Category: Creative Non-Fiction

        by Dot Armstrong

 

Compost is Cyclical

        A mouse wriggles in from a hole in the bin’s outside. Burrowing up, sideways, and through, little paws disrupt compacted layers. Above, the fresher stuff. Weeds, straw, leaf detritus. Yesterday’s breakfast, still recognizable: coffee grounds, newspapers, eggshells, grapefruit rinds, pineapple crowns. Below, soil in the making. In the middle, scrabbling for purchase in the ripe darkness, the mouse digs a cave. She can’t see where she is but she feels a pulse. The pile seethes with rot. Though the top freezes, it heats from the inside, making a cozy spot for a rodent to spend a long winter. Microbes eat and fart, performing alchemical spells through their miniscule digestive tracts while the mouse sleeps. Snow comes, covering the bin and heavying its contents. The mouse and microbes sleep and eat, oblivious. The seasons shift: freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw and thaw again until the smell of last December’s grapefruits hits the air. The mouse stirs among the stems and seeds and the human grabs the pitchfork. It’s time to flip the compost.

 

Compost is Personal

        I left Brooklyn in March last year. I stayed at my parents’ house in Minnesota for what I thought would be a brief exodus from the virus. April came; I got restless. Birds darted through the warming air and tulip shoots poked through the leaf detritus on the lawn. As a kid, one of my chores was emptying the silver compost bucket onto the pile in the back garden. This task once belonged to my dad, but he usually forgot about it. So: as the prodigal child and out-of-place city kid, I returned to an ancient responsibility. I even declared that I’d turn the compost—proposing a complete takeover of the whole disposal-and-aeration affair. After a few fragrant experiments over the years, we learned it’s crucial to aerate the compost. Think of the pile like a parfait: if all the vegetable matter squishes together in compact layers, the microbes can’t digest it. Digging through the pile shuffles the layers around, giving every scrap a chance at decomposition.

        A simple acolyte to the compost’s eternal flame, I had my quest. The tools were simple, elegant: a pitchfork with sloping tines and three black barrels containing the compost. I tied my hair up and threw an extra bandanna around my neck. I planted my feet athwart the middle barrel, plunged the fork into the pile with a thud and heaved free a half-frozen chunk. Holding the weight of half-asleep microbes, I thought about New York. Like the compost, the city fosters a complex togetherness. Disparate entities, all packed together—dense and intertwined as layers of squash skins and banana peels. These networks, the connections we can’t bury, either help us or haunt us.

 

Compost is Communal

        As long as humans have eaten, they have composted. An ancient practice, old as decomposition itself. And composition: during Sargon’s reign in 2300 BC, Akkadian farmers wrote fertilizer reports in cuneiform. Scots and Britons, Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards, Chinese and African farmers all created systems for turning shit into gold. Here in the States, indigenous folks perfected techniques to enrich the soil with nitrogen using fish, dung, and food scraps. Techniques abound, but one truth remains: when you’re composting, you’re never alone. In New York, you’re also never alone. Composting should be a cinch.  But city-wide compost collection stopped altogether in spring 2020 and hasn’t yet resumed. I wasn’t there at the outset, but I want to know what happened.

        Where was I in the interim? Adjusting my bandanna over a barrel of microbes, reveling in the rank, funky scents rising to my nose. I stabbed at the gnarly tangle, glimpsing buried textures thawing in the sun. Unfrosted whorls, a winter’s worth of organic Gordian knots: skins, pits, pith, and rinds; seeds and leaves, mats of grass, severed roots, peelings—a living archive of decay, animated library of discarded materials barely resembling their former shapes. What looked like waste was fecundity coming out of hibernation. Just as vital as the tulips. A chaotic snarl of abundance. Life, smelling like death. As I thrust my tines in again and forked over more of the frosty top layer, a ripe warmth swelled up.
The compost had its own temperature. And I sweated my own smell over the mix.
I stink the body electric, I hummed, flexing my muscles.

        Whitman’s dream, echoes of Marx. Compost is an effort for the greater good, an earthy project of redemption and resistance. An ecstatic dissolution of individual parts into something richer. Cedar waxwings sang and shat in the trees as I fed the seething mass of microbes their breakfast. Making space; giving life. Over and over. Simple motion. But who turns the piles in Brooklyn? Who turns the city to face the turning seasons, the opening world? What values do we find, distilled like soil at the bottom of this year and the next?  I came back in September 2020. Theaters were closed; restaurants and bars were serving bold customers. Schools struggled to keep up with curriculum. Compost, once a component of lofty climate goals and a source for green jobs, was last
on everyone’s list.

