Queer Swamp Roots
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[ 20 min ]
10 am, June 10th, 2024.
This is the second part of a series of texts on Cultural Rooting. Beginning with White Folx on Zoom - a text on Whiteness and Cultural Appropriation, I now continue to dive deeper into exploring the wet and murky roots and woodlands I grew up in and where I created a eco-spiritual identity for myself.
The world is not a map!
It was somewhere around 2016 when a couple of my friends wanted to buy a piece of land in Guatemala to start a queer community when I began to really feel something was very rampantly un-adressed in White spaces. This is not to say that I think white people should stay on their “own” land, if such a thing exists, but rather that I find we are tremendously at ease not considering our actions in the larger community properly.
There is no absolute judgement from my part on overseas projects or travels in general, this world is way to wild to place imaginary boundaries on it and hold people behind them, I find that backwards. The world and ethnicities and migration is so much older and more murky and more messy than the contemporary rendering of issues of privilege and power and what belongs to whom can nicely put in a pie-chart.
The world is not a map.
Yet this map-ness, the idea that a concept or history overlaps neatly onto the reality of the earth and people, is something I keep finding in critical discourse and in critical dialogues, and there we run the risk of turning the very alive non-linear and cross-pollinated world into a very linear and outlined map.
This is something that some of our colonial forebears have done to the entire planet as well, cutting up communities and kin alike with Papal lines on seafaring maps. So why continue that practice?
I do deeply long to be engaged more in soils and lands, and living in a country such as the Netherland, where buying or taking care of land is simply unaffordable, stepping back from an opportunity to develop a place to live near the lush Lago Atitlán was a turning point for my way of looking at the world at the time.
Despite it being so hard to connect with land in a way of stories, myths and spiritual practices in my land below the oceans, I realized it mattered to at least try.
Low-Land Druids?
As the only way to learn about myself, to find sense again, I began to enter and create a storied-network of my own swamp-y homeland roots and belonging, right here in this wet place that I'd formerly overlooked, including trauma and pain I wished to escape from formerly.
I circled for a while around artistic regurgitations of Druidry, a debated yet not-to-be forgotten aspect of pre-roman culture centred on wise initiate peace-keeper philosophers that held an upper class in Celtic societies. My exploration of these Euro-region-ish wisefolx was followed by creative-approximations of an imagined Pan-European pagan history.
But truth be told, it is hard to look for cultural roots when they are both erased, frowned upon, and often imagined to unclear extend.
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So, I grew up next to and played nearly-daily in the Urkhovense Zeggen, a wetlands living on the tributary of a river that was worshipped in Celtic times, and later by Romans as well. My grandfather was a peat-cutter in the same nearby wetlands that Ambriorix, the last king of the Erubones, used to escape a Roman battalion moving north.
The countless days my childhood talking to trees and clouds in my childhood swamplands have formed my own sacred natural experiences and ways sensing and finding myself.
Near the end of 2022, this process of investigating my roots began to draw in my own childhood deeper; one spent in seeking nervous-system regulation, spirituality and sexuality in the watery woodlands near my two teenhood homes. Escaping an overwhelming divorced parental realm, wherein one parent was in abusive relationship with alcohol as a means to cope, leaving me barren for mental and physical abuse somewhere between my early 2000 high school, and the nearby swamplands.
Mind you, it was a pre-woke era. We did not have Sex Education on Netflix. No. We had Will & Grace, and Karen, who I remember wanted to park her car on top of a group of Mexican people - as, a, joke?
90’s television is wild.
Back in the day, I really deeply needed the swamp, more than I realized at the time. As a neurodivergence queer person dealing with trauma, I perhaps needed the outdoors more than most average hiker. It took me to about 35 years to realize how fully it needed it. How fully the wetlands tutored me, whispering to me as a child - and me whispering back.
Somewhere in the spring of 2022, a friend asked me if I had autism. She recognized my descriptions of feeling intuitively connected with the outdoors as something her own child on the spectrum experienced often. It was the start of a long process of homecoming. And of questioning my connection to the outdoors, which to me had always been something sacred and spiritual.
I mean, there are countless examples of people leaving offerings in bogs and swamps all over Europe, and I felt like my relationship was part of that work, but it seems something more neurological is intermingled here too.
Non-Binary Swamps?
Two weeks ago, I gave an artist talk at Green Space Miami, a part of my artist-in-residency at AIRIE, in the middle of the Everglades National Park; a unique World Heritage site and wetlands currently listed as in danger of disappearing forever. During the Q&A at the end, my friend Lee asked me if the swamp is non-binary.
