Transcript: BRONTË VELEZ on Embodying the Revolution
Ayana Young Welcome For The Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana Young. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with brontë velez.
brontë is guided by the many rivers that have come together to make and sustain them as a black, Latinx multimedia artist, lifelong student, and designer. Their praxis, theory and action lives at the intersections of critical geography, black liberation ecologies and creative placemaking. They live by the call that "black wellness is the antithesis of state violence," a quote by Mark Anthony Johnson. Their work intends to compost the violence forged by environmental racism through radical imagination. This commitment iterates through several mediums, and this year grows through Lead to Life.
In their last year at Brandeis University, bronte worked as a copy editor on a retrospective of Mexican artist Pedro Reyes work when they witnessed his projects disarm and palas por pistola was, in which he transforms weapons into shovels and instruments. They were met with profound healing and a deep desire to share this medicine through continuing the rituals in the United States as a direct response to losing a dear friend to gun violence, alongside the larger traumatic impact on black communities and environments from police brutality. They are committed to joy, wellness, decomposition as rebellion, and walking in the prayer that "justice is what love looks like in public."
It is such an honor to have you with us here, brontë. I just deeply respect you walking through the world as you do and it is a pleasure to have you on the show.
brontë velez Mmmm, yay. Happy to be here. So grateful.
Ayana Young So I want to start with this feeling that's been coming up for me a lot, which is that movements towards regeneration are growing more intersectional and I think we're finding ourselves thick within the growing pains of decolonization. There's a whole lot of work to work through within ourselves, with one another, how we treat, how we interact with our fellow humans and nonhumans alike. I see these growing pains arise in many ways and one being this circular conversation or many types of circular conversations that leave our movement stagnant. Much of the way that we communicate, much of the way we listen remains an expression of colonial mentality which is competitive, self righteous and entitled, aggressive. I think we all share a common pain and loneliness, but we also absolutely do experience the system disproportionately. And, to lose sight of that is a dishonor to what we're trying to grow as a regenerative culture. There's a quote from Alicia Garza, who's the founder of Black Lives Matters in an interview with Kianga Yamata Taylor in how we get free black feminism and the Combahee River Collective and she said it so clearly, quote, "If we're going to change the way that we organize, we have to stop doing this. Like this framework of multiracial organizing is so sloppy because it allows us not to take responsibility for the ways that we also perpetuate the system," end quote. So I wanted to start by asking you, what are your feelings around these growing pains of decolonization? And, how do you see us becoming better organizers?
brontë velez Wow, okay. I think a lot of it is rooted in the absence of rituals to practice grief. And to me, decolonization is a death ritual. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about letting go and releasing from what we thought, either for some people's what we thought we wanted, and then for others, what was imposed upon us and told, made us citizens or worthy beings or value beings, or declared that we were, in fact, alive. And I think we're at a time in this concept of the great turning that it will require pain. It will require grieving. It will invoke sadness because everything we thought was true, everything we were striving for,is no longer or now we know the impacts of what that old dream will impose upon the Earth and other living beings. I think the growing pains with decolonization are valid. I think, to be better organizers will require patience. And, I think the problem is that the work is so urgent so how do we metabolize that grieving process? What do we need to do to instigate that grieving process so that we can show up to the Earth and to one another, urgently and slowly, and how to find that quantum space to be here. And I think a lot of it can come through being transparent about the pain that we are in and like being witnessed in the grief that is to shift.
I've been reading a book called Conflict is Not Abuse. The author is sharing that supremacist ideology and traumatized behavior reflect one another. And, it's a contentious concept that those two things reflect one another. And I'm grappling with it while I'm reading the book because I'm like, "I deserve to be angry. I deserve to be pissed. I deserve to call people out. I deserve to not be patient." And, at the same time being able to sit with the ways these responses come from a traumatized place and what do I need in community to support grieving the thing I thought I wanted? Grieving this world I thought I wanted to be a part of? And being curious about what is possible and being okay with not knowing the future. This is why I'm really interested in decomposition as rebellion, as was mentioned, because decomposition as rebellion is saying, "I don't know what is coming. I don't know what's happening. I don't know what is next." All I know is that I need to die. All I know is these things need to be laid to rest. That part I'm sure of. And how to just be committed to that, I think is a powerful practice.