 

Compost is Messy

        New York produces 14 million tons of waste per year. Bags on the corner for trash day, sagging with carrot peelings from the banh mi place, moldy cronuts from the bakery, pizza crusts. Lemon slices and soggy fries from the dive bar next door scattered across the sidewalk. So: where do we put food scraps to avoid this unidirectional horror? Pre-pandemic, the New York City Department of Sanitation managed compost in two ways: through residential collection and independent drop-off sites. To receive residential collection service, you needed a “food scraps and yard waste” bin to put beside your
trash and recycling bins—city employees did the rest, collecting an estimated 50,000 tons of compost in 2019. 50,000 tons of cilantro stems, wilted lettuce, onion skins, eggshells, mango peels. The New York City Compost Project, founded in 1993, once partnered with seven locations across the five boroughs to facilitate food scrap drop-
off and compost education. GROW NYC arrived in 2011 to close the loop between locally-sourced food and locally-sourced food waste at its Greenmarkets and gardens. And let
it be known: New York’s community gardens are magical little spots, minor shrines to the deities of rot and reuse, decked out with flags and signs and furnishings reminiscent of the ‘hood they’re from. Odds are, there’s one right around the corner. From the Lower East Side to Ridgewood, gardens flourish with tenacity in unbelievably small spaces. Composting is a typical exception to strict members-only rules at the gardens. There’s
a tacit understanding. We’ve all got food scraps; we need to put them somewhere. And we’d be tripping if we erased that reality by dumping our carrot tops and apple cores in the trash. Compost: the great equalizer.

        As the pandemic spread and I high-tailed it for the Midwest, composting sites across the five boroughs shut down. Deeming collection unsafe, the city cut funding for the Department of Sanitation’s program on May 4, 2020. The cycle stopped altogether. And New Yorkers did what New Yorkers do: they took matters into their own hands. Spring arrived. Magnolias bloomed in the botanical gardens. A friend of a friend started collecting compost for his neighbors after the NYC Compost Project laid him off. Shocked by the lack of support from the city, he outfitted his bike with a capacious trailer and pedaled through the boroughs. Another friend made a weekly pilgrimage of her own. She biked from 148th Street in Harlem to Dean Street in Brooklyn, taking the Waterfront Greenway bike path down the west side of the island and crossing the Manhattan Bridge, carrying food scraps in her backpack.

        Meanwhile, outside the city and far away from convoluted urban infrastructure, I stepped into my parents’ backyard and lifted the lid on the barrels. Considered the many peregrinations, the cycles of arrive and return, arrive and return. I considered the miles I’d have
to travel to get back to my apartment, the distance between what I knew of the city pre-pandemic and what the city might become upon my return. Not an afterlife, exactly, but a revitalization. Second coming. The new metropolis, bustling and stirring with civic activity. Rot to soil; isolation to communion. Resurrection.

 

Compost is Ritual

        Five minutes by foot, two minutes by bike. There’s a line. There’s always a line, here in the city- Brooklyn on a Sunday is no exception. We wait, solicitous and patient as parishioners waiting for communion or parents waiting for school dismissal, clutching our bags and pails and buckets. Afternoon means queue, means showing up. A duty we took on; a project we are still responsible for. Two steel buckets on the sidewalk brimming with scraps half-frozen and multicolored in the bright January air. I clutch my own bag of peelings, rinds, and seeds, feeling the weight of the week’s refuse. A volunteer stabs one bucket with a shovel, making room for my offering. I’ve walked past the Prospect Heights Community Farm so many times, it took consulting Google Maps to find its exact location: cradled between two brick apartment buildings, across the street from PS. 9. Here I am, and here it is: square, deep, and withered to match the season. Though the black iron gate is locked, I imagine strolling forever into the tangled mass between the buildings. Trees branch and bend; raised beds, stalks, stems, seedheads, rocks, paths, benches. There’s a lot I can’t see. From where I’m standing, the back of the garden doesn’t exist. Does it end? Climbing vines caress a 5th-floor windowsill.