“Yes, it is!” I exclaimed, “the swamp is non-binary.”
Unknowingly, it is exactly this aspect that has been drawing me into the swamp since childhood. A place that is neither land not water, neither wet not dry, neither day or night. A twilight zone of in-between, defying easy determination, easy extraction, easy access and understanding.
It is so Queer, and so defiant.
It was only as recent as 2018 that I realized for the first time that I was non-binary, after endless questions and scrutinizing therapy that wanted to know if I was male and who I wanted to have sex with - trust, I'll rant more about this in later writings.
I can see now how the swamp has always been a perfect terrain to imagine a non-binary spirit within. To formulate one, perhaps, within myself: a murky singing Goddess.
The swamp is also sadness. And boy, I did not know how much the song of sadness would find me through my recent song writing. And I am so moved, as it finds me as an evocative teacher-healer that I had carried with me all this time.
Through a multiple year psycho-therapy training focussed on childhood trauma in 2016-2018, I had learned to enter my body time and again. But I had never before put that in my visual work consciously, besides the video EARTHHURT.
It felt potent. It beckoned me.
Tricky as it is to weave deeply personal aspects of mental health into an art practice, over the last year and a half I’ve managed to delve more deeply into this dark watery realm of my soul.
Under the banner of Wetlands Worship, I began to create work where the abuse that my body and mind endured is mirrored in the abuse and terror that the landscape has undergone - especially wetlands. In the historic drainage and the current mismanagements of wetlands globally, I trace the marking of Western Capitalist-Industry, spawning from an older exploitative imperial modus operandi of nation-states.
It is striking to me, how the Texandri and the Erubones, the Celtic and Gaulish folx living in what is now the province of North Brabant -my birthlands- also found refuge in the swamps when they escaped the Roman Empire encroaching on them, spreading their creepy nationstate and religious oppression.
All throughout Europe, the UK, Scandinavia and the Baltics, Swamps provided hiding places for people escaping militarized nations. This is true also for other parts of the world, where wetlands and mangroves have provided shelter for indigenous folks, escapees, and maroons.
Autistic-Nature Kinships
A decade before the notion of Climate Grief became mainstream, Pınar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd described their feelings of “deep ecological grief and shock” to their therapist. Without their knowing, Pınar was henceforth put on antipsychotic medications. In a recent text they published about the experience, they describe how it feels like the “ […] psychiatric and medical world want(s) to privatize and isolate these monumental feelings I (am) having, placing the onus on me to change, instead of society."
"Explicitly naming Indigenous grief in this project on settler colonialism ended in one of the deepest forms of colonialism there is – breaking down the bedrock of Indigenous reality and infusing the idea of “craziness” (…) as a mechanism for self-colonizing”. (1)
In my own experiences with clinical diagnosis, I asked the psychiatrist if she ever considers cultures who live with spirits and ancestors in more direct ways – if her diagnosis could comprehend such realities or factor them in? She said she didn’t.
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Western mental health is to a degree based on many White lies and colonial constructs on what a body, a person, an individual, or sanity is. I don’t mean to say that I have not found any help via conventional healthcare – pray tell, I and many others have done so. I do not wish to discredit the work done by both healthcare workers and by clients on their journey, but something is deeply absent from our health-systems, and I wonder if we can invite it back in, or if we need to burn it down like pyro-technician working on a a field of weeds.
“This is not costume; it is my being,” said Vaid-Menon in this 2019 post.
The effervescent gender-non-conforming poet explain that the way we look at our bodies as “individually bounded and enclosed by skin” is a particularly Western conception of body. They mention how clothing is something that we put onto the body, and not part of the body itself, much like our environment: it is seen as something around us, rather than it being us, or us being with it, and it being inside of us.
“I am not dressing up as; I am being myself, […] enmeshed in my surrounding, not isolated from it.”
It reminds of the gruesome stripping away the hair and regalia of Turtle Island indigenous, who would be forced to cut off their hair, and dismember their appearances as to fit with the "dress codes" at boardings schools. It seeks to strip humans of their entanglement with their cultural roles, traditions, and religious expressions – it tears apart the body of flesh and story in which we live.
The conceptual constitution of our body, identity and belonging with the world around us matters.
The way in which we draw or suspend boundaries between where we end and begin matters.
But there she goes, Western health declaring that we start and end at the edge of our naked, and preferably thoroughly washed and odourless body, and not our communities or enmeshments. I mean ghee, I don't want to be smelly either, but if there is one thing I learned from the swamp is that life smells. And so does sex.