Ayana Young I think a lot of what arises in these circular conflicted conversations and the miscommunications sometimes is actually grief in disguise. And instead of there being spacious nests around grief, it seems that the colonizer mentality has imbibed even grief with competition. Grief is either compartmentalized or expressed haphazardly. You know, can be misdirected at others, which ends up only re traumatizing and instigating more grief. And, you know, tapping into our walls of grief is raw and witnessing such can be uncomfortable. So I see this need for safe spaces to really grieve where we can learn how to be around other people who are also deeply feeling their grief. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to create spaces for communal grieving that can recognize the inequities among us while simultaneously not demeaning anyone's trauma as lesser?
brontë velez Oh, yeah, that was the narrative of 2017 for me – witnessing a lot of spaces where people needed to be witnessed. And the beauty, the beauty and the vulnerability of transparency about like, what I hear in the meta scream of grief competition is like, "Please see me. Please love me. Please support me. Somebody give me a hug. Somebody, please! Somebody love the child in me. Somebody tell me it's going to be okay. Somebody, please, help, help." Chaos. Everything I thought I knew was true is no longer true and I'm struggling and I see that. I see that need to be witnessed. At the same time, we're in an era of so much disparity. And so, I think what's happening is this dance between traumatized response and supremacist ideology is that the Earth is asking us to move into recalibrating balance. And in that I moved to ecosystems where I'm like, "Okay, balance comes through an ecosystem," and that would require an ecosystem of support and ecosystem of spaces where people...right now we need to be thinking about how to move on multiple timelines because there's things that need to happen urgently and there are things that need a deeper time and space to happen. And some people need to be there and some people don't need to be there because, realistically, we can't all be in the same room at the same time – truly, in one room. We need multiple spaces to do that work.
Someone reframed recently, collaboration is co-liberation, co-liberating. We need the ecosystems to be co-liberating together. And I think my struggle is that we often come into one space and believe that is the space where healing is only possible, and so we demand that of that space. We demand that of the gathering that says it's about grieving. And so, we won't center the people who need to be centered at this time – whose deep, long ancient history of marginalization, their voice, and their practices and liberation need to be listened to, needs to be heard, needs to be amplified. To me this work around grief competition can be grounded when we practice humility. This is a big thing. I've seen a lot of spaces where people aren't willing to be humble, aren't willing to listen, aren't willing to say, "Hey, what are the other spaces where I can get the tending that I need to? And in this space, maybe it's not my voice that needs to be heard right now." And how to be in that wisdom and discernment. And it reminds me of someone tweeting about during the whole, All Lives Matter complex that was definitely this thing we're talking about with grief competition. Someone tweeted, like, "All Lives Matter is like coming into a funeral and being like, I too, have had someone that has died." And being like, "Wait, what? We're trying to honor our family. We're trying to just be with our family right now." And to just allow, like, multiple timelines to move together and I think for this work, we have to transition from the concept of linearity. We have to decompose linearity, and we have to be humble.
Ayana Young There are so much there – so many threads in that response. One thing that you brought up a few times is urgency, this feeling of urgency. And I want to read a quote from adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy that really spoke to me, quote, "There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face. It can make it hard to remember that in fact, it is urgency thinking, urgent, constant, unsustainable growth that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in going deep, slow, intentional work. We need to go beyond having a critique, counter analysis, alternative system, systemic plan for society. We have to actually do everything differently, aligned with a different set of core principles for existence, especially in movement, building," end quote. And I'll admit, I definitely fall prey to the urgency because while the urgency is real. Sitting with this quote, it's good medicine in itself. You know, perhaps to respect the urgency, social-, ecological-, climactic- of this time, we need to be slow. We need to be gentle. We definitely need to be intentional. And perhaps if we practice that we'd be able to organize more righteously ,more compassionately with more potency. Well, I don't know, what do you think?
brontë velez Yeah, I remember someone sharing that an elder had said that this work right now is so urgent that we must be slow. And I'm thinking about the word intention and medicine. In medical practice, the word intention is defined as the healing process of a wound. And I'm thinking about that language around how to be intentional and know that the healing process will take time. And I'm really interested in this concept around metabolism. How can we time travel? This is why I love adrienne maree brown's work and Afrofuturist practice because there are ways to be in these multiple timelines. And I've been learning from my grandfather who lives with schizophrenia about this. He's living in many timelines. And when I'm listening to him, I'm like, "Okay, wow! He's on many dimensions." And there's a lot of medicine in that and I'm learning a lot from him about that our work is multi-dimensional. If we're doing that deep work where we're time traveling by healing our spirits, the work on this plane and this reality, okay, on this timeline on this linear space, we can work with it really well because we're prepared to metabolize a moment into a huge consciousness shift. This is why I'm really interested in ways people are gathering.
Disaster capitalists, for example, are using that moment of chaos and disruption and despair and cracking apart. They're using that moment as opportunity. And I feel like there's a lot to learn from that evil, what is seen as evil. I think it's a sleeping path, where it's like, "Okay, we're gonna go in. We're gonna coach upon these vulnerable communities. We had this plan. We're prepared." And I wonder for us, how do we start to prepare with the ritual as needed to shift in that moment when we're vulnerable, in that moment where everything can change. How are we prepared to turn? To really say, "Yes, okay, this is where we're going." How do we practice that in the smallest ways, in the ways we love one another, and the ways we're intimate with one another, in our friendships and with our families with our chosen families? Like, how do we always be in that moment of how can I be willing to be creative in the midst of violence, in the midst of the unknown? To really, really, really be having those conversations to speculate about what is coming.