        More things I can’t see: legislation, boundaries, agendas. When the city quit collecting, the Farm welcomed anyone with a bag of roughage. But I know there’s not enough space here to process all the organic material from my neighbors’ endless pandemic kitchen experiments. On the gate, hand-lettered posters reading “OPEN HOURS” sag against fiberglass placards from the city council. Best Green Space 2017. Best Neighborhood Garden 2018. City gardens are as much made of words as they are of seeds and soil.
And what of the name? Utopian forecasting: call it a farm and the meager plot will stretch, exceeding its confines and urban situation, brimming with space and possibilities. Not exactly the shit-polishing of the delis and markets—every block in Brooklyn has its own “World’s Best Cup of Coffee”—but an agricultural variant. Call it what you want it to be.

 

Compost is Revolutionary

        The term compost derives from Old French, then Latin. One etymological direction produces compote, stewed fruits to drizzle over ice cream; another makes soil. Compost is a mixture, a putting-together, a combination bigger than the sum of its parts. Compost is a party, an improvisation: it’s a jam session roiling with unpredictable harmonies. Compost is beyond ripe. It’s frightening, anarchic. No wonder it scares us a little. Food scraps decay at rates slower or quicker than human expectation and take on new forms foreign to our senses. Fragments of recognizable produce—celery leaves, squash skins, apple cores—get weird in the pile’s deep heat.

        And here’s the weirdest part: there’s a hierarchy of waste. Trash bag mountains line the sidewalk on my route to Prospect Heights Community Farm. Blue and black, grey
and white, slouching empty or stuffed with bizarre angles. Towering heaps spilling down the curb and into the street. So what, we say, the trucks will take them somewhere else. Keep walking. Trash is ubiquitous in the city. The Big Apple’s real rotting core. And where does it go? Consider: New York sends its trash as far away as the Carolinas for processing. What would the city look like if the wine bottles and takeout containers and aluminum foil burger wrappers and single-serving froyo cups stuck around? We’d have to build our luxury condos in the black bag mountains. Compost is gnarly, yes, but in the way Brooklyn hipsters are gnarly: gross, sure, but beguiling and sexy. A hot mess. Trash,
on the other hand, warrants no shot at redemption. Compost is reincarnation, hippie garden magic; trash is Capitalist waste. Real waste. Real death.

        NYC promised to send zero waste to regional landfills by 2030. The crisis, as always, is spatial. Expanding alternative systems for waste management means rethinking where and how we live. The answers rely neither on community gardens nor city collection alone. We need composite solutions: many locations, many hands. The reality is not seamless, but tangible, proximal. Two spaces in particular offer visions for New York’s food waste future—but they’re in trouble. The Lower East Side Ecology Center, a satellite of the NYC Compost Project, continues to accept and process food scraps as it has since 1987. This location, along with the Big Reuse in Queens, faces removal due to misguided city planning. Eviction threatens humans and their microbial companions alike. Consider: would you rather live next to a garden fragrant with new soil, or a dump?

        Big Reuse processes GROW NYC’s compost. LESEC, in addition to processing, offers educational programming and equipment distribution. When these spaces—and the humans with pitchforks who tend them and render them operational—are forced out, the city has no recourse but to keep throwing things away. Compost, residing down the block like an eccentric neighbor, gives the lie to this illusion: there is no away.

 

Compost is the Future

        I am explaining Easter to the kid I babysit. She’s eating pineapple chunks out of
a plastic container and I am standing beside the sink, chopping garlic for a stir fry.
The discussion began when she offered her definition of Jesus: he’s the Messiah,
and the Romans had him crucified- which means they nailed him to a cross! Ok, tell me about what happened after he died, I prompt, raising my eyebrows. She blinks. I chuckle, crossing my eyes and sticking my tongue out. Braaaaains! I groan. Her fork thuds to the table in a spray of yellow juice. Zombie Jesus?! Oh, right! He was dead, and then he wasn’t! she exclaims. I shake the papery garlic skins into the compost bag, along with the vegetables’ earthly remains: carrot tops, broccoli peels, radish tails, furled layers from decapitated onions. This Sunday, I’ll tote my bag to the community garden and start
the cycle anew. Rot to soil. Scent of citrus rinds, overripe pineapple, moldy leaf matter. Birds chirping; mouse nibbling; humans in the garden, grunting and huffing. Turn, turn, turn.

