remnants of them: On شَجَرَة, "storying otherwise*", <3 gathers
This is part two of a two part piece as we continue soaking in our ancestral soup; this time to shift our gazes forward into the past, towards the power we carry in our spirits, cells and stories.
This is part two of a two part piece. You can find part one here. Following chapters will include illuminating scenes from all seasons of Reservation Dogs1 and True Detective: Night Country2. Major spoilers ahead.
*Quote by Donna Haraway in Storytelling for Earthly Survival.
(i) ’Stories are stories’: our illiterate bodies in immeasurable time.
The deeper story
I am not sure if it’s my water placements but I’ve always gravitate towards water bodies whenever I am restless. Maybe it’s growing up in proximity to water, always at some near distance. Sunday mornings at East Coast beach, passing that notorious canal that separates Jurong East and West on a bus afternoon after school, or rivers and reservoirs in almost every other neighbourhood. What I’ve consciously avoided though all these years are green spaces; nature reserves, secondary forests, anything that’s not properly converted to the more palatable parks. There’s a sense of unease in these spaces always; bugs, untethered seabeds, overgrown grass that itch and a certain wetness that seem to yuck me out enough to stay away.
For most who know me now, this may come as a surprise. It would seem that at least in the last five years, peaking during the pandemic, traversing through these unruly green spaces, these water bodies, have became some large part of my core being. Although the discomforts are still very much felt, I’ve grown to find pleasure in communing with these spaces, by myself and with friends, finding strangers along the way. Unravelling some secret parts, fluidity of water, its currents beckoning or the soft turns of soil matter beneath me, our loose communion entangling in and out. There are stories here, I feel it always. Maybe the unease is from the retelling, my body pressed against the sharp heat, the damp, dragging me towards something else more other, some spirited, no not away but inward.
In True Detective: Night Country, there’s the same sense of unease. Here, the spirit world folds into the real world as the small town of Ennis enters the long night where the sun disappears during the arctic winter. In the opening sequence, a herd of caribou chases after the last of the sunlight before falling to their deaths. The series sustains this ominous tone through several of its characters being haunted by one eyed polar bears, frozen scientists, oranges and the dislocated ghost voice of the arctic winds whispering, “She’s awake”.
The characters seem unfazed by these visions although they struggle with its reading just as we do as an audience. Are these hallucinations caused by contaminated water? Is it an ancient mother spirit (more on that later) that have been stirred from the icy depths, awaken by the tunnelling of ice? Are we the caribous running towards the clarity of the light, away from the murky depth of the darkness chasing after a resolve, some desirable sequence we are allowed to fall into, to follow with, but falling to some kind of death. Although all the strange things remain unresolved until the very end, the deeper story reveals a lot more.
***
It’s always the same story with the same ending. Nothing ever happens. So we told ourselves a different story, with a different ending.
In the last episode, Navarro and Denvers are in Beatrice’s house. With her is Blair. They appear briefly in the first episode. Beatrice had hit Blair’s abusive partner with a metal bucket. Navarro had arrested Blair’s partner and for a moment the scene reveals that Blair is missing several fingers on her hand. This feels to be an episode filler, as side characters are added into the sequence to colour the gender discrimination in Ennis and how women stands up for other women when no one will. Similar scenes like this appear several times more in other permutations with other characters.
The scene begins with a retelling of the night the scientists froze to their deaths. It was revealed that leading up to these events a network of women, Bea and Blair included had discovered how, and more importantly why, Annie Kowtok was murdered a few years before. The scene is set at the table near the kitchen with Bea and Blair on one side and Denvers and Navarro on the other.
D: Right so the Tsalal men…
Bea: Those fuckers killed Annie K
N: You knew. All along
Bea: No for six years we thought it was the mine, the town
[Two woman walk into the kitchen. Denvers stand. Navarro pulls her back in the seat]
Bea: To shut her up, shut everyone up.
[The women stands in the kitchen, blurred in the background]
Bea: Then we understood.
[cuts to a flashback scene with Bea spilling a mop bucket and discovering a hatch beneath the lab as the mop water spills into the opening. She goes down the hatch and finds the star screwdriver that was used to kill Annie K. Scene cuts to the same woman who had walked in earlier, but in a flashback scene. She is at the police station taking photos of Annie K murder wounds on her phone.]
N: Why didn’t you report it?