I really am interested in adrienne maree brown and Octavia's Brood's work and has come a lot into my work around the concept of the oppressor. There's so much preparation. This is traditional. There's a tradition to harming people. There's a tradition to these systems, it's practice. And so I think we, in the same way, need to learn from this level of practice, this level of training. How are we speculating? How are we training? How are we thinking about the moment where we can come in and be healers and shift this concept? I think this time is asking us to be in this question. and trust that when we're slow, even if it's in your own time, even if it's like, "I don't have time to meditate. I don't have time to be with myself. I don't have time to heal myself. I don't have time to take care of myself. I don't have time to be loved." And as soon as I said that shit, I didn't have time to do anything else. So how to actually be like, "Okay, healing my body will bring me more time," and to trust to trust.
Ayana Young I am so interested in this practice, this tradition that you are talking about of oppression. And it really clarified this idea for me that there is a practice, a tradition, a deep intention underlying the physicality of oppression, intention behind the production of segregated urban spaces, the fragmentation and privatization of ecological webs, and the separation of us from our own bodies from another's body, and ultimately the body of Earth. And I think about critical geography, this school of thought which you referenced in your work which speaks to such impacts of colonization and white supremacy, on geography, critical geography is actually a fairly new term to me. And I imagine it might be for many of our listeners, as well. So would you define critical geography and perhaps share with us how your understanding of critical geography has impacted the way you move through space?
brontë velez Mmmmm. Yeah, thank you. I would describe critical geography as how do we practice a deeper inquiry into the ways spatialization is experienced? And how do we inquire the ways mapping has occurred and the ways we relate to borders and the ways we relate to how we experience place, and the ways, then, that we relate to our ecologies, And who is where? And how, and for what reasons and how did they get there? And what is the history of migration and movement? And also then, people over time we've been in a place, is that a choice? Is it a choice to be where we are? Have we been moved there? Have we been forced to go there? Is the movement I make in a day not decided for me? That's a big point of this question. Am I actually being moved around? Or am I immobilized? And so questions around mobility, transportation, environmental racism, ableism, racism all come up here to me this confluence of we all are in space, we're all here, and we can begin to be in an inquiry about our location.
Yeah, I think, for me, that question around place around space has really come through with one of my teachers, Dr. Jasmine E. Johnson, who has an amazing article from San Francisco on "Dear Khary: An Autobiography of Gentrification." She's both writing a letter to her brother who was killed when she was a child and she's also talking about the ways the city has changed – how San Francisco has become gentrified and how her family's bookstore, I believe is the first black independent bookstore in the nation, Marcus Books, is trying to be torn down for a condominium development. And she's moving in between scholarship and narrative and history and love and poetry and is asking, "How does place traumatize us? How does place hold memory? How is memory trying to be obscured?" I learned this from a professor, Dr. Greg Childs, for our ancestors – it's not that we weren't in the archive, it's that our histories have been erased. That is true. And then he challenges the agency of our ancestors to be like, was everyone really just a race or were some people actually intentionally evading the archive because what they were doing for their liberation couldn't be written down? It couldn't be remembered. It needed to happen through a corporeal experience. It couldn't be in this way we understand memory.
So that happened through the body, or that happens in place, or that happened in relationship with the Earth as an ally. And so I'm interested in that encoded memory. This concept of epigenetic trauma that's been coming up about lineages of trauma that are encoded into our DNA and that we have these responses that come from our ancestors. I'm interested in what's my epigenetic resilience? What are those responses in me that remember how to pray, how to practice freedom, how to love? What are those things in me and to focus there and to know those memories live with the Earth and how to be in the Earth of that process to speculate upon things that have not been written down and that I will not be able to find anybody's books? That they were quiet and they can't be told to me. Our initiation into hearing our ancestors maybe isn't in the ways we thought they would come. In this colonial way, where we thought we will be passed down the family tree, that we can go on ancestry.com and all the answers will be there, but to trust that it's in our bodies. I've been learning from my friend tayla, "The revolution will be embodied." The revolution is a somatic experience with the living body and to learn from my own body as a site of healing.
And I've been learning this also from Suzanne Pierre about the body being an intervention through her work with critical ecology. And we're in the Earth because the ways we're supposed to see black bodies in the Earth – how we imagine that is a sight of trauma? And what is it to see black bodies playing in the ocean? To be with one another? To be walking? The fact that just even walking itself or moving or just being in place is an act of intervention? Yeah, it's really deep.