And death.
Since September '22, I am on a low-dose of ADHD medication. It came as a miraculous answer to a decade long journey. It was surprising in many ways. Mostly because I had been a ferocious advocate of natural remedies and spiritual work for the mind up until that point, but also because the medication dissolved a whole string of issues I had been dealing with in one go.
Did I think not having meds would make me more natural? And that is somehow better?
Funnily enough I have had a document laying about on my computer, one that I started working on in Brazil in 2014 (!). The animistic text stresses how there is no such a thing as soberness in the world. If it is not coffee or hormones, then it be political ideas, hunger, or the way we are thought to see the world. We are always under the influence of something.
It might take 11 years until you suddenly eclipse the topic of research by becoming it's embodiment. Maybe this is what artistry is, or what the life of a performer is: to form and become, to undergo as to understand, in order to create.
Thirty-five years on this solemn globe in the cosmos and no single doctor, not once, inquired me about ADHD or neurodivergence. I had to litterally demand care, repeatedly, to prompt investigation beyond the usual paracetamol. It is shocking to come about your mid 30's with SO much information and access to a community centered on the stuff I've struggled with my whole life. A vast and expanding communal world of knowledge that is shared amongst fellow neurodivergent people has opened up me since the meds and the diagnosis of ADHD.
But not via any medical establishment, no, it's all instagram and friends, baby. A world of nuance and kinship brought to me. A gift as rich as the worlds I found through being Queer.
So, it is natural that I am saddened by the skepticism, phobia and unwarranted critique that the cis-hetero and neuro-straight world throws at those of us with more nuanced specifics. Especially when they make claims of us not being "natural". Just fuck off. Did you ever actually listen to the world spill its abundance? Pearls before swines.
The fallacy of critiques on many "woke"-identies, besides pretending that they are something new and superfluous, is the way they undermine and overlook the deeply rooted and intermingling knowledges that are stimulated and generated in the respective communities of all these special folx.
Epistemologies that are of course developed foremostly as a means of survival within a neuro-straight world, but beyond that they form a joyeus and exhuberant resource that can help to better understand what being a human (can) entail(s) in this enchanted realm-scape we co-habitate.
None of us are numeric indexable point on some AI algorithm, despite what the hellscape brought on by the contemporary Social Media and Algorithm science likes to dictate.
We are each infinitesimally unique and specific, albeit that not a lot of us are thought or invited to access that depth.
Ecological Co-regulation
In the astonishing text When seeing the world as alive is called madness, Indigenous multi-species futurist Pınar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd describes how they became friends with pigeons and squirrels. They then outline a groundbreaking framework that draws in the natural world as a partner in nervous system regulation.
“Co-regulation," they write, "is a term used for mutual nervous system regulation between two or more beings."
"Ecological Co-regulation is when we engage in a mutual nervous system regulation with the more than human world.”
What we see here is an indigenous experience of animism converging with a branch of contemporary Western psychology, namely that of attachment theory and of nervous-system regulation, which is a cascade of physiological responses that our nervous system makes in order to reduce heightened states of arousal and increase calmness during times of distress. Regulation is an important need of neurodivergent people, who often need to regulate their bodies and minds in a world not designed with them in mind.
The implications and meaning of Co-Regulation with the Natural World is huge for me. Both on a personal level, but also on a larger societal one. It bleeds into the understanding that we are in fact able to find secure attachment with the environment, was it not for that environment to be in such rampant distress itself. In a upcoming essay, I will dive deeper into the notion of secure attachment with and through our relating with the landscape. Coined by Dare Sohei, the field of Animist Somatics will show us just how deep the multi-generational wound which we facing is, a chasm that has left both our ecological systems as well as our communities cut up and bleeding.
I recall how during a mental health diagnosis in Amsterdam in the spring of 2022 I was asked if I ever see things that others don’t. ‘You mean like Racism?” – I offered, deadpan.
It is horrifying, truly, how the Western medical world all too often takes the deeply felt connection with more-than-human environments either too lightly, or worse, it literally pathologizes this as a sensitivity to ‘hearing’ and/or ‘feeling’ things that “aren’t there”.
I told the doctor that in most of my life I’ve been able to sense serious health issues inside someone’s body by placing my hand on them, and how strong pulls in energy and visible dense gray energies in zones in the park or the cityscape inform me not to go there, and that whenever I ignore these signals there is always either a group of homophobic teens, aggressively intoxicated people who throw things, or an ex-lover. Delusion? Trauma-informed childhood sensitivity skills? Witchcraft? Shaman? Who knows. The guidance is native to me like naps in shaded grass on sunny afternoons, or writing on a duvet-covered couch while June hail spoils the summer soils.