        A city without compost is an impossible utopia. A family without arguments, a theater premiere with no line, a deli without bagels. To meet the next phase of New York’s awakening, we must concede to live amid the waste we create. It is our quest. Take up your pitchforks and buckets, people. Locate your nearest community garden; petition your leaders to value compost collection as an essential service. Look at the leavings from the breakfast you just made. See beauty in entropy, loveliness in dry grapefruit
skins and discarded coffee grounds.  Renew your faith in decay.

 

by Esther Vincent Xueming

I find myself standing again at the edge of the road, although now, there is something different, I can’t quite pinpoint what, about this road from the road I remember. In search of the field of my childhood, I cross. In this dream, the place I grew up in is familiar yet strange, and instead of a small patch of grass that used to mark the boundary between this estate and the next, there is now a manicured lawn with various kinds of weird and wonderful animals perambulating.

But this is not the field of my childhood—where as a child of nine or ten, I used to ramble for hours on my own while my mother did her chores in our apartment on the third floor, leaving me to return with bunches of wildflowers and rapt stories of tiger moths—so I continue walking down the road, on the red road tiles shaped like arrows pointing me home, through the void decks of the housing estate, under sheltered walkways connecting block to carpark, past the empty playing court where you could string a net or ride around in circles on your bike, towards the lift lobby, normally flooded with natural light, now morphed into a dark corridor. But I walk further still, towards the phone booth near the letter boxes on the ground floor, because my memory tells me that beyond the labyrinth of pillars, the grey of concrete will give way to a field of green.

 

//

 

Mary Oliver writes in Upstream that a writer’s subject may just as well be what she “longs for and dreams about, in an unquenchable dream, in lush detail and harsh honesty”. And yet, to long for the subject of this essay, the field of my childhood, is to long for a broken and irretrievable past. A place or habitation I can no longer enter in the physical sense though I keep returning to it in my dreams, in various iterations and permutations, the field changing each time, but still the same.

The field of my dreams was once a field of green, inhabited by wildflowers I would only later learn the names of. One day, upon visiting my mother, she hands me two books I used to own as a child: A Guide to the Wildflowers of Singapore and A Guide to Medicinal Plants, scientific handbooks published by the Singapore Science Centre. I flip the cover and on the reverse side, my mother’s name “Mrs. Vincent Elaine” is written in blue ink, dated “10/3/99”, against paper ringed with the sepia of mould. These would be the same two handbooks I would consult twenty one years later as I revise a poem for a Creative Writing Graduate course about childhood, memory and change.

But what of the field, you ask?

To paint a landscape from memory, one has to take certain liberties. But let me endeavour to recreate the scene as accurately as I can remember. As accurately as it is deserving of memory. To a child, the field was an immeasurable expanse of grassland, a gentle slope leading up to a plateau where all around, an ocean of green. Of course there were already high-rise blocks bordering the edges of the field, but a child’s mind is immune to limits and boundaries, and so I invented stories and places, telling myself that to my north was a strange and forbidden land (in reality, my mother had disallowed me from venturing too far, the field containing my adventures and exploits), to my east, the road of daily traffic, to my south, my castle, my home, and to my west, nothing of real consequence.

The adventure begins with waving goodbye to my mother, walking out the house gates in slippers, my fingers trailing the white walls of the corridor, fingering the peeled beige paint of the metal staircase. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I would be greeted by a tiger moth resting on the wall, but if not, I would skip down the three floors of stairs, walk past the lift landing on the ground floor, towards the pillars at the void deck, phone booth to the left, letter boxes somewhere nearby. Past all that, the block would end with a narrow strip of metal drains, and all I had to do was take a breath and cross over, and I would enter another world.

The field was always there for me, waiting. And I was always eager to be alone in her company. I remember climbing up the little slope with great effort, imagining it was a steep incline, and then running across the wide expanse, lungs bursting like the white tufts of the common vernonia fruits when they explode from the tight cups of their flowering, or blowing bubbles into the air when I brought along with me a small bottle of cheap soap. I remember touching and sniffing the wildflowers, knowing they were common weeds but loving them all the same. How I would look for grass blues, little silver-blue butterflies that were ever in abundance, flitting from wildflower to wildflower, doing their work diligently, interrupted only by my thumb and forefinger when I picked them up in wonder, before setting them free on their powdery voyage.

The grass was green and the field of my childhood was open to me, like a mother whose heart would daily welcome the daughter who stood at the door, asking to return home.