Ayana Young Well perhaps continuing on that train of thought, there's this narrative that seems to be prevalent today that black folks in America are alienated or estranged from nature and wild places in the wilderness. And I'd love to unpack this a little bit with you, perhaps to begin by tracing back in time. You know, the beginning of the relationship that people of color hold with the land and waters of Turtle Island was not autonomous. And as the hands holding the whips, these wealthy white people were actually severing themselves further and further from the soil. And, the bodies on the receiving end still lived in tune with the stars and the elements. Right? And, you know, was the wilderness not a refuge for those evading brutality? Did nature only become inaccessible in modern times like any story so much is untold, omitted, or convoluted purposefully. So I'm wondering, what's your take on this historical narrative? And what are the stories you know to be true?
brontë velez The first thing I think of is watching a two hour conversation between two black scholars to Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten at Duke Theological Seminary in a series that Duke was holding called the Black Outdoors. And somewhere towards the end is very high theory. It's also amazing the ways black people have had to practice equity anemia and then shove it back in this way that's, like, even smarter than it ever could have been if, like, so deep. We're like, wow, this is amazing. Like, I'll take this colonized form and I'll dance with this way of knowing. I'll play with it, and then we'll give it back to you so reimagined. And we'll actually show you how to be in question. And that was really deep for this whole, like, two hours and then someone in the audience...It was one of those people who, like, actually doesn't have a question, but needs to be heard and started sharing this narrative from this text black aesthetics by Paul Taylor about an archive where I believe enslaved folks from Senegal arrived to the port and the trader is confused that they have stars and moons etched into their head – all these black folks. And they're asking, “Why do they have that on their head?” and they're like, “They did that to themselves.” And apparently, these were people who spoke different languages. And, I think about that moment at the bottom of the boat – what scholars talk about with transatlantic time. And that period of time shift for black people coming into this place and the language that you use ‘alienation from nature.' It has been an alienation, it's like you literally coming as aliens to this other world. And this moment of literally carving into the body the memory of the stars, wearing it. I'm imagining these people looking amazing, like coming off this boat like "what y'all about to do." We're wearing this. That moment is so deep for me. And that to me is what's true – is that even if it wasn't etched in, in that way, people hid seeds in their hair, seeds in their bodies. People hid memories in their bodies. People protected things. People practice quiet in a way we can't imagine.
Michel Trouillot, he talks about the language of unthinkability – that it's unthinkable for many archivists to imagine that black people experience joy, for example, during slavery or that they experience freedom or that they sat and were with the sky. And there's a thing Toni Morrison talks about of Phillis Wheatley, the first published black poet. She says if Phillis Wheatley writes something like the sky is blue, people are going to ask, “What does a blue sky mean to a black slave?” And that there's always that relationship between the body and the Earth. And that that can't be separated. Often, we are separated from nature physically through design, through the ways cities are designed, that actually does become inaccessible to us. So that narrative is true. And time as a act of colonization, which also comes through disrupting natural rhythms of time and the history of how slavery was practiced and the carceral system of time with the idea of people doing time, and taking people's time away that prevents people from being in nature. You not about to go to the woods at night. You've been working all day and now you've got to go to the woods, like people got to work on the weekend. It's just like, there's not that rhythm. There's not that availability. It's not that black people don't want to be walking around and be in the Earth. People know it's that relationship is taken away from us. And so I'm interested in remembering that it is true that we've always been in the Earth. It's true that we change the fabric of the soil here. It's true that we developed the agriculture that has happened in the United States. We developed the system of capitalism. We didn't develop it, we were able to fuel what is now known as America through our bodies. We were traded as currency, and to feel that current to feel that energy and that power. And to reimagine, to trust that my ancestors, they were taken because of how much wisdom they held. And to remember to challenge how we’re archived.
This is what I did with my thesis at Brandeis. This woman, Eliza Pickney, a white woman, South Carolina, is able to adapt and to go to the backcountry, that it becomes one of the biggest cash crops after rice in the mid 18th Century. Did she really do them alone? The way it's archived is she is one of the first great agriculturalists of the colonies. Then I started to inquire how do I challenge this narrative? Is this true? And then I started reading her journals and she inherited three plantations from her father, Lieutenant Governor of Antigua and she's saying she wants to adapt indigo and she can't get to grow, and so she's asking him to send someone from the West Indies to support her. That's a moment where a lot of speculation then can be opened up. Or you can start to read against the archive. This is how I learned from the salmon to move against what I've been told – to just keep moving against the way the salmon have that memory of home to be like, I know that this ain't true. I know that I have these things in me of where home is and what is true and how my ancestors were moving with the earth and I'm gonna listen I'm gonna start listening and I'm gonna get out of the distraction that we weren't with the Earth and recuperating that narrative.
