Métissage: Weaving our Differences

 

“With each word we write, we open up to new worlds erupting and evicting us from our old selves,”  So write authors Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia Chambers and Carl Leggo in Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times.  While the introduction to this book is written in academic language, the braided life writing that follows is anything but.

The authors explain that, “the word métissage is derived from the Latin mixticius, meaning the weaving of a cloth from different fibres (p 35).  The cover of the book shows a detail of a woven Métis sash that ends in braids as a wonderful illustration of this concept.  They go on to explain that,

“Métissage affirms, rather than polarizes, difference and calls those who practice métissage to create an aesthetic product that combines disparate elements without collapsing or erasing difference.  The act of creating new mixed forms, stronger and more resilient than the existing ones, gives métissage its generativity in the face of difference and thus the power to reconfigure the past, to transform the present and to imagine otherwise (p35).”

I found this idea of affirming difference instead of polarizing it very interesting.  Mainstream (White supremacist) culture affirms one right way, this or that and seeks to assimilate everything into the “norm” which is white.  The whole tragic history of Indian Residential Schools in the land we now call Canada is a good example of this.  So, the idea of weaving disparate elements into new mixed forms that are stronger than the existing ones makes sense.  It makes me think of the fragility of a monospecies-green suburban lawn which requires constant care and “weeding” to stay a monoculture versus ground cover made up of native species that take care of themselves.

As I read through the life writing part of the book and hear stories of growing up in British Columbia, Germany and Newfoundland, the fabric begins to appear.  The authors describe their work in this way:

We take métissage as a counternarrative to the grand narratives of our times, a site for writing and surviving in the interval between different cultures and languages, particularly in colonial contexts: a way of merging and blurring genres, texts and identities, an active literary stance, political strategy, and pedagogical praxis.  Our writing illustrates métissage as an artful research praxis that mixes binaries such as colonized with colonizer, local with global, East with West, North with South, particular with universal, feminine with masculine, vernacular with literate, and theory with practice.  We braid strands of place and space, memory and history, ancestry and (mixed) race, language and literacy, familiar and strange, with strands of tradition, ambiguity, becoming, *re)creation, and renewal into a métissage (p 9).

In imagining how this praxis could be used in everyday conversation and in storytelling, I am grateful for the visual image of the Métis sash.  I can imagine hearing the stories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who are my friends and neighbours, weaving together as an expression of where we are now.  This praxis would change my listening to story.  Instead of listening for only what is the same or for only what is different from my story, this praxis of métissage would allow me to simply listen and understand.

The authors think that, ”… autobiographic work invites a recognition from others, not of who we are, and who we have always been, but who we are becoming in the encounter with the other (p33).”  Once again, I imagine the Métis sash on the cover of the book.  Colour theory tells us that yellow will look different if it is beside blue as opposed to red.  Our encounters change us.

“Postcolonial theorists have named this site a ‘third space’, a ‘hybrid place’ where colonial worlds are reconstructed into new ambivalent literary and political spaces (p37),” suggest the authors.  This space is available I believe to the people who live in the land now called Canada.  And the idea of métissage as an ethos for our times is compelling.

The authors state their goal clearly.  “Our aim is to go out into the world, to embrace it and love it fiercely, always returning home with the gifts of new knowledge, new hope that it is possible to live well in a particular place, at this time, with ourselves and with all our relations (p. 9).”

So, the next time you are reading ideas that are different from your own, or listening to someone describing a vignette from the story of their lives imagine it as weaving mysteriously with your own into a fabric that is strong and resilient.  See how that feels and see if it changes how you listen.

Hasebe-Ludt, Erika, Chambers, Cynthia M. and Leggo, Carl. (2009) Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times.  New York: Peter Lang.

 

Apostle of Peace: Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh
 (https://plumvillage.org/articles/please-call-me-by-my-true-names-song-poem/)

Earlier today, Thich Nhat Hanh passed away in his hometown of Hue, Vietnam at the age of 95.  Thich Nhat Hanh was called an “Apostle of peace and non-violence” by Martin Luther King Jr. for his stance against the Vietnam War which led to his exile from Vietnam until recently.  He was an influential Zen Buddhist monk, poet and peace activist who brought Buddhist teachings to people in North America and Europe.  His teachings, particularly those on bringing mindfulness and compassion to everyday life will live on for generations.  He repeatedly taught people to “walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.”

During his exile he founded the Plum Village monastery in France and other centres around the world where he taught until suffering a stroke in 2014.  In 2018 he was given permission to return to Hue, Vietnam, the place of his birth to live out his final years.

Thich Nhat Hanh was author of over a hundred books which were translated into dozens of languages around the world.  You can listen to him read one of his most famous poems Please Call Me by My True Names as well as an explanation of how he came to write this poem here.  

So, in honour of and with gratitude for Thich Nhat Hanh’s life and teachings, I will walk today in the forest as if I am kissing the Earth with my feet.  

