and are usually found in two different kinds; the soft and pure kaolin white clays and the colourful sedimented clays, rich in minerals like iron and cascading in colours from shades of terracotta, brown, beige, purple, red and black. These soils are relics of prehistoric beings, actual animals, plants and microbial bodies broken down until only microscopic carcasses remain; mingled with ancient planetary sediment. Going to the beach is a movement in time, each grain could be as recent as a few hundred years to many hundreds of millions and the sheer quantity of them reveal gentle stories of existence beyond our scope of telling.
I try to hear the stories as I dig my feet in, as I step into the icy waters that throw sand in all my creases and crevices. I let the sand run through my fingers and then I dig down to find the wet sand, the hard sand, the sand suitable for sand castles and toy excavators and while my sons busy themselves I wait for the wind to bring the knowing.
Before I had children I used to walk these sand dunes as a balm for depression, urged on by our dog Meisie because I surely would have stayed in bed otherwise. We would just get lost, walk the small stretch of dune up and down until we couldn’t see the road or the sea. I recall a couple of times while looking for plants and nests and life, with the hum of the ocean as white noise backdrop and the traffic a distant buzz, coming into a dune and being surprised that there were people there, surprised that I didn’t hear as I approached, hearing them only as soon as I had crossed the cusp. It taught me about the wonder of these dunes as sound sinks, at least when voices are kept at a reasonable audibility – though on one occasion I stumbled into an argument that was only audible when I stood up at the top of where they were sitting within the dune. The sound came at me as if in a tunnel, drowned out by wind and sea and the loudest thoughts swirling in my head as they wanted to do in a depressive state. We all paused, startled at the sight of each other and I recalled the story I’d heard on local radio, about madrassahs* Islamic schools in the dunes, having found no archival evidence, the theory landed at me as I witnessed this moment. I apologised and moved on, their tension broken and they began to gather their things and left.
I have heard anecdotal stories of madrassahs held in quiet spaces to hide them from colonial rule, as any form of gathering was outlawed. The dunes were a popular choice to meet, especially at that time when dunes still made up a large part of the Cape’s landscape in the city and coastal surroundings. I carry that with me a lot, as inherited memories, the idea of these sand classrooms holding space for political education, I imagine this while sand falls through my fingers and remains soft at my toes. The idea of the sand as safe space delights me because we curse it so much; it doesn’t grow food well, it doesn’t hold water well, there is so much we see as wrong with it but it tells stories older than us. The way this land held those in resistance and so, some hundreds of years later here we are as descendants of these political prisoners who came to the sea to settle upon the sand.
These initial madrassahs were spaces for Islamic education initially but because of the climate and the colonial nature of society in general in the years of slavery, “such schools taught more pupils of colour than all the other educational institutions in the Cape colony put together,” as historian Robert Shell** says. These dunes taught people, they witnessed revolutions being dreamt and held the visions of teachers who wished cultural freedoms for their students. Islam in the early days at the Cape quickly became a refuge for these practices, a place to exercise birthing rites and funeral rites, to express beliefs that connected you to community without being outlawed, a place where indigenous knowledge and peace could be in the same space and time – something that became increasingly hard to come by. Along our Peninsula, the ocean sand meets the mountain in a sliver of incredibly heightened diversity. The ecotone of where mountain and sea connect must have conjured so many fascinating conversations as they formed some million years ago. The water does incredible things where it will dissolve all dissolvables and help leach clay out of the matrix that holds itself into the soils and rocks that were set down as molten forms when the earth moved itself around. It’s all a complex system of time, chemical change, pressure and a lot of talk with water.
Water is a secret ingredient in some ways, you wouldn’t think it by seeing or feeling dry rock but so much of the way rock lives is because of its historic relations with water, between the freezing and fast flowing ways of water, in its ability to separate sediments, to carry across vast distances and the different solutes that travel with – salt from the sea or tannins from the mountains, and always many minerals. Cape Town is a movement of sand flats and clay rises, of shale and granite and quartz, and then when you get to the very top of the rocky mountainous outcrops, sand meets you again, sometimes even with prehistoric seashells 1.000 m above sea level. My foraging nature embedded in pattern-recognition has long been seeking moments of uncontaminated spaces, healthy systems of life to collect from. The tragedy is that we have inherited diseased land, polluted waters and a disconnected way of being with land. A post-Apartheid South Africa has pretty much the same political economy as colonial ways, a free market economy is not concerned with the health of our soils or reforming land.
These days I am mostly looking for clay which really, starts off as looking for colour then looking for cracked earth forms on the surface of the soil. Today we are caught between pollution and conservation areas, “no take zones” prohibiting the removal of even a single leaf or grain of sand. It’s an insult to me as a child of multiple inherited stories of forced removal, and while conservation is vital in the rapid decline of biodiversity, it does not consider why biodiversity is in decline and places the oppressors as saviours of the ecological crises they themselves created. To counter this, I simply follow my own story and seek clay from fallow sites of forced removal and think about continued forced removal of people and other animals, plants and entire habitats. So I harvest from roadsides brutally carved out of sacred mountains, or construction sites where endemic species are threatened, I take clay from river beds and landslides, uprooted tree root balls and constructed dams. I let these clays sit and welcome time to mould plasticity, eventually processing the clay to refine it and see which ways it wishes to be worked on.