Bea: To you, the cops? That would change nothing
[Another woman walks into the kitchen, a gentle grip on Bea’s shoulder as she walks and sits beside here, her tattooed face looking resolute, towards Navarro and Denver momentarily]
Bea: It’s always the same story with the same ending. Nothing ever happens.
[Two more women walks into the room. Camera stops at Blair’s silent face looking gravely at D and N}
Bea: We told ourselves a different story, with a different ending.
[Another woman walks in, touches Bea’s shoulder, more women sit around the table and stand in the background]
N: How does this story go?
[Flashback to the lab. A bunch of women carrying guns enters the door, switch off the electricity and point their guns at the scientists, rounding them up.]
N: In this story, you killed the men?
Bea: Honey, they did it to themselves, when they dug in her home in the ice, when they killed her daughter in there.
[The scientists are rounded up into a truck and the doors are shut. The truck drives off]
Bea: They woke her up.
[The truck stops in the middle of a snowstorm. Beatrice tells them to get out of the truck, and when they hesitated, the women fired shots into the air.]
Bea: If she wanted them, she’d take them.
[They walk off naked into the snowstorm.]
Bea: If not their clothes are there for them. They’d be half frozen but they’d survive. But they didn’t though. I guess she wanted to take them. I guess she ate their fucking dreams from the inside out and spit their frozen bones. But it’s just a story.
[Bea stands and all the women comes into focus and stand in solidarity with Bea. Bea asks Navarro addressing her by her newlyfound Innupiaq name, what action will be taken against these women]
N: Stories are stories.
D: We just swing by to inform you that the forensics came back and the cause of death was a slab avalanche. The case is officially closed. Thought you’d want to know seeing they were your employers and all.
The scene ends with Navarro asking about Annie’s tongue found on the floor of the lab. Beatrice replied, that is not our story. Here we learn what we’ve known all along. There’s many stories in a story. Many ways to read it. At the end of the episode I turn to my partner who told me how he’d wish they show more of how these women organised themselves. But they did, I replied, in the dark, during the birth scene, at the funeral, blurred in the background. We were just paying attention to the wrong things.
**
On Sedna: The myth is alive
Here a story is no longer merely a sequence of events. Here, it is an eruption of time. So who is she that’s been awakened? Who is she that “ate their fucking dreams inside out and spit their frozen bones.” Much like the purposeful sidelining of the women characters, and the visions, Sedna appears only momentarily in a scene, a subtle suggestion. The myth comes alive nevertheless and she is furious.
In the first episode, Darwin who is the young son of Sheriff Denvers unwilling protege, Pete Prior shows a drawing of a woman with red eyes and bloody fingers. Prior asks his wife about the drawings. She tells him it’s just a local legend and her grandmother loves telling stories from their local culture.
The white male dominance insert itself through Prior’s response, his body language as he walked towards her stating that if Darwin’s wake up from a nightmare from this stories, the grandmother can tell Darwin why it is important. He disappears Sedna first, and then diminish the importance of these stories by marking them as nightmarish. Sedna transforms into an unseen force, in the women, in the spirits that haunt, in the ice. The myth stays awake. She is the cell source of all these stories, or maybe she too is part of some other interconnected unreadable thing.
Sedna (Inuktitut: ᓴᓐᓇ Sanna, previously Sedna or Sidne) is the goddess of the sea and marine animals in Inuit mythology, also known as the Mother of the Sea or Mistress of the Sea. The story of Sedna, which is a creation myth, describes how she came to be. Like most ancient myths, Sedna origin is a refraction of similar stories,with the same ending. In all of them she commits some form of heteronormative disobedience and is blamed for some divine calamity.
She is brought out to sea on a kayak before being thrown overboard. She clung onto the kayak, fighting for her life and in all of them, her fingers are cut off, knuckle by knuckle. From them emerged whales, seals and walruses. And she emerged a goddess who controls the seas. Inuit shamens comb her hair to appease her in exchange and hunters throw “worn-out harpoon-heads, broken knives, and morsels of meat and bone into the sea as offerings”.
Her story is a story in a story that echoes on in this fictional portrayal of Ennis. It echoes too in real life where there are high numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women:
A red hand over the mouth has become the symbol of a growing movement, the MMIW movement. It stands for all the missing sisters whose voices are not heard. It stands for the silence of the media and law enforcement in the midst of this crisis. It stands for the oppression and subjugation of Native women who are now rising up to say #NoMoreStolenSisters.