Ayana Young Thank you for sharing that. And you sent me this article that I want to bring up. It's called "Cosmic Literacy and Black Fugitivity" by James Pantaloni, Jr. And would you tell us what the idea of fugitivity means to you and share with us some pieces of this article that you feel to be pertinent to now.
brontë velez In that article, James is talking about Benjamin Banneker's almanacs, which were also known as ephemeris, where we get the word ephemeral, and that which is for a day. Then the etymology of journey is also one day. Ephemeris is also that concept of disappearing, of letting go. And I've always been really moved by Benjamin Banneker making these almanacs, and then like, encoding them with these other work around black liberation. And in the article, he's also talking about Nat Turner knowing that there would be a sign in the stars. And I think about Harriet Tubman and many other folks relationship to the North Star, and I think about this practice and celestial navigation. And, yeah, this concept of cosmic literacy.
And something I had been writing about is decolonizing literacy. Oftentimes, it's written that Harriet Tubman was an illiterate slave and so what I want to say is a lot of scholars talk about moving out of the concept of calling folk slaves and making it an active term – activating that were more out of the noun into the action that was happening upon these people, so the enslaved. Instead of being like this person was illiterate. Actually, what literacy did she have? Wow, this illiterate slave was able to, you know, get to freedom. That's 'cause she was literate. She was literate! It wasn't your literacy. Oh, but Harriet Tubman was literate. Harriet Tubman was literate in the stars Harriet Tubman was literate in the soil. Harriet Tubman was the only woman to lead a military operation during the Civil War. Like we just skip over that we just imagined this is just this person freeing people willynilly like this was happening in the winter time. This was happening at night. This was happening when it was cold. She was also a nurse in the Civil War. So I'm always like this person was an herbalist. So how do I start to read how she knew plants? How she was a coyote. How do I start looking at the way she experienced – a master threw a piece of metal at another enslaved person and it hit Harriet in the head. And so she was known to have had a brain injury from that experience. It said that she had hypersomnia and that she would fall asleep uncontrollably. She was moving via her dream world the ways Spirit and God were telling her these roots. And so I'm just like, wow, okay, that's another kind of literacy – to have a spiritual literacy, to have another relationship to time in the gravity of faith, to know that another way as possible, to be literate in imagination. When we think about the context of where Harriet Tubman was...to say that you're going to be free, is like so deep, to decide you are free. And then to make sure that everybody else is free with you. That's like, okay, whoa, that really humbles me.
And Nat Turner's work with waiting for the sign from the stars, it's like, okay, you know, we're gonna move as black folks across the earth in the same time that the sky becomes black. So they were waiting. They moved on the Eclipse. And so to think about what Martin Luther King called cosmic companionship that we have – that is with us, that the stars are with us, that the sky is with us, that the Earth is with us.
That I'm thinking of Alice Walker's writing, "But in truth the Earth itself has become the nigger of the world," and what it is to be like, "Okay, we're both this." What happens to the Earth happens to black people and what happens to black people happens to the Earth. And to find that communion and witnessing. And I've had this experience where I was out here and these fires in California, and these fires are happening and I was inside of an oak in Los Padres National Forest and I started weeping. And I was just like dang, I just felt like the Earth really needing to rage only because we took away the folks who tended fire in that way for the land where the land learn to burn. And this pain and this tension of like, that serotiny has to happen – this idea of things germinating by fire, that it's a process that has to exist. And to trust in this process, and then also, to see the Earth in that pain of trying to come into balance and it having to be so painful, of it having to be violent. And that we're so imbalanced. We've taken the Earth so out of balance that the only responses are this way because the Earth is also metabolizing their healing. And I just see the Earth in that process of what we've done. And just learning and just humbled and just, yeah, just really humble.
Ayana Young I think a lot about how the Earth has been used against her or their black and brown children, and how painful that is for both the children and the Earth. And how you've been dispelling so much of that narrative that black and brown people are separate or they don't belong or they didn't have nature, literacy, or don't. And it seems like if we're talking about the biology of violence, we need to also be talking about a psychological or community healing and physical healing. And to do that, we need to talk about the way the system is designed to keep people poisoned and unhealthy. And the article that you directed us to "Wellness and the Black Molecular Future" by Marc Anthony Johnson, names how there is feedback between the toxicity of the biological systems of our bodies and violence. Calling on Flint, Michigan's lead poisoned water crisis is an example. So would you speak through your knowledge on the physiology of violence and how a physical lack of wellness and lack of access to wellness limits communal healing process?
