Queer Swamp Roots
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[ 14 min ]
10 am, June 10th, 2024.
This is the second part of a series of texts on Cultural Rooting. Beginning with White Folx on Zoom - a text on Whiteness and Cultural Appropriation, I now continue to dive deeper into exploring the wet and murky roots and woodlands I grew up in and where I created a eco-spiritual identity for myself.
The world is not a map!
It was somewhere around 2016 when a couple of my friends wanted to buy a piece of land in Guatemala to start a queer community when I began to really feel something was very rampantly un-adressed in White spaces. This is not to say that I think white people should stay on their “own” land, if such a thing exists, but rather that I find we are tremendously at ease not considering our actions in the larger community properly.
I have no absolute judgement from my part on overseas projects or travels in general, I believe that the world is way to wild to place imaginary boundaries on it and hold people behind them. The world and ethnicities and migration is so much older and more murky and more messy than the contemporary rendering of privilege and power and what belongs to whom can put in a pie-chart nicely.
The world, afterall, is not a map.
And precisely this map-ness, the idea that a concept or history overlaps neatly onto the reality of the earth and people, is something I keep finding in critical discourse and in critical dialogues, and there we run the risk of turning the very alive non-linear and cross-pollinated world into a very linear and outlined map.
This is something that some of our colonial forebears have done to the entire planet as well, cutting up communities and kin alike with Papal lines on seafaring maps. So why continue that practice?
I do deeply long to be engaged more in soils and lands, and living in a country such as the Netherland, where buying or taking care of land is simply unaffordable, stepping back from an opportunity to develop a place to live near the lush Lago Atitlán was a turning point for my way of looking at the world at the time.
Despite it being so hard to connect with land in a way of stories, myths and spiritual practices in my land below the oceans, I realized it mattered to at least try.
Low-Land Druids?
As the only way to learn about myself, to find sense again, I began to enter and create a storied-network of my own swamp-y homeland roots and belonging, right here in this wet place that I'd formerly overlooked, including trauma and pain I wished to escape from formerly.
I circled for a while around artistic regurgitations of Druidry, a debated yet not-to-be forgotten aspect of pre-roman culture centred on wise initiate peace-keeper philosophers that held an upper class in Celtic societies. My exploration of these Euro-region-ish wisefolx was followed by creative-approximations of an imagined Pan-European pagan history.
But truth be told, it is hard to look for cultural roots when they are both erased, frowned upon, and often imagined to unclear extend.
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So, I grew up next to and played nearly-daily in the Urkhovense Zeggen, a wetlands living on the tributary of a river that was worshipped in Celtic times, and later by Romans as well. My grandfather was a peat-cutter in the same nearby wetlands that Ambriorix, the last king of the Erubones, used to escape a Roman battalion moving north.
The countless days my childhood talking to trees and clouds in my childhood swamplands have formed my own sacred natural experiences and ways sensing and finding myself.
Near the end of 2022, this process of investigating my roots began to draw in my own childhood deeper; one spent in seeking nervous-system regulation, spirituality and sexuality in the watery woodlands near my two teenhood homes. Escaping an overwhelming divorced parental realm, wherein one parent was in abusive relationship with alcohol as a means to cope, leaving me barren for mental and physical abuse somewhere between my early 2000 high school, and the nearby swamplands.
Mind you, it was a pre-woke era. We did not have Sex Education on Netflix. No. We had Will & Grace, and Karen, who I remember wanted to park her car on top of a group of Mexican people - as, a, joke?
90’s television is wild.
Back in the day, I really deeply needed the swamp, more than I realized at the time. As a neurodivergence queer person dealing with trauma, I perhaps needed the outdoors more than most average hiker. It took me to about 35 years to realize how fully it needed it. How fully the wetlands tutored me, whispering to me as a child - and me whispering back.
Somewhere in the spring of 2022, a friend asked me if I had autism. She recognized my descriptions of feeling intuitively connected with the outdoors as something her own child on the spectrum experienced often. It was the start of a long process of homecoming. And of questioning my connection to the outdoors, which to me had always been something sacred and spiritual.
I mean, there are countless examples of people leaving offerings in bogs and swamps all over Europe, and I felt like my relationship was part of that work, but it seems something more neurological is intermingled here too.
Non-Binary Swamps?
Two weeks ago, I gave an artist talk at Green Space Miami, a part of my artist-in-residency at AIRIE, in the middle of the Everglades National Park; a unique World Heritage site and wetlands currently listed as in danger of disappearing forever. During the Q&A at the end, my friend Lee asked me if the swamp is non-binary.
“Yes, it is!” I exclaimed, “the swamp is non-binary.”
Unknowingly, it is exactly this aspect that has been drawing me into the swamp since childhood. A place that is neither land not water, neither wet not dry, neither day or night. A twilight zone of in-between, defying easy determination, easy extraction, easy access and understanding.
It is so Queer, and so defiant.
It was only as recent as 2018 that I realized for the first time that I was non-binary, after endless questions and scrutinizing therapy that wanted to know if I was male and who I wanted to have sex with - trust, I'll rant more about this in later writings.
I can see now how the swamp has always been a perfect terrain to imagine a non-binary spirit within. To formulate one, perhaps, within myself: a murky singing Goddess.
The swamp is also sadness. And boy, I did not know how much the song of sadness would find me through my recent song writing. And I am so moved, as it finds me as an evocative teacher-healer that I had carried with me all this time.
Through a multiple year psycho-therapy training focussed on childhood trauma in 2016-2018, I had learned to enter my body time and again. But I had never before put that in my visual work consciously, besides the video EARTHHURT.
It felt potent. It beckoned me.
Tricky as it is to weave deeply personal aspects of mental health into an art practice, over the last year and a half I’ve managed to delve more deeply into this dark watery realm of my soul.
Under the banner of Wetlands Worship, I began to create work where the abuse that my body and mind endured is mirrored in the abuse and terror that the landscape has undergone - especially wetlands. In the historic drainage and the current mismanagements of wetlands globally, I trace the marking of Western Capitalist-Industry, spawning from an older exploitative imperial modus operandi of nation-states.
It is striking to me, how the Texandri and the Erubones, the Celtic and Gaulish folx living in what is now the province of North Brabant -my birthlands- also found refuge in the swamps when they escaped the Roman Empire encroaching on them, spreading their creepy nationstate and religious oppression.
All throughout Europe, the UK, Scandinavia and the Baltics, swamps provided hiding places for people escaping militarized nations. This is true also for other parts of the world, where wetlands and mangroves have provided shelter for indigenous folks, escapees, and maroons.
Here I feel a deep connection. I love how this murky swamp-y-ness of resilience forms a sanctuary that traverses history and culture.
The swamp in this way, has always been a place away from Empire. A liminal zone, a space for otherness, and I find rooting there.
Continue reading at the next drop: Autistic-Nature Kinships
XOXO
VENUS
Enjoyed reading this?
- This essay s part of a collection of 3 essays partially payed for RE_NATURE platform.
- Cover image: mangrove roots at Flamingo Point, Everglades National Park (USA).