temporal: An Artist Residency
the eco / mytho-poetics of repair and liberation
temporal (adjective)
:: expressing or relating to time; relating to the present life, this world; the tenses of a verb
:: worldly; terrestrial, earthly, temporary. From Old French temporal “earthly.” From the Latin tempus “time, season, moment.” From Proto-Italic *tempos “stretch, measure” from the root ten “to stretch,” the notion being “stretch of time.”
this is a basket to tenderly hold poetic weaving of historical and ecological synchronicities and storytelling like the bee swarm or the discovery of pirates, or learning that the entire landscape of portugal was deforested to make ships to enslave and colonize…in what ways are ancestors speaking through the land? what stories – from red fox tracks to the dying fish on the wrack line – are reaching for me?
week one: 13 - 20 november
After many months of movement, migration, learning what it means to be a guest, here I am in Carrapateira, Portugal. Again a guest, yet offering myself to the dream and practice of landing and tending hearth: “House-sitting.” I like how in the words there’s a gesture of the body’s stillness, requiring a staying in place. In doing so, I’m invited to prepare for winter, quiet down my body enough to find a pace that actually allows me to catch up with myself. Who am I now?
I enter these days tender yet solid, a curious companion to my own becoming: a body on the path of love mixed with distance. I’m practicing a quiet sense of center, landing into the home of my body, again and again each day. It is mid-November in the Algarve. The sun has been shy. Nearly every morning when I go outside to drink my tea, the world is drenched. The sound of the sea roars at a distance, reminding me why I’ve come, if I dare to remember.
I brought a shell that I found on the beach in North Carolina on the other coast of the Atlantic when I was there in September with my mother, and with it a prayer: I’ve come to apprentice to the sea, to the sand and the salt, to the stories of dunes and surf and the distances across which so many ancestors traversed. To time travel, to dig deep, to unearth, to renew, to re-collect. To truth-tell and to grieve. To let time have their way with me. Time, and the sea.
Starlings and house sparrows are my most constant and vocal companions – occupying the eaves of the clay roof and neighboring fig tree, bodies plump like fruit. A chiff-chaff knows the edge of the Portuguese water basin as their homeland. The water is green with forgetting.
Carrapateira is a small hamlet on an indented headland of limestone cliffs. Pontal da Carrapateira, the point of the headland, collaborates with wind and water to create a current which traditionally wrecked ships. I read that the coast here mirrors Cabo de Sâo Vicente – Portugal’s southernmost tip, eleven miles South as the gulls fly. The pontal was often misinterpreted by sailors as a safe corner turn towards the Mediterranean. Sometimes a fatal mistake.
Something like 400 years ago, villagers here were kidnapped during razzias by Barbary Pirates (corsairs), who would raid coastal villages across Western Europe to capture and enslave people for the Ottoman Empire. Somewhere between one hundred to two hundred thousand people from the Iberian peninsula were captured and enslaved by these raids, and over a million from across Europe.
As I am here to research what the land and the sea have to teach me about my ancestors and our collective history and how we became a people who could wreak so much brutality to fellow human beings and the earth, I find this history compelling. Indeed, Dr. John Callow at the University of Suffolk in his text British Captives and Slaves in North Africa (2017) writes:
“The memory of slavery, and the methodology of slaving, that was burned into the British consciousness was first and foremost rooted in a North African context, where Britons were more likely to be slaves than slave masters” (32).
And I’m sure this burning of a methodology of slaving into the consciousness of a people occurred beyond just the British context – likely also happening here, by the sea, in Carrapateira – and elsewhere around this continent. I’m reminded of Resmaa Menakem’s scholarship and praxis. He asks, “Did over ten centuries of decontextualized medieval European brutality…begin to look like culture? Did this intergenerational trauma and its possible epigenetic effects end with European immigrants’ arrival in the “New World”?
These days I’m haunted by questions of culture – of what we mean by it, of how our bodies are formed and informed by it, of what capacity we have to renew, change, or transform it. What cultural rites of passage and initiations are ready to take place, and what are the ceremonies for them? It seems to be that I’ve inherited the burn scars in my body of these methodologies, this consciousness, because the violence keeps happening. Just this weekend, another mass shooting at a queer club in my old haunt, Colorado Springs. Last week, I dreamed a man with a rifle began to shoot at a group of us who were swimming in a pool of water, which in turn woke me up with a beating heart, seized by fear.
Like Wendall Berry, all I know to do in moments of despair like this, is to go to the earth, to the sea, to the wide wildness beyond me, and surrender to the wisdom of all I’ll never understand. So I’m here, in this place, wondering what the sea, the sky, the salt and the sand have to teach me and my people about healing our histories, legacies and bodies. I bow into the offering of these clay walls by the coast, wondering: who will the sea become me? Half a fading dream. Windswept.