brontë velez Yeah, I think a lot about Mark's article. I remember reading that when I was in India with the Spiritual Ecology Fellowship. No, I was looking for it again. I remember I was like...there's some article that changed my life. Now can I find it again? I need to find it again. I'm trying to like...what was it called? What was it called? And I found it like. And at that time, I was so disturbed that we were with these Tibetan Buddhist nuns at a nunnery called Tilacapor in the Himalayas. And we're doing the spiritual ecology series and my friend Dameris is teaching these disaster management workshops. And there are these infographics of nuns and monks with face masks on carrying out people on gurneys for inevitable landslides that are happening in avalanches in India. They are rooted in like American empire and to think about the people who are living so close to the Earth needing to be these responders. To see that was really intense. And I wasn't really paying attention because...I was paying attention, but I also happened to be reading underneath the desk, The New Jim Crow. And it was this overwhelming moment of like, "Oh, my God, we have really messed up. This is so intense."
And then after that time to come back to Mark's article and to think about when he references the lead poisoning in Flint. To begin to contemplate, how is people's inaccessibility to wellness then criminalized? For example, if police aren't being trained to de-escalate situations and aren't trained in sensitivity to care for people with differently-abled bodies, what happens if a child in the future who's been poisoned by lead for water in Flint, which is a neurotoxin, who then becomes later in their life criminalized in a moment of who knows what happen, and is then criminalized for something that happened because there was neglect for the safety of people's water? There was neglect for the safety of people's bodies and what was entering their bodies, and it’s deep – that nourishment is something that's taken away from us. And, yeah, I think that when he says this idea that black wellness is the antithesis to state violence that implies that state violence is contingent upon black bodies not being well. It means that in order for the state to stay intact in the way it is right now, black people have to not be healthy – spiritually, emotionally, mentally, physically. That is the project of white supremacy. And it always has been because capitalism was built upon us not being well. That's literally how it came to be. And so in order for it to stay alive, it has to continue that tradition. And it is one that is designed.
I remember being somewhere and I was at a retreat last summer and people were like, "Wait, redlining? Wait, what's redlining? Wait, what's food apartheid?" And Leah Penniman at Soulfire Farm in New York has reframed food desert as a food apartheid. It's not a natural phenomenon that people don't have access to healthy food. That is designed that has historically been designed in the urban space. It has historically been designed that the history of sanitation in the US was placed in communities that were also deemed disposable. That's always been what it's been about. How do we move our impact away from visibility? How do we not have to deal with the idea that we are being harmful? And I'm really interested in how we begin to really bring that accessibility. And I'm in the beautiful humility of where we are right now. I'm from Atlanta. I don't have any organic grocery stores in place where my family grew up. There's not organic food. And if there is, it's very limited. It's definitely an experience of food apartheid. But I've been learning for Mandela Marketplace in Oakland. Like, okay, we're this one grocery store in a radius of 25,000 people that has organic food and otherwise, it's 300 corner stores that are also liquor licensed to feed these people and it's all GMO food and all this stuff that's low vibration, that's riddled with chemicals that is working in so many ways through advertising, through media, to kill us, to shift our energy to not have stable energy and to be like, okay, they're going to use those places that are there and they're going to put in fresh fruit, fresh produce, at the front of those stores. They're going to bring the foods to those places. And so, like, I can't wait for my grocery store to be built. You know, I can't wait for all of that. I'm not going to deal with that bureaucracy of all of that. How do we start bringing things to be in the humility of where we are right now? How do we start suturing that proximity? How do we start bringing us closer into that availability and bringing people together who have the medicine, who have the food and just, yeah, making it more accessible. That's what it's about because our transportation is another part of it. The design of the city especially in Atlanta too. The design of urban sprawl where it takes you hours to even get access to food. And how to make that relationship closer and how to also share with people that they have the agency to grow their own food and to be in that security. Yeah.
Ayana Young A quote from this article, "This toxicity has been linked to impulsivity and criminality which invites us to deepen our analysis of criminalization and complexify the compassion we have for folks who are being locked up and who without intervention will be incarcerated in Flint. It requires an understanding that violence can and has been produced in our communities on the level of physiology," end quote. And he goes on further to discuss how our diets interact with our neurotransmitters, influencing our mood, cognitive functions, stress responses, etc, and how the diet of the incarcerated and the poor which is high in sugar and low in nutrients depletes neurotransmitters and how this quote "creates physiological grounds for depression, anxiety and aggression." And he calls then for, quote, "an end to state violence all the way from the architecture of policing and mass incarceration down to the level of the neuron," end quote. So for people that again, that's the "Wellness and the Black Molecular Future” by Mark Anthony Johnson.