 

//

 

We are told a story of scarcity and economy, one whereby our government’s land use policy is predicated upon the need to “optimise limited land” to meet the demands of the people. As a small nation-state with supposedly little natural resources, we believe that people are our key resource, and that our land should be subject to stringent planning for the continual growth and development of the nation. Redevelopment, the word is sandy in my mouth, and so I gather it into a ball and spit each grain out.

Here, it is common for the average citizen to view land as a scarce commodity, a piece of real estate that appreciates or depreciates in economic value, a thing to buy, sell, rent, cordon off, tear down, build over. Rationalised in pragmatics terms, land is partitioned into parcels and plots, put up for the wealthy to acquire and commercialise. A house serves its purpose well in so far as it facilitates day-to-day living, and most of the time, when housing decisions are made, factors like proximity, accessibility and convenience rank at the top of a homebuyer’s list. Home owners buy and sell their houses when the property market works in their favour, buying when low and selling when high, and so we trade our homes for houses of brick and stone in the housing marketplace.

Marshall Sahlins, cultural anthropologist, writes that “modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest peoples”.

As a child growing up, I had little notion of this at the beginning. My childhood before the age of six was a hazy blur, and much of what I recall about home was aided by old photographs, which conjured long forgotten memories of sand-filled playgrounds, a bulky, red, wired telephone, a tricycle in the living room, dark sliding doors in the bedroom, my father carrying me in his arms, smiling by the main door gate. We had lived in two different parts of Singapore by then, Yishun which was in the north, and then Serangoon North, which was the northeast. Much of that I have forgotten.

The home of my remembered childhood, the one that appears to me time and again in my dreams, is the place of my primary school years, of taking the school bus, then the public bus to our school at the other side of Tampines, of crossing the road, past the small patch of green, and plucking a handful of Cupid’s Shaving Brush to secretly feed the neighbour’s rabbits before heading home. Going over to the Thai home-based hair salon for a cheap haircut, then walking past the basketball court quickly to avoid getting hit by the ball. Spending hot afternoons after school watching Speedy Gonzales on the television, and then racing for joy downstairs to the void deck with my father, back from work in the evenings, to rollerblade from pillar to pillar, pillar to his arms.

Cycling in dizzying circles in my living room, holding large birthday parties, and once, hearing the sounds of an Indian wedding from down below, I ran to the kitchen window and caught a glimpse of the procession. Bride and groom smiling, flowers strewn on the red road tiles, the scent of jasmine and the drumming of the tabla lingering in my awestruck mind long after another season of monsoon rains washed over the city.

Before I turned thirteen, we would sell this house, and move even closer to my secondary school, affiliated to my primary school and located at the same site. Here, high-rise blocks lined both sides of the small road. We would only be a five-minute walk away from school, where before, we had to take a thirty-minute bus ride with our ponderous school bags. There was a coffeeshop and some amenities on the ground floor, which made it convenient. While this new place was much smaller, there was built-in air-conditioning, as well as cabinets in both bedrooms, so we could readily move in with little renovations.

True, there would be no more large birthday parties, no slipping next door to our Malay neighbours’ place for cookies and cake. I would no longer be able to meet my cousins who lived a few blocks away to rollerblade, cycle, or play. There were no sand-filled playgrounds with the smell of rank piss, but by this time, I had outgrown playgrounds, and moved on to crushes instead. While downsizing from a spacious four-roomed to a three-roomed apartment financed our first family trip down south to Sydney and Melbourne, in hindsight, I now regret the price we paid just to afford ten days of leisure.

I remember our last weeks in my childhood home. Our bedroom was locked, and now filled with the belongings of the new homeowners. The house no longer smelt of the five of us, but of an inevitable past and a beckoning future, housed into one living, breathing space. We would leave behind wall posters and charts of fruits, vegetables and Chinese characters, for the new homeowners to do with them as they pleased. Perhaps I visited the field everyday, perhaps I willed myself to forget, perhaps I truly forgot about it in my delirium to grow up and move away.

Or perhaps I shut the door to the memory of my field because the pain of separation was too much for a child of twelve to bear.

 

//

 

A girl observes from a distance an indiscernible shape on a hill, which unfolds into a red fox. The fox unfurls, bows and stretches its body, unaware of the girl. It takes its time, licking its front paws, looks around and eventually ambles away. The girl comes to a profound realisation—that life goes on in spite of her. The red fox and the girl, both alive, both sharing the same space for a moment in time, the girl regarding the fox, the fox disregarding the girl.