As I build stories of collected clay, I start to see veins of knowing within the material, from millions of years old deposits or from a shale mudrock that crumbles to clay in a stone wall, there are nodes of connection and nondescript evidence of these soil bodies holding onto clues as silent time machines. Some seed perhaps rooted here or the concrete and limestone is proof of forced removal, perhaps an old egg casing or the skeleton of a tiny lizard who drowned is showing us life. Clay in its nature is traditionally defined by its plasticity, as in its ability to hold water, separating it from other soil classifications of loam or sand or silt. Plasticity is the way clay can form a coil and snake its way around your finger or hold its shape when being moulded into a bowl. In the absence of water clay turns brittle and dry, powdery to the touch and tends to crack as it pulls itself towards itself, forming a mosaic of wilted shells in its wake.
Because of its fine particles, clay is easy to separate and keeps to itself, pulling away from the memory that it was once rock or animal or plant body, that it formed from glacier or river, twisting and transmuting rock into clay and back again. There is definitely something about this timescale that twists in a long extended infinite loop of forms, and when we add the tensions of really high temperatures to transform that clay into ceramic it buys time that in our human ways of knowing is practically instant. I have started a gentle library of clays and of plants turned into ash found on travels and forages. It’s a gesture towards glaze as their ash melts in the kiln, the higher their silica content the better. Thinking about these lives – these soils and plants, as mineral brings ways of connecting everything to everything else, blurring the lines of time and space, decentering the self and the anthropocentrisms that keep us comfortable. I wonder how to emulate the way that dunes silence sound, or what clay does to sound waves when wet and concaved, if anything at all. There is this distinct meeting and dichotomy of sand and clay and the pull of sound between them, I am sure of it, but I do not know where to host this conversation between them and recognise the way they have been having this conversation for millennia. It’s a strange but thick with knowledge thinness, a borderland that nobody ventures into that I’m aware of. Well, perhaps the bats and shrews that live here do, moving in their sound beams and their silent but full-of-sound quiet.
One thing I have learnt only through experience is that the gift of lullaby is to regulate both screaming child and weary caregiver, it is a rope to pull you through the hard times and tide over the long times where it feels like you have been helping this person sleep for hours. Sometimes it does nothing and deeper modes of regulation need to be sought out. This whole thing is a wonder though, I am certain these sounds and discomforts hold their own sound beam physicality, they hold value and merit in ways our senses cannot ascertain. Like bats who move in sound beams so much so that their worlds are never silent even though to us it seems they may be. There’s a peace in this dichotomy, a weird and intense way of being I can only surrender to and connect it through the in-between spaces of early motherhood I've been living in, where terror and sweet dreaming meet. In the quiet then incredibly loud moments between baby sleeping and baby awake, and how this balances tenderness of quiet and loud, love and heightened stress, and how the land holds me in this. I will wake up moments before the baby wakes up screaming, and this baby is particular because there is no gentle wakening or graduating crying like my first born, this baby screams 0 to 1000 in a second and it brings so much anxiety for when the night comes. In that moment when I wake up, the dread gently eases into my body as I pray for sleep for everyone, especially those sleeping closest to me, yet I know that me waking up is simply a precursor to the cries that don’t seem to calm unless I breastfeed. Now though, we have weaned off each other, a most gentle and honestly, easy process, much like this baby is in the daytime, mellow and pleasant. Like sand and clay, so different but part of the same soils that make up this land, any land in fact. There is something about the way this land holds us, perhaps to do with the land praxis of time, landtime that feeds human time in an ancient way, not a new capitalist way. That after time the terror of waking to be unable to soothe a baby is not a fear I am conditioned in, as exhaustion and distraction move us on towards new stresses and delights. One thing I have learnt only through experience is that the gift of lullaby is to regulate both screaming child and weary caregiver, it is a rope to pull you through the hard times and tide over the long times where it feels like you have been helping this person sleep for hours. Sometimes it does nothing and deeper modes of regulation need to be sought out. This whole thing is a wonder though, I am certain these sounds and discomforts hold their own sound beam physicality, they hold value and merit in ways our senses cannot ascertain. Like bats who move in sound beams so much so that their worlds are never silent even though to us it seems they may be.***
*Arabic for a place of study, it has come to be used as a place for Islamic Study
**Shell, Robert. Madresahs and Moravians. Muslim educational institutions in the Cape Colony, 1792 to 1910. Department of Historical Demography, University of the Western Cape, New Contree, No. 51. North West Univeristy Publication. May 2006.
***With reverence to the bat and acoustic sensory systems research of Inga Geipel at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, see also: Geipel I, Jung K, Kalko EKV. 2013 Perception of silent and motionless prey on vegetation by echolocation in the gleaning bat Micronycteris microtis. Proc R Soc B 280: 20122830. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.2830.
*Zayaan Khan
works as an artist, consultant, food transformer, ceramicist, writer and researcher. She is intrigued by the local urban and ecological environments and their interchangeable relationship in order to understand the elements that build ecosystems. Through curiosity, research, experimentation and engagement, her work found a resting place through food as a means of understanding the world, particularly land and our collective heritage. She is influenced by traditions, both inherited and the creation of new ones, reclaiming culture and reviving tradition through progressive interpretation in order to enact a listening of the future and a steady present survivalism. She continues to build the Seed Biblioteek, a seed library highlighting the story of seed.
close-up of: IO Makandal
Untitled (Clay impressions series: JAG #1)
2023
close-up of: Silvia Noronha (BR, 1984)
From the series: Shifting Geologies
2020 - ongoing
Untitled (Clay impressions series: JAG #1)
2023
From the series: Shifting Geologies
2020 - ongoing