Stories remain as stories for many obvious reason. This is just one of them. But we keep telling them to each other anyways, we figure how to read them with our illiterate bodies and we sometimes feel them in the eruptions of time as we fumble in the darkness.
**
(ii) Storying Otherwise through ancestral work: “..the power we carry”
In 2019, I wrote my own story and my relationship with the spirits, or energies that surround me. Aside from this written piece, I created lupa, a video accompaniment to confront what feels to be my neutered spirit from the source, the last common ancestor which I believed to be an ancient tree that connects the spirit realms with ours in its entanglement of roots and branches, in its pure cellular form. In one particular scene, closer to the end is a static shot of a riverbed, along Pandan river. Sporadically water breaks the surface as the scattered mussels open momentarily to release air. I mentioned mutations, both in reference to genetic expression and storytelling:
“How can we reconcile these large number with the extremely slow rate of evolutionary change? The answer is simple. Only a tiny fraction of mutation persists over time. Some mutations survive as a matter of luck or natural selection…”
Passing through the mangroves submerged in the river during high tide, I continued:
Sensing. I imagine some of us still carry the knowledge of Walenreng*3 in our bodies. I caught a glimpse of the flesh sometimes and feel the same quiver, a low rumbling in my belly as if you were turning inside me whispering your secrets in a language I could not translate. To sense is to feel the land waking up at odd hours of the night, fiercely alive with energies that I can never articulate…..but the sensing is incomplete, unfinished and I am an illiterate child that was never taught to read. Most of us remain orphans to our own spirits.
I find myself traversing, what Donna Haraway describes as, the intimacy of inheritance; inheritance of big things and little things sprawled across lifespans and temporalities. These are the stories I inherited from my ancestors, knowledge I have received as an egg of an egg in my maternal grandmother in her lifetime and knowledge reproduced in mine as my own, yet in constant entanglements to those around me. Mutations after mutations, marked by the past, simultaneous in their becoming and dying, marking other neutered spirits in their flesh bodies in this lifetime, spirits in the next. Or maybe as what Maximus describes as energy manifest. More on that later.
***.
In Reservation Dogs 9th episode of Season 2 Offerings, Willie Jack visits her incarcerated auntie, Hokti to deliver her a time capsule letter belonging to Daniel, her son who had died in the beginning of Season 1. Losing Daniel and learning to grief this sudden loss is the catalyst for the entire series.
H: Why are you here?
WJ: This is a letter Daniel wrote to himself in his final year. Time capsule assignment. All his dreams and shit. I think you should have it
H: I don’t want it.
WJ:Well what if I read it to you? I’ve never read it yet. It could probably help us be like healing
H:I said no. Shit this is why none of you are on my visitors list. I look at you and I see him you understand?
WJ: Yeah I do. But you’re not the only one that’s affected by this. No one’s the same. I miss my friends and I miss you too. Like the version I remember of you when I was little. Remember I always used to come to you whenever I get hurt. Which was rare. I always remember you made things better. Daniel was the same way. I used to think you were so powerful. Like a wizard…But now, you rather be fucking miserable man. All you elders, you don’t want to talk to me, avoiding shit all the fucking time. No wonder my mom and dad didn’t want me to come here.
We learn from Willie Jack that everyone is struggling with grief that the four of them are slowly drifting apart… “It’s like everyone’s walking around in sunshine and we are in darkness”.
In a previous scene, Hokti is reading in her cell when a spirit calls her attention . Hokti closes her eyes, but when she opens them, the spirit is still there. With a cute dose of magic realism, the characters in Reservation Dogs, much like True Detective, are able to commune with spirits guides who set them out into the right directions. Hokti is able to see spirits but Willie Jack is unable to.
H: Come on put your hands upon the table Like we just did. Close your eyes. Going to have a little prayer. [turns to spirit] I need your help
WJ: What?
H: Not you, keep your eyes shut. Eyes closed no matter what happens ok. Just focus on the dark
[Willie Jack breathes ]
Take long slow breaths. Good. Just listen to your breathing for a second. Remember the stories I told you when you were growing up, about the people we come from. Generations of medicine people. Caretakers.