This is what I reimagine of a poem by Mary Oliver, although I have taken the liberty to dream that the girl stands in a field at the foot of the hill, wishing she could peel off her skin, shake loose her luscious, red fur, and bound off to join the others in the woods just beyond the hill.

 

//

 

Secondary school would pass with little nostalgia for my childhood home. I entered polytechnic, I graduated, I worked for over a year in a small marketing firm. I received a teaching bond and travelled across the island for four years to complete my education degree, and returned to my secondary school, this time as a teacher.

The field did not come to me in my dreams, and I was now a young woman of twenty-seven. Jo Gill writes in her chapter “Poetry and Place” that a “return to the country is also a return to the self”. In this case, the field was my country, the country was my childhood, my childhood was the part of my self I had barred shut behind a door in order to survive.

Perhaps it is Eavan Boland, who in “The Woman, the Place, the Poet”, says it most poignantly, that “there is the place that happened and the place that happens to you”.

The field of my childhood happened to me, and when a tiger moth landed on my kitchen windowpane one evening as I was doing the dishes, it was as though the waters in the well of my memory, the silence and loss buried within my subconscious, began brimming and running over, flooding the shores of my conscious waking self. The tiger moth as spirit guide, as patient teacher, as intuitive dreamer, leading me by my fingertips on a bittersweet journey of returning.

 

//

 

Let me tell you the Iroqouis creation myth of Skywoman.

Skywoman fell from Skyworld down into the water below, and was greeted and cared for by all the animals there. Turtle carried her on his back, and after many gave up their lives trying to get her mud from the bottom of the lake, little muskrat succeeded before he too breathed his last. Skywoman was grateful to the animal beings for their sacrifice, and she created land with that mud, blessing the earth with all manner of seeds, plants and trees, her hair, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, reminding us of Skywoman and bringing to mind forgotten stories that tell of our indigenous and reciprocal bonds to the land.

I read this moving creation story from the first chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass, written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a mother, scientist and Potawatomi nation citizen, and I think of how, like Skywoman, my ancestors too left their homes, leaving behind memories and maps of the rocky plateaus, hilly plantations, waterfalls and beaches of Sri Lanka, the salt deserts, arid scrublands and coastal plains of Gujarat, the mountains, farmlands and infamous harbour of Fujian, known also as the starting point of the “silk road of the sea”, the forests and caves of Ipoh.

What did they expect, crossing the seas, when they finally set foot on a land whose name, derived from Sanskrit, meant lion city? Displaced from the lands of their ancestors and the homes of their births, they would soon forget their own stories of home. What was once memory, now lost and forgotten, like the winds that blow gently away at the sands of time.

But if I look back even further, if I dive into the darkness of the pool of my ancestry, beyond the abyss of time and remembering into the mantle of history to witness the first birth, my first mother, I will find her in the Northern Islands of Melanesia. Towards the end of the book, in the chapter, “Defeating Windigo”, Kimmerer writes that we all come from “people who were once indigenous”, and in genetically tracing my ancestry, I am beginning to understand why I have always felt drawn to the song of the sea, the tug of the winds in the sails of a boat, the beckoning of the stars like a celestial map charting my coordinates, pointing me home. On my right thigh, an anchor to steady the boat, and an eight-pointed compass star for direction.

Perhaps, I am remembering the way of my ancestors, who could once read the winds and the stars at the back of their hands, who one day sailed away from their islands and did not return, whose travels, migrations and displacements over land and sea over time has birthed me home on this new island, this island whose body of red hills, green forests and thriving coral reefs has been shaped by the sickled hands of men into a sinking first-world city. Like the non-native Flame of the Forest trees that hail all the way from Madagascar, my roots have sprouted and continue to tunnel deep into the earth in a land I call home.

I sing myself home as a child of ten in a field of green, wildflowers still wet in the grip of my fist. I sing myself home as I walk down a familiar road, navigating my way back home in a dream. I sing myself home at the edge of a lush, verdant field full of rolling hills, finding myself in another dream. I sing myself home as all around me, wildflowers and green fields turn into terrifying towers rising like pristine chimney stacks against the dazzling sky.

 

//

 

To be indigenous to land is to care for the land, to nurture and cultivate it so that it looks after our children long after we are gone. If we look to nature, we find that she is the best teacher, showing us how to tend to the gardens of our lives, through planting and watering seeds of gratitude, balance and reciprocity, and weeding out greed, strife and selfishness.