Brilliant Mycelium

 

Beneath the surface of the forest floor is the “woodwide web” (so dubbed by German forester Peter Wohlleben). The mycorrhizal network of underground fungi filaments form this complex web of interconnection that allows trees to share resources and information with one another.  One of the people who has brought this knowledge forward is Canadian biologist Suzanne Simard.  She describes her journey of discovery in the book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (2021).

The mushrooms and fungi that we can see on rotting wood or emerging from the forest floor are the fruit of the fungi.  However,  most of the fungi lives underground in a vast network of mycelium that are interwoven and connected with tree roots.  The mycelium are very tiny threadlike structures that can wrap around or “bore into tree roots (National Forests.org ).  Altogether, they form the mycorrhizal network that is capable of transferring water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals from plant to plant.

When I read Finding the Mother Tree, I was struck by a sentence in which Simard describes these mycelium as rainbow coloured.  I began picturing this in my imagination and a representative piece of art soon emerged.  In the public forest where my partner and I hike, we have been creating pieces of art from the debris left over from logging activities last winter.  This seemed to be the perfect place to visually represent the mycorrhizal network that is invisible to the human eye unless it is unearthed.  

I chose the stump of a recently felled tree and my partner drilled three holes into it.  I placed the ends of three branches into each of these holes to create the idea of “tree roots” that were upside down. I got this idea from “Seahenge”, a 4000 year old Bronze Age tree circle that was discovered in Norfolk, England in 1998.  Within a circle of Oak trunks is an inverted Oak stump with the roots pointing upside down( Seahenge ). 

Seahenge, Norfolk, UK (https://www.explorenorfolkuk.co.uk/seahenge.html)

Then, I took rainbow coloured wool and began to string it between the branches that represented roots.  I worked intuitively in the midst of the branches, imagining mycelium travelling through the soil in search of roots and then connecting to them by winding around or boring in.  I tied off the wool at each "root| I encountered to simulate this.  It wasn’t until it felt finished that I stepped back to view the work.

Branches placed in drilled holes in stump with rainbow wool mycelium.

One interesting thing about creating art in a forest is that the light is constantly changing as the sun moves, leaves grow or get eaten by caterpillars and then regrow.  There were times when the coloured wool shone and was highly visible and there were times when it was in shadow and a hiker might not even notice it.  The work flickered in and out of visibility which seemed quite appropriate.

After a number of weeks, the host stump started suckering up new sprouts from its roots.  It turned out, that this was a Maple stump and many new shoots emerged and shot up towards the sky in the midst of the rainbow coloured wool mycelium.  Nature was co-creating with me and I paid attention.  The shoots got taller and the leaves obscured some of the wool making it invisible once again.  The message for me was that if we pay attention to our interconnections, we will thrive.  You may get a different message from the co-creation. 

Maple shoots growing from the cut stump amidst the wool mycelium.

By fall, the Maple leaves began turning their famous red and orange adding more rainbow colours to the piece.  Eventually they fell off and the tiny trunks looked like more roots. 

The Maple leaves from the shoots turn yellow, orange and red amidst the wool mycelium.

And now everything is getting highlighted or obscured with snow.  The piece evolves and evolves, flickering in and our of visibility.  It informs me constantly as I visit the forest through all kinds of weather.

The Maple leaves have fallen and snow covers the bare shoots and wool mycelium.

Recently, I came across this lovely video called Brilliant Mycelium by Beautiful Chorus.  The video show simulated mycelium travelling through the earth and becoming visible to my eye.  I was very excited by this.  There is so much more to life than what meets the eye, so much magic, mystery and brilliance.  Check it out!

Anna and the Ancient Alders

 

Anna could hear the river before she could see it.  Following the trail along the top of the ridge, the burbling sound of the water cascading over time smoothed stones brought a smile to her face.  She was almost there.  The winter temperature had been up and down passing the freezing mark many times in the last few weeks.  The packed snow of the trail had become icy but the temperature kept the ice a bit soft.  She had cleats strapped to her winter boots and two walking poles to keep her from falling.  These were well appreciated as she made her way slowly down the hill to the river.  Luckily, the sand on the trail  had partially covered the snow and ice and she made it to the bottom without falling.  Anna was of an age where falling was not advised.

She could see the river now through the green screen of cedars and yews.  The water was a continually changing pattern of grey and black shapes reflecting the overcast winter sky.  White splashes of water sprayed up as the riverwater bounced off of the rocks.  And along the riverbank before her were the trees she had come to visit this New Year’s Day.

The ancient Celts used the first alphabet in Europe, the Ogham script to encode the wisdom of the land that was understood to be the goddess and therefore sacred.  Each letter in the Ogham script was represented by a tree or plant that became a mnemonic device for this ancient knowledge.  Each month was represented by a letter and its corresponding tree.  On this first day of the new year, Anna had come to visit the Alder trees which were symbolized by the letter F or Fearn and represented the month of January.

The water loving Alders clung to the soil of the riverbank, stabilizing the shore with their roots.  Their speckled trunks leaned over the river, away from the shade of the cedars in an effort to find sunlight.  The bare branches held only the tiny cones from the past fall.  The long showy male catkins and rounded female catkins that grew on the same tree had long ago come together, pollinating with the aid of wind and bees.  The female catkins had turned into tiny little cones which eventually opened up, dropping the seeds into the river.  Each little oily seed case had air pockets that made it buoyant allowing the river to carry it to new shores where it would be washed up and hopefully put down new roots.