[Hokti’s spirit guide and others appear behind Willie Jack gazing lovingly at her]
These are the ones who held us together as we arrive from our homelands. The healers who carried us and buried us as we marched. Men and women whose songs led us through the dark. They’re watching you my girl. You don’t need me. You have them.
[Hokti’s spirit gently squeeze Willie Jack’s shoulders]
This is the power we carry. When you really pray, they are all around you. All the time.
WJ: Oh shit.
[Willie Jack feels the spirits, surrenders herself and cries]
<3<3<3<3<3
H: Takes focus though. Intent. Open your eyes.
WJ: Holy fuck.
***
In Fabrizio Terranova’s 2016 film, Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, the encounters are haphazardly humorous in its retelling, a bee landing on top of Haraway’s head as she talks about the racism behind the perfect bite, the constant shifting of the room she writes in through the use of green screens, close up of her dog Cayenne’s breathing as she lay asleep. These narratives are interrupted playfully and purposefully, bird sounds and barking, quick scene cut, leaves rustling in the wind, the tendrils of a jellyfish lingers as Haraway animates “the importance of writing this particular story, not some story in general…You have to be here and not everywhere…You have to be attached to something, not everything….”
Haraway then narrates how we can render each other capable of telling a different story:
The deepening of the destruction of the ways of living and dying on this earth is happening.And the story of this earth, the arts of living on a damaged planet…the absolute obligation to become capable, to render each other capable of changing the story, story of ongoingness cultivating in earth, in the tunnels of the earth….To be at risk with each other and to propose something real…To make a proposition, that which is not yet but might be you know? Until the stories are told like that…How to make the weak stories stronger and the strong stories weaker…
..in the critique of capitalism and the critique of capital makes us stupid….The stupid thing is to be so mesmerised by the smartness of the latest analysis of capital you know? That we lose all sense of what is important in the world…and the only reason to do this analytical work is to learn how to tell another story….and to learn how to add to the work of those who are already storying otherwise. The only possible thing to do in the world we are inhabiting is to revolt, you know? It’s an insurrection…It’s an insurrection that refuses the paralysis of critique, that the world is finished because we know how it works..
(iii) شَجَرَة - ku: the storyteller is the keeper of time and space.
In Science Fiction and the Future (1985), Ursula K. LeGuin wrote of the Quecha speaking people of the Andes relationship to time as something reverse to our looking forward to the future that “lies before us” and putting the past behind us so we can move freely towards the future without any “interruptions”. In the context of 1985, where the dreams of the future is still bright and shiny, still desirable, for the most of us at least, this is of course the most natural way towards capitalistic progress.
However, now, the future does lie but the lies have grown weak, feeble in its keeping. The Quecha speaking people however have always believed, and in fact known that the future cannot be seen “and sometimes you snatched a glimpse and wish you hadn’t because you’ve glimpsed what’s sneaking up on you from behind.” The past however is what we know and we can see it right under our noses. “This is a perception rather than action, of awareness rather than progress”.
She describes then that going forward into the future is a metaphor, a myth that has been taker literally, for fear of being inactive, receptive, open, quiet and still. Instead, our “unquiet clocks” makes us think that we are capable of making time and controlling it. We forget that the future comes or is there whether we rush towards it and morning comes whether we set the alarm or not. In addressing future as a metaphor for space, a common trope in science fiction, we have grown to believe that we are able to conquer the future. But the future is not a space we can travel to, it is part of the spacetime continuum from which — in the body and in the ordinary states of consciousness—we are excluded.
Out of curiosity I look up then the etymology of the word history, trying to then think of the possible metaphors to described this Quechuan past. Historia (Greek/Latin) or Istoria (Old English) to mean account/narrative but also inquiry. Nothing much there tbh but then decided to look at sejarah, the malay translation for history. And woah…
Etymology. Borrowed from Malay sejarah, from Arabic شَجَرَة (šajara, “tree”).
The phylogenetic tree graphs come to mind. When I did a quick search, I realised there are so many versions of the phylogenetic tree. But here’s a basic rooted tree:
And this is the unrooted one which I found so beautiful though honestly I don’t understand a single shit about.
So what does this got to do with the past ila? Ok,ok hear me out. If a story is based on a sequence of events that have happened at a given set of time and we, as humans, have the awareness of time and the ability to put these sequences in order, in meaningful patterns, are we then the only species that possess the ability to think, and speak, and specifically tell stories? In The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, in Chapter 15 titled Brutes, Amitav asks us to reconsider who is a brute (or savage) and who is fully human, who makes meaning and who does not as they lie at the heart of the planetary crisis.