A few years back, I learnt the Hawaiian word Kuleana, which embodies the reciprocal relationship and responsibility we have with and to the land. Kuleana, I write this in green on my chalkboard door as a daily reminder to myself. Kuleana, my heart jumps with joy when two stray dogs lie in the empty field in front of my new home, where I now live in the northeastern part of the island. Kuleana, from my window, fourteen migratory egrets visit today in the field down below, wintering here all the way from southeastern China or Korea. Kuleana, the workers have set up wooden fences, they have wrapped you, field, in a ghost net of blue. Kuleana, they have sent in the excavators and towering blue cranes; so it begins. Kuleana, how do I still find the strength to sing on as their drills bore deep into the wet belly of the earth?

 

//

 

This time, the field is lush, full of vegetation that only takes on such girth when nursed by the tropical sun and rain. There are verdant, rolling hills, and wild animals grazing. I see boars and dogs together, and I know then that I am in another dream, and though my body now sleeps in yet another part of this island city, my mind is travelling in space and time, excavating the dream-world of the subject of unquenchable desire, a desire for home.

According to Martin Heidegger, the topology of Being is to dwell on the earth by means of building. Apart from physical buildings, language too can be a way by which human beings attempt to build their dwelling places. A prerequisite of dwelling is caring for one’s dwelling place, by cultivating and constructing home as we know it. The English word eco can be traced to its Greek origins oikos, meaning house. The house as a home, the earth as our first home, the home as the centre of our universe.

 

//

 

It is hard for me to return.

The field that used to occupy my time and imagination no longer remains. Instead, it is replaced by another estate of high-rise apartments, buildings that house nameless, faceless others, weeding their way into the field of my childhood, blocking off the view my mother used to have when she looked out the corridor from her chores. When I was a child, she tells me she loved to watch The Little House on the Prairie. Googling it now as an adult, I wonder if she too felt the prairie’s call through the screen, halfway across the world from Plum Creek, that unspeakable urge to burst out of the metal gates and launch into the open of an endless green. Her own prairie in the tropics, her daughter in the field.

Canadian poet Anne Szumigalski, who spent her formative years growing up in the prairie, acknowledged how its open landscape was “an enabling psychological space” for her writing. Reading that, I think back to how I would imagine scaling mountainous terrain when I climbed up the wee slope. Tiger moths, with their instinctive trust, would wander from flowers to the twigs I held, and to my fingers. I collected wildflowers of all sorts—Kanching Baju, Common Vernonia, White Weed, Cupid’s Shaving Brush—and brought them home to my mother, hoping to brighten up my home the way homes were brightened by flowers in vases in the English story books I read.

Like the prairie of Szumigalski, the field of my childhood was not bound to a beginning or end; there are no boundaries to a child’s imagination. From the Greek, peras, boundaries did not indicate where something stopped, rather, the Greeks recognised how, like horismos, or horizon, boundaries were places where things began their “essential unfolding”. The field unfolding into the prairie, the prairie unfolding into the world, the world unfolding into the self.

The field as the beginning of knowing, and in knowing, I navigate my way home.

 

//

 

Let me end then, with the beginning. Let me invent and narrate a new myth, one that pays homage to the fields of our childhood, the homes we have lost, the mothers who taught us the meaning of love.

In the beginning there was a field.

And a girl was born into this field.

That field, with its tiger moths, grass blues and wildflowers, was her world.

That world was her mother.

And the mother was good and beautiful, and she loved her daughter well.

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Esther Vincent Xueming, is an editor, poet and educator. She is the editor-in-chief and founder of The Tiger Moth Review, an eco journal of art & literature based in Singapore, and has co-edited two poetry anthologies, Little Things and Poetry Moves. Her poems have been published locally and internationally, and her unpublished manuscript was a finalist for the Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize 2020 (New York). She is passionate about the intersections between art, literature and the environment.

by Hasheemah Afaneh

There is a long strip of untamed land between the road leading up to my paternal grandparents’ home in Jabal Al-Taweel and the Israeli settlement, Psagot. One can find shrubs, yellow grass, cactus, lost soccer balls, and even, more times than not, Israeli soldiers camouflaged into the land, watching the neighbors and their guests go about their days.