The melting snow now hung as tiny drops of water on the small branches.  Anna noticed that closed leaf buds were at the ends of each branch, waiting for spring’s warmth.  The river was higher with the recent melt and the trunks of the Alders were in the water.  This was no problem for the Celtic “King of the Water” as the oily wood was water resistant.  This is why its wood had been used to make bridges, roads in wet areas, pilings for buildings in Venice and even butter churns.  Alder wood had even been used to make wooden clogs because of its waterproof nature.  Anna’s Great-great-grandfather had been a Master Cloger in Lancashire, England as was noted in the census of 1881.  This cheap and durable footwear was worn by the cotton mill workers from whom Anna was descended.  Alder bark contains salicin which is turned into salicyclic acid in the body thus giving pain relief.  In fact, people used to put Alder leaves into their shoes to help relieve sore feet.

Part of Anna’s family was Irish and she knew that Irish mythology told that the first man was born from an Alder trees while the first woman was born from the Rowan.  The Alder tree was associated with the Irish God, Bran whose name means “raven”, one of Anna’s favourite birds.  Legend had it that after being killed in battle, Bran’s head was brought to Tower Hill in London and buried there to be a protector of the land until King Arthur later removed it.  However, Bran’s birds, the ravens are still kept at the Tower of London because of a prophecy that predicts the fall of the kingdom if the birds leave the Tower.

Even though Anna stood on another continent across a great ocean, the ancient stories stirred her genetic memory.  The Indigenous people from the land where she lived had used the local species, Tag, Speckled or Grey Alder to make a decoction from the bark to relieve the pain of scalds and burns.  In the Celtic world, a decoction of bark and mature green leaves was used externally for painful joints and a spring tonic tea of the bark and immature leaves was drunk in the spring.  The Druids regarded Alder as a sacred tree that was a guardian of the water which was also sacred.

Remembering this, Anna made an offering to the river and then sang a song to honour the life-giving water.  In fact, this very water ran into the bay where her own drinking water came from.  Somehow the thousands of years and miles disappeared as the ancient knowing mingled like the drops of water in the river.

Anna had learned that the name Alder comes from a word meaning red.  When the White Alder is cut, the wood turns red, like blood.  For this reason, Celtic warriors wanted shields of Alder.  The Celts believed that Alder would assist in facing obstacles or issues with courage as it lent strength and endurance in finding a way forward.  Anna carefully cut a small branch from one of the Alders to take home.  She had many new challenges to face and the twig would remind her to ask for help.  She knew that Alder had masculine fire energy and feminine water energy and that she would need to balance those energies within herself.  She could rely on Alder to teach her about when to take action and when to find stillness.  The old ways of navigating the world were falling away and Anna wanted to reach to the ancient wisdom from within her genetic memory and from those Indigenous to the land where she lived to find new ways of moving forward.

Looking down at the snowy earth, Anna remembered that Alder has a symbiotic relationship with a bacterium that lives in the root nodules.  This Frankia alni bacterium can absorb nitrogen from the air while the Alder cannot.  The bacterium share the nitrogen with the tree in exchange for sugars produced by the Alder leaves through photosynthesis.  As Alder is one of the first trees to grow in disturbed soil, it not only stabilizes the soil but also enriches it with nitrogen.  This reminded Anna about the importance of focusing on the needs of the earth, not just her own personal needs. 

She closed her eyes and pictured her little human self as a part of all of life.  She imagined that she could see with a raven’s eye as it flew high over the forest and how small she would look from up there.  And then suddenly, she was seeing with the raven’s eyes.  From her Raven’s point of view, the tree branches intertwined with each other and so did the roots.  Everything was connected by a light shimmering web.  She could see the water moving in the stream, evaporating into the air and condensing on the branches.  Everything was in motion.  She could see the oxygen being released by the conifer trees and moving into the lungs of her tiny human self down below and then carbon dioxide coming from her nose into the air and back to the cedars.  Movement in and out, stillness and action, female and male in balance.  She could see nitrogen being absorbed by the tiny bacterium in Alder’s roots and then being shared with the tree in exchange for glucose.

Everything started to get larger to her Raven eyes as the bird dropped down to land on the top of the largest Alder beside her human self.  The tree swayed under its weight and Anna as though disembarking from an airplane was once again in her own body, looking out from human eyes.  With a load groak, the raven lifted from the branch and flapped away over the forest.  Anna listened to its call until it drifted off into the distance.

New ways of seeing, new ways of being and living, braiding the old, the new and the possible were emerging all around her.  It was a lot for an older brain to comprehend but perhaps that was not so important.  What was important was how Anna felt now; grounded and nurtured.  What was important was she could see in her imagination the connections and the possibilities.  And most importantly, Anna was learning that strength came from asking for help from all of life instead of thinking she had to accomplish everything on her own.  That was a big change but life was teaching her and the Alder twig would be her reminder.