Fixed To Space
Britain and a sense of place
I write this from Britain, a place I’m pulled to because it is where so much of my family, by blood and by choice, lives.1 Every Nigerian you know has family in Britain, and how could we not? The UK is the fabled Seat of Empire, a country whose elite yanked half the world into their own vision of what life should look like, a vision colored by hierarchy and struggle. We're still making sense of the results.
(Jamaica Kincaid on the English: "...everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English. But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that.")2
Being here reminds me of Ingrid Pollard's 1989 series Pastoral Interlude. Partly this is because Pollard's a British-Caribbean photographer and the series she created is laser-focused on Britain. More generally, Pastoral Interlude is one of those works that tends to drift to my mind, maybe because of how perfectly it expresses itself. The series consists of photos of Black people looking absolutely idyllic out in the peaceful English countryside, only for the illusion to be ruptured by Pollard's cutting captions: The owners of these fields; these trees and sheep /want me off their GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND. No Trespass, they want me / DEAD.
Pollard's work is about the imagined boundaries that fix people to spaces. These boundaries are imagined in the way that so many things — like race and money and debt and etc — are. Which is to say that they are shared imaginings, and that fact of their being shared both ossifies them and allows their effects to manifest as material realities.
(Quick side note: Pollard's talking about who is allowed access to England's spaces of leisure, but I created my own series of work in response to Pollard's called Natural, or: Where Are We Allowed To Be.3 My work started by thinking about the ways that Black people are constantly trotted out in painfully violent digital representations, as if we are more preferable frozen in data than in our complicated and imperfect flesh. The three prints I created are staged within a data center, and in them I'm questioning the results of these instances where documentation of pain becomes point rather than proof. This is the work I thought I would be writing about here, but I've already written about it elsewhere and that seemed like enough).
Thinking of Pollard's work often gives me a jolt that reminds me of where I am in space. Sure, I always know where I am, abstractly. But there are instances when I feel where I am with sharp specificity. Usually such moments are prompted by sensation: The spice-and-sweat smell of my grandma's old house, the hazy blue-green color of the sky in Port Harcourt during dry season, the lilting laugh of my neighbor who lives across the street from me in Brooklyn. These are things that give me a sense of place. They do not, as in Pollard's work, glue me to a space that I can never leave. It's more that they remind me of the land I stand on, its many histories, and the terms of my connection to them. In those moments I feel like I am brought back to where I am, grounded in the web of relations that sustain my existence. It's a bittersweet reminder of how easy it is to be removed from such earthy awareness.
If there's one thing I would like to do when it comes to tech, it is to reinsert a sense of place. More precisely: to reinsert this awareness of a sense of place. After all, it isn't that senses of place don't exist — where else but California could the tech sector in its current incarnation have emerged from? — but perhaps that it's not widely recognized, and often minimized. The computer I type on is composed of parts from all around the globe which have been assembled together due to globalization and modern supply chains. It is made from the hands, land, and labor of folks in places like Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, China, Japan, the US, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mongolia, and more.4 What an opportunity there is in this, no? An opportunity to consider and reconsider and challenge the ways we are still yoked together along lines of hierarchy and struggle.
But what makes my computer a machine of modernity is the way that though it is tied to everywhere it seems to be from nowhere; the result of so many places whose edges are smoothed away in the name of this simplistic, complex, dumb, essential, sleek, advanced device. In the name of frictionlessness, there is little in this machine that bears explicit witness to its context and the processes that made it what it is. But I want it to.
Having a sense of place doesn't just give you roots. It provides depth. It gives accountability, both from and to a region and the life and processes within it. (I mean accountability in the way that reliably astute writer and disability organizer Mia Mingus) speaks of it: as a process that is generative, not punitive.)
Farmer and land designer Ben Falk writes that, "Humanity’s various failings on both the individual and collective level can be traced back to this basic phenomenon: misunderstanding how one’s actions affect an outcome, or oftentimes, not recognizing that one’s actions have any effect on an outcome whatsoever. In evolutionary biology this is called a maladaptive response."5 I could write an essay on the many ways that the tech industry (alongside others) works to sever the realities of cause and effect as they could show up in our lives everyday.
But I'll save that for another day. Instead, I'll just posit that perhaps our machines are as much tools of possibility as they are icons to maladaptiveness, with neither the extent of their potential.
Updated Dec 1 to include alt text for all images.
Pre-empting (justifiable) concern: this trip — my only international travel since the pandemic started and my first time in the UK in over three years — is on account of family matters. Nothing taken lightly, no worries.
From Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, an appropriately small and smart book. Don’t sleep on Caribbean thinkers.
Nothing is created alone. Natural had a lead photographer (Pavel Ezrohi) who brought great expertise to shooting on film. The model is my longtime friend Tinuade Oyelowo, an artist who can also somehow convey just about any emotion or mood in a look. Both are talented, check them out.
From Ben Falk's The Resilient Farm and Homestead