Over the past few summers, the Jabal Al-Taweel neighbor-hood witnessed a few wild-fires emerge in this untamed land. The grayish-black smoke rising into the skyusually gives the wildfire away before the actual fire does. Two summers ago, I was sitting in my grandmother’s veranda one evening, staring through the large windows out onto the street, when I saw sparks of orange appear in the shrubs. The neighbor-hood youth playing soccer outside on the pavement ran to their homes, including my grand-mother’s, to relay the message that a fire had started.

“Al-dunya hamya,”  my grandmother, of whom I am the namesake, would comment matter-of-factly. The world is heated.

We watched the clouds of smoke grow larger, as Israeli soldiers emerged, as if from this air, to try and put it out. This swiftness of movement to action was not luck, or that a settler so happened to be adjacent to where I was sitting and she, too, was staring through large windows, and she, too, saw orange sparks appear. It was not luck, at all, for at least one soldier is always on the watch, watching us more so than keeping an eye out for the potential fires that happen every now and then.

This particular fire seemed to be getting out of hand, and so, the Palestinian firefighters were called, by whom, I can-not recall. They parked their fire truck on the road between my grandparents’ home and the untamed land and began their attempt to put the fire out. The fire seemed to be put out within thirty minutes, which was much shorter than the length that the smell of burned land lingered in the air, I’ll tell you that much.

The next afternoon, I was sitting with my grandmother and the neighbors as they spoke about the fire. The Jabal Al-taweel neighborhood women have witnessed the changing landscape - an olive harvest season that was not like what it used to be, threatening economic growth of Palestinian farmers; and settlement fences getting closer and roads getting tighter, threatening Palestinian access to land and movement.

Al-dunya hamya, one of the women remarks. The world is heated.

I thought of how this group of women were speaking about a symptom of climate change without realizing that they were speaking about a symptom of climate change.
I don't even think the Israeli soldiers realize this, as their first question post-wildfire was, “who started it?”, pointing fingers at the neighborhood youth and their friends.

Al-dunya hamya, or the world is heated is, in the literal sense, used to describe weather events. However, it has a metaphorical spin: the world is heated with struggle and strife. I reflect on how the United States has witnessed its share of moments this year depict-ing both the literal and metaphorical meanings of this phrase. Whereas in a small neighborhood in Palestine, the wildfires were extremely small, the fires that raged through the lands across the West Coast were on the other end of extremities. The world is also hot, so to speak, with struggle and protest in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the many others we have and have not heard of. From Palestine to the U.S., we are collective witnesses to the changing environmental and political climates.

“See this picture?” The barista at a local coffee shop in New Orleans said, as she approached me with her iPhone. Her and I, like everyone else living through 2020, are witnesses to a world of social distancing and masking up, so she stretches out her arm, and without getting close but being close enough for me to view what she wants me to look at, I see a picture of a picture of a group of people in front of a home. It was a photograph taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, she told me.

“They came to help us clean up and fix our home. We need to go over there and do that,” she comments, nodding her head in the way that one does when their mind is made up. I smiled at the gesture, thinking, if only it was that easy to get over there. 

The over there she was referring to was Beirut, Lebanon. Just two days before, I was working from the same coffee shop she was working at, when a seven-second video of the August 4th blast circulated on the internet. We both were so taken aback when we viewed it that we  could not focus on any task for the rest of the day. For the barista, it brought up the memory of a rescue crew coming to help the locals after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For myself, it brought up the memory of when a gas tank blew up in the home next to mine, killing the father in the household. When I finally got ahold of the Palestinian fire department that day, I was asked, “Are you on the Israeli side [of the area] or the Palestinian one?” In other words, there are places that they would not be able to reach because of the Israeli occupation, even if they wanted to.

All the neighborhood youth, women, men, and elderly could do was witness the wildfire from across the street  and believe that it would be taken care of. In this particular area, they cannot run to stop the fires, even if they wanted to. It is not because they don’t care about the land. They cannot approach because they would risk their lives, and not because of the wildfire but because of open fire. There would be two fires to put out, and no one wants to be witness to that.

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Hasheema Afaneh, MPH, is a Palestinian-American writer and public health professional based in New Orleans. Her work centers on social justice and various intersections related to it. You can find some of her work in the Fair Observer,
HuffPost, Shado Magazine, The Markaz Review, 580 Split Magazine, Glass Poetry Poets Resist Series, Poets Reading the News, This Week in Palestine, and others.
Her website is norestrictionsonwords.wordpress.com.  She tweets at @its_hashie.