Hope Lives Low Down on the Ground

by Lucy S. 

Last fall, in our class on writings of resistance in this age of globalization, we read Arundhati Roy’s beautifully angry book of love, Walking with the Comrades. This is her account of her weeks with the guerillas in the forests of the southern Indian state of Orissa. Her opening to her first chapter explains better than my paraphrasing will do here.

The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain. For the Kondh it’s as though god has been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ (1).

Roy explains that their hills have been sold to Vedanta, “one of the biggest mining corporations in the world, … owned by Anil Agarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran. Vedanta is only one of many multinational corporations closing in on Orissa” (2). These corporations are after the minerals in the ground, and to get to them, these companies remove the forests and rip open the ground. Their extractions leave deep gashes over huge expanses of land, pouring pollutants into the water, land, and air. Here is a link to a short article from 2011 stating that the Indian government had revoked permission to mine in this part of Orissa. (Another article of the same month and year tells of mining permits granted by the government for twenty more years in Orrissa.) Look to see what these forests are like before the mining companies do their business on them.   http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/no-green-nod-for-mining-in-niyamgiri-forests/article2153398.ece 

Here is a photo of what previously forested land in Orissa looks like after mining companies occupy it. http://www.silicongeoscience.com/Orissa.htm  The photo is helpfully provided by a company called Silicon Geoscience in their short beckoning to other companies to come and enjoy the rape of Orissa. Their prose drools over the “unmatched bounty of mineral wealth” there for the taking, minerals which they then list one by one to wet the appetites of the profit-chasers. Orissa “enjoys a lion share in the country and the World” of these minerals; why should she keep her treasures tucked away inside of her warm earth?  Her ground must be mechanically ripped open so the goods can be gotten.  And it will be so easy, according to Silicon Geoscience. “A complimentary infrastructure, strategic location, availability of high resolution airborne geophysical data over the mineralised terrain and an investor friendly Government make Orissa the hottest destination for the investors in the mines and mineral sector.”  According to Silicon Geoscience, Orissa’s ground is defenseless, sold out and mapped for maximum exploitation of her resources until she is emptied and used up. Other multinational companies who are already in on the action are named; do you want to miss out?  No worries about getting into trouble – the company promises this: “We will shoulder your responsibility while you are here.”

Roy writes:

If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will be destroyed too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India whose home is similarly under attack (2).

Who is the “we” who will “shoulder” the “responsibility” for this? What does it mean to “shoulder” this “responsibility”?  Like the ground of Orissa and anywhere else on earth where companies like Silicon Geoscience can plunge in their instruments of extraction, the word ‘responsibility’ is emptied of its innards here. The people who sell their lives to in turn sell out the world have taken a word which carries inside it the capacity to respond reasonably, to be personally accountable for what is done and hollowed it out, to then be filled by its exact opposite. What they mean is that they promise to help you decimate the land and people living there while never having to be responsible for the carnage. And how could they mean anything else? How strong are the ‘shoulders’ of this paper company? Can the specific people who stand under their paperwork cloak resurrect the forests and creatures (human and otherwise) which their mining will murder?

But these forested hills of Orissa are not defenseless and the destruction is not inevitable. Many who live there are fighting with all they have to protect their land and their ability to continue abiding there. Some are the ‘Maoist’ guerrillas. Who are these ‘Maoist’ guerillas of the forests?

Right now in central India, the Maoists’ guerilla army is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after sixty years of India’s so-called Independence, have not had access to education, health care, or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to  a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadre who have lived and worked and fought by their side for decades (Roy 7).

As have so many indigenous people, they are fighting against their own annihilation. They fight to live, not only individually, but as a collective entity inextricably bound together – people, land, all that live in and on that ground., The Indian government wages war on them. Arundhati Roy arranged to join them for a short time to better understand their struggles and write about them. She too thus became part of the defense of this land and its inhabitants.