And you brought up that you're from Atlanta and I want to bring up this project that you're doing and as we begin to heal as intersectional Earthly communities, I'm curious how ceremony and symbolic remembrance can help us achieve justice, particularly in places where both the land and the people harbor intrinsic memories of violence. And in conversation at the For The Wild Live event, you brought up the work of the equal injustice initiative that quote, "recognizes the victims of lynching by collecting soil from lynching sites and creating memorials that acknowledge the horror of racial injustice in America," end quote. From what it sounds like you're hosting events this spring in Atlanta that are in the same vein. So would you tell us about your endeavor Lead to Life – People's Alchemy for Regeneration?
brontë velez I usually start with sharing that my friend Harry, we were studying in Czech Republic and he sent me this glow in the dark bike path that's in the Netherlands – was, like, just sending it to me because it was this beautiful design, and it looks like a bioluminescent bike path. And I was just like, wow. And I immediately thought of my friend Xavier who was killed on a bike path in Atlanta. And I get into a lot of manic questions about "If the conditions were different, would this have happened?" I asked a lot of things about like, Okay, "If this had looked like this, would this have happened like this?" And it's true. I think of it as manic, but it's like true that it maybe could have been different. And I don't know how much this serves me to ask, but it's like, "Can we instigate new ways of relating to space?" And how does what Dr. Shawn Ginwright calls 'the persistent traumatic stress environment' – how does that inform our experience with violence and proximity to it? We're always experiencing trauma, and we don't even have that space and time to heal. It's not even like post, it's just incessant. And he was killed on a bike path at 21, young black man. And he was killed by a 14 year old, young black person, young black child.
And Alice Walker says the most important question in the world is, "Why is the child crying? "And I kind of am in that this is the most important question. Why is the child crying? Why is a black child killing another black child? And affording them that question and affording them their life and affording them the trauma they must be experiencing to inflict that degree of violence onto another being. When white kids are afforded that experience. They're afforded the question, "What happened to you? What happened to you to kill all these people. What happened to you to walk into a church and kill nine people who were praying for you?" To walk out with a bulletproof vest, for you to be on a chase and for people to still ask what happened to you and to still see you and to still feel you're disturbed – to be seen as a human and to want to give black children that experience of being seen as children of their trauma being witnessed – of this desire to be a part of capitalism and all of the nonsense that inflicts and all of the mental noise that inflicts to be witnessed and for us to grieve that together. That we are told so much that we want this thing that we don't actually need. And to make other things beautiful, to make another way of living beautiful. Which is interesting, too, about Mark Anthony Johnson's work with the way of the diet. And diet, the etymology is just 'a way of life.' That's what it is. And how to move out of this diet with capitalism and how to be like, "I don't want to be in that practice anymore," and how much violence is contingent upon it.
And my friend was being robbed. And that story, that history and like this kid going to prison, and like these two people going to prison – young man who was with him. It's just so tender to me. It's so tender for me, for the families because it's this persistent traumatic stress environment where everyone around me has somebody who's died, somebody who's been killed, somebody who's killed somebody else, somebody who's plotting to kill. And then in addition to that, we're experiencing state violence which has informed how we're killing one another. And there's not that room to memorialize the folks that we've lost.
And I'm really moved right now by dear teacher in my life, Theaster Gates, who the Stony Island Arts Bank, place that he recuperated through his practice the Rebuilt Foundation. They had the gazebo that Tamir Rice was killed underneath, 12 years old killed by the police for holding around a BB gun. No due process. No question. Do you have a gun? He's killed in like less than five seconds, it looks like. A child. And his mother asked for the gazebo. At first they were going to destroy it and she said, "I want the gazebo. I want it." And now Stony Island Arts Bank is not an exhibition they're calling it Caretaking Material Memory where they have these memories of the gazebo in this space they can barely go in. And this is the sound of Theaster and his mother, Tamir's mother, in a conversation about this decision to want it. And it's just all of these pieces of the gazebo, the memories of the tape and the teddy bears and all of those things.
And I'm just interested in transforming that landscape of trauma with Lead to Life. And the trees are also in pain from experiencing - being surrogates for white supremacy, literally being used to lynch black people. Trees don't want to do that. And to be in that allyship with the trees that accomplishship with the trees and with the soil to know that the soil doesn't want to have to take young black body so early – doesn't want to have to bring us into these unnatural deaths. Wants us to come when we're supposed to come because we've lived. And so I'm excited about gathering healers in Atlanta that I really respect will heal my body.
I met Kyle Lemle through the Spiritual Ecology Fellowship and bringing in his work around sacred tree planting and the medicine of Pedro Reyes' work with guns to shovels and just liberating these rituals into space, taking them out of museums, migrating them, like, being, like, "Okay, if someone has some medicine that we need to learn from, let's keep practicing it. Let's keep bringing it." I was working as a copy editor for Pedro's book and I read about Palas por Pistolas and his other work where he transforms weapons into instruments. I was like, "We need to do this everywhere!" Let's plant things. Let's plant food. Let's reimagine what security is. Let's decompose violence. Let's do that work together. And so this work of alchemy feels like the medicine that is really needed right now. And I'm excited to gather in Atlanta and we'll be gathering on the night that Dr. King was killed 50 years ago and it feels auspicious. It feels like that moment of where the quantum shifts can happen, where that energy is open, and I feel him in his life and legacy walking with us.