“It may seem obvious to humans that their ability to destroy forests and endows them, and them alone with the capacity to act. But intentional action can also unfold over completely different scales of time. Trees have inhabited the Earth much longer than human beings and their individual life spans are, in many cases, far greater than those of people; some live for thousands of years. If trees possessed modes of reasoning, their thoughts would be calibrated to a completely different time scale, perhaps on in which they anticipate that most humans will perish because of a planetary catastrophe…It may be self evident to humans that they are the gardeners who decide what happens to trees. Yet on a different time scale, it might appear equally evident that trees are gardening humans….
But perhaps this is all wrong. After all, trees and humans are not — or not just— adversaries competing for space. They are also linked by innumerable forms of cooperation. Perhaps what is at fault here is the very idea of a single species. It is now known that the human body contains vast numbers of microorganism of various kinds4. So if it is true that the human ability to speak and think can only be actualised in the presence of other species, can it really be said that these faculties belong exclusively to humans?”.
In different parts of the same chapter, Ghosh describes different animals and their relationships to time and space, the stories they tell. How humpback whales mark the passing of the year by changing their songs, how elephants walk the same migratory routes over lifetimes and how a flock of penguins will return to the shores of some suburbs in Sydney because they “represents the world to themselves…weave meaning out of experiences so that they, like humans, inhabit an endlessly storied world5”. <3
Approaching the end of this long rumination, I can’t help but consider my own practices of storytelling; in the act of gathering, and retelling and telling it together over and over across time and spaces with others, not only humans, but rivers, and seas, land and trees, ghosts and spirits. How stories have always moved me most as I seek them with veracity, in old interviews, conversations with strangers, friends and kin, how I find them in the forest, in the quiet, in the wordless mouth of my laughing child, refusing and revolting against this illiteracy. Here in these stories, I feel love gathers at its highest amplitude, loudest in its sharing, in energies manifesting.
Ending this post with my most favourite clip from Reservation Dogs.
Maximus: Well in order to observe the universe, you must put your back to the future and fix your eyes on the past. Such is the way of nature. Celestial events have occured long ago. We still see remnants of them. Hell we might not know it happened until the light travels across the galaxy to show us. The universe knows. It always knows. We are just echoes of things that came before.
Bear: Look its the Big Dipper.
Maximus: [Laughs] That’s a boat
Bear: Boat? I thought it was supposed to be…
M: Nah, white man calls it the Big Dipper. It’s a boat. Helps us on our journey when we go.
B: Where does it takes us…
M: Well they call it the Milky Way, but it’s a passageway to the source, the source that created everything. We are just energy manifest.
B: Why did they create us?
M: Well to prove a point I guess
B: What kind?
M: That we could still love. Through it all, life’s tough. We should be proud that we can still love.
B: Do you still love?
M: Yeah I do
B: How do they know that you love them?
M: They didn’t…They don’t. They feel it. See love doesn’t have to be received. It can just…It can just be
Thanks for reading this far babes. Until next time, hydrate, ressociate and stay in love.
Reservation Dogs run for three seasons and revolves around four indigenous teenagers, Elora, Bear, Cheese and Willie Jack, living in Muscogee Nation, a small reservation town in rural Oklahoma. The story begins with the sudden death of their closest friend and follows them through their loss, as they process their grief across three generations, the elders, the aunties/uncles and themselves towards unpacking traumas through intergenerational healing.
True Detective: Night Country begins in a fictional small Alaskan town, Ennis during its long winter night in which the sun does not rise. Scientists at the Tsalal research station are found dead, naked and frozen in the ice. Sheriff Danvers and Trooper Navarro (Reis) are tasked to solve the mystery but what lies deeper is the struggle of the Iñupiaq peoples as they fight for the removal of the mining station that’s polluting their land and waters and killing their children.
In lupa, Walenreng is the last common ancestor. The sacred tree that was chopped down to allow for Sawarigadeng (the hero in the epic of Sureq Galigo) to travel to China.
Biologists estimated that 90 percent of the human body consists of bacteria, rather than human cells and one microbiologist has suggested that under a microscope a human body is “an assemblage of lifeforms living together”.
From Storied-Places in a Multispecies City by T van Dooren (2012)