As we speak, I am wrapping much of what is written here into a larger publication that coils around all these interrelated topics, forming a rich mycelium centered somewhat on the notion of the “wounded healer”, an exploration that I began in my 2013 Graduation thesis at the Piet Zwart Institute.
The idea is that people who are wounded can become great healers. It is an ancient shamanic principle, but I also see it mirroring a lot of neuro-queer pride and community.
In the writing, I attempt to wrap all these notions together in a sort of field trip through histories of environmentalism and philosophies of health and the body, passing also through communities of sensitive somatic bodies, queer witchcraft, neurodivergence, and speculative spells that might be able to remedy a world driven by extractivism and greed. Paired with the writing, I’ve been doctoring the making of an artistic documentary video called Drained. Weaving the narrative of drained and tainted wetlands with the psychological maiming that has happened in my own life. “I only stink because you drained me,” I said, while performing as the Murky Murky Little Bitch Witch mid 2023, voicing the anger of the drained swamplands, and passages of my own history.
Don't miss out!
Rain strikes down the window of my illegal Jordaan subrent.
My boyfriend just went to work. It’s noon. I remember I set out to talk about appropriation and roots at the start of this draft.
I love that this cold rainy day prompted me to spill all this out. I am excited to write after what seems to have been a huge creative block since early October, and the darkness that followed.
I hope that the passage we went on has made it more clear how my own journey of rooting into landscape and trauma renders the desire for cultural appropriation utterly obsolete.
Is there even a need for someone else's culture when one finds their own? The body, in relation to land and spirit, and each other, that is.
Looking back at White Zoom guy, I just want to ask: do you even know what you're missing out on?
Is the controversy of staging politically controversial works worth it? Did it bring you more deeply and more comfortably into the vast nexus of life and death that we are enmeshed in on this globe?
The appropriation of "other" cultures does not only produce an often facsimile, superficial and often commerce-based service and or product-version of a deeply enmeshed cultural practice outside our full comprehension, it also often turns age-old wisdoms into mere anecdotes or inspirational quotes that we have to sell as artists-tutors during lectures. And yes, still we can find cultural theory and literature and practices of elsewhere vastly inspirational, and I am happy it is so. Thank fuck we have such an abundant world. But it is rare to have the study of other-than-western ontologies bring about a full understanding of the world they are embedded in, let alone our own.
I say rare, not to overlook the mystic soul, the deep wanderers and voracious academics and teachers that I know study the world and the self deeply and virtuously, but because nearly never this richness finds its way into pragmatic politics, applicable management systems or locally rooted cultural practices of our own.
Perhaps because we have so little to start with or stem those inspirations on?
The ecological tapestries of human and non-human existences have become deeply maimed by the onslaught of the ‘developed world’. I think the notion of stemming is crucial, in order to fully bring home something that has inspired us.
Stemming is a form of plant propagation which involves a part of something shooting roots in or on a existing base terrain. A "new" plant can grow from a source, such as seeds, cuttings, or another plant parts - but we need to plant it on something that is already alive for it to graft.
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Despite my deep understanding of the craving and the motivation of seeking out mysticism, wisdom and even leisure in the faraway in an attempt to cover the wounded void within our own cultures, I stress that in doing so we miss out on the murky wetlands, and other types of environments that are native to us, whispering to us. Trust, I love going to Yoga classes as well, and I do believe my own travels have made me predisposed of deeper understanding of my own soils, but no namaste or “peace wishes” ever truly brought me home to a realm where dark and light are merged like they do in the sacredness of my swamp.
The rooted homecoming in one’s own culture (that is, the praxis of embodied and storied relatedness to the environment, the self and our kin) actually brings us closer to the source of inspiration that we hope to find elsewhere.
In a paradox that is beyond my grasp, entering deeper into one’s own story seems to create bridges that travers cultures and histories, feeding connections with one-another, all stuck on this forsaken green sphere spinning in and out of fascism, while it circles the sun at some 1600 kilometers per hour, buccaneering its way across the galaxy.
XOX
Venus
- Queer Swamp Roots is part of My Queer Swamp, a collection of personal and autobiographical essays partially payed for RE_NATURE platform.
- Cover image: mangrove roots at Flamingo Point, Everglades National Park (USA).
Footnotes:
(1) When seeing the world as alive is called madness, Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd, Pp.77-83 in Nature is a Human Right, 2022