Ayana Young Wow brontë, I am so grateful for you and this work and the depth of your care and healing and intention and love. It is absolutely mind blowing. And I have one last bonus question for you because I am mesmerized by the way you communicate, by the way you express yourself. Watching you with groups of people in this interview, I'm always just so taken by how you can connect linguistically. And I feel like another reason we can get stuck in the movement or through healing is that the English language restricts our expansiveness because it's so utilitarian and reductionist and narrow and can lack spirit and animacy. And now as we journey further into the Anthropocene, we're facing unprecedented experiences that the English language doesn't have the wherewithal to describe. I know language is deeply important to you and I'm so curious if there's anything you'd like to share about your journey in decolonizing the way you communicate.
brontë velez Yes, this is my favorite thing. I was with my friend Harry I mentioned in New York this past August and I wanted to get a tattoo with alchemy – the alchemical symbol tattooed on my, at the base of my throat. And was really thinking about like, "Am I speaking from my mind? Or like, is this sound coming from my heart?" And language is really important to me because my parents named me this name that means 'thunder' and I think a lot about sound. I've had a fight with English as a poet and growing up as a poet and being like I and as a black Latinx woman person to be like, 'Okay, I'm not supposed to be speaking this language," and all the ways I relate to myself, my love, my being in the world are informed by the psychology of this language.
And I love English. One of its gifts is its flexibility. We can make it whatever it wants to be. We literally can make up any word you want as well, I love the Bureau of Linguistical Reality. And I love this idea of making up new words to inform our experiences at this time. So one way for me is making new words and naming experiences. Right now, I am working on a word to name the experience of words that only are the antithesis of what we want to separate ourselves from. For example, like non violence or anti-oppression, but we don't have the word for what non violence is, the only thing we know is it's not that. So that's what we've called it. And like, what would be a word to name that constellation of words so that we could start to understand our relationship to them. And naming is really critical. It allows things to have a shape - a shape in a way where we can see it from many sides.
And in addition to making up new words, I'm also interested in...Rooting English is an uprooted colonial language. We don't know where it comes from so we're speaking things and we don't know what spells that we're casting. We don't know the history of what we're saying. We don't understand the monetization of language. A lot of our language around time and love becomes about possession and its monetized. And like, I just listen a lot to how we're saying things and how I'm saying things and what I'm invoking when I let something come out of my body – how that sound effects people. And to really trust that it does to really, really, really know that it really does and to be careful to be careful because what we start to say becomes true. When we start to change our language, it changes us. And it's what I'm really excited about when I root the language...when I start to root it and bring it back to the ground, it has another experience.
I love English now because I'm able to go and be like, "I wonder what the etymology of this word is because I am diagnosing this sensation through a language that is colonial." And so I am actually closing off the experience of this sensation to be something else because I've already decided what it is because I've been told that this sensation means this. I've been told that this sensation is jealousy. This sensation is sadness. This sensation is anxiety. And when I learn that the etymology of anxiety is ‘narrow’ or when I learned that the etymology of jealous is ‘zealous,’ I go, "Wait, what was the point when those things got separated? And how did they? And what do I need to do to just be with these feelings and to be more in an embodied experience and to embody and root English a little more on it?" It feels very important to me that we are changing how we speak to one another. It was very important to me that we're asking, "What language are we praying in?" and I saw it in this Land Justice Anthology that just came out and the etymology of anthology. And antho- it comes from ‘anthos’ which means 'flowers.' There's a quote in there about "You can really know someone by the language that they cry in." I was like, wow, okay. Yeah, what language do I cry in? And also moving away from language and finding more ways to be embodied. I think that's really critical for this time, too. And I'm really moved by Kevin Quashie's work around The Sovereignty of Quiet. That's also coming to me a lot as medicine – to not say anything and to find quiet and to be moved by quiet or to be stilled by quiet.
Ayana Young Wow, brontë, you have been such a teacher to me in every conversation we have. I love the way your mind and heart function, the depth of your curiosity, and all of the roads that you walk down and bushwhack through. It's such a gift to spend time with you and wonder aloud together.
brontë velez Mmmmm. Thank you. So blessed, so humbled.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. The music you heard today was by Maho and Reverend Pearly Brown. I'd like to thank our producer Reachout, our research director Madison Magalski, and our media director, Molly Leebove.