Rather than engage in a simplistic chase for the answer to the ‘are they good or bad’ question, Roy labors to discover and live a bit of their story and tell a part of it to the world.  In doing so, her goal is not to ‘advocate’ for the forest guerillas of Orissa and motivate all of her readers of this book to likewise feel sorry for them and perhaps sign a petition. Rather, her labor here is to ultimately ask: what can they teach us?

Near the end, she writes:

Can we expect that an alternative to what looks like certain death for the planet will come from the imagination that has brought about this crisis in the first place? It seems unlikely. The alternative, if there is one, will emerge from the places and the people who have resisted the hegemonic impulse of capitalism and imperialism instead of being co-opted by it (212).

And Roy writes of the hope in India, the “most spectacular coalition of resistance movements, with their experience, understanding and vision” (213). Will this hope bear enough fruit and spread its seeds in time?  And what is the nature of this hope? Roy says:

If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them (213-214).

How do we get low enough onto the ground for hope to put its arms around us? What of those of us who do live in cities with tall buildings?  How do we learn to remember that the forests, mountains and rivers – yes, and deserts, prairies, valleys, lakes, and oceans – all protect us? How do we go to battle every day for them?

Planting all the food plants we can where we live (food for us humans or the multitude of living beings who live some or all of their lives near this small spot on earth) moves us closer to the ground. This is not ‘the answer.' It is a place where we can physically locate ourselves, a place in which hope can better encircle us. We can learn more of what this ground and all that grows in it has to teach us if we let ourselves love those who live in and on it. To do this, rather than conquer, we protect. Rather than ripping the ground open to extract minerals to make weapons (as Roy notes is the main goal igniting the lust for bauxite to make aluminum), we plant seeds to nourish, seeds in the ground and seeds in ourselves and others.

My friend Delaine wrote of our shared thirst in her beautiful April contribution here. Her writing feels to me like a reach outward, exploring the question of how to begin to respond adequately to the revelations of a student in pain. (Unlike the Silicon Geoscience company, she still knows the meaning of the word ‘responsibility.’) Delaine writes of feeling each other’s pain “so personally that we cry,” and, with an increasing urgent ache to respond well to this other person’s pain, she asks, “What about a hug? Will a hug help?”   http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/04/conversation-on-friday-delaine-w.html

My friend Ahna often signs her emails to me with “Abrazos,” and I have increasingly enfolded this in my own words because I love this. Hugs, embraces, abrazos.  Ahna lives near the ground on her small farm. She fights to keep poisons away. She always greets us with such affection.

My friends Sue, John, Becky, Darwin, and Bree graced our home for a few days at the end of May.Their entire visit was for me a holistic embrace of life and one another. Sue and John live partly in the ground in an earthship home they built in Vermont. They live in an intentional community in Vermont, two hundred acres of forest, meadow, and pond where a myriad of creatures live. A small number of those creatures are human. Some of them grow food there. Becky, Sue’s daughter, lives on the other side of the country in California with her two daughters and partner. They grow so much food on their two acres that they feed themselves and others.  Sue is always ready to physically embrace those around her. She is always looking for ways to bring us together in the hopeful labor for a better world. She plants and nourishes seeds of hope in us all – those of us fortunate enough to know her.

My friend Dan wrote recently of his pleasure working with his father in the garden during his visit home. And he wrote that imagining our endeavors as a process rather than an end product might be better – that thinking about how we want to live our day-to-day life can provide insight in making decisions. I am thinking about this. Dan gives me hope in his merging of steadiness and passion, and this, too – this is what it is to live low down on the ground, where life bursts forth from the good dirt.

Ryan and Justin, my youngest and oldest sons, are outside giving a bit of water to the newly growing vegetables.  

Gardening; preparing food; caring for humans young, old, or in-between; writing; reading; teaching; building homes – all of these are humble, steady, down-to-earth, life-loving acts. 

Are they enough? Is anything enough?  In “Confronting Empire,” Arundhati Roy writes:

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/AR012703.html.

These rooted, fecund stories sprout from those living low in and on the ground.

Abrazos de esperanza y la esperanza de abrazos.