Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature (404Ink) is a new book featuring a series of essays by women of colour across the UK that explore their relationship with the natural world, connecting to issues ofclimate justice, neurodiversity, mental health, academia, inherited histories, colonialism, whiteness, music, hiking and so much more. Redressing the imbalance of a genre long-dominated by male, white, middle-class writers, Gathering broadens both conversations and horizons about our living world, encouraging readers to consider their own experience with nature and their place within it.
On Thursday, May 16th, contributing authors Maya Chowdhry and Dr Sofia Rehman join us for an event at Liverpool's iconic Sefton Park Palm House, delving into this topic in the company of local artist, beekeeper and gardener Andrea Ku, and Liverpool Biennial curator Marie-Anne McQuay.
Find out more about the event and purchase a ticket here.
Purchase a copy of 'Gathering' (£10.99) here
Below are extracts from the essays 'In a Relationship with Sugar' by Maya Chowdhry and 'From God We Come and To God We Return' by Dr Sofia Rehman.
In a Relationship
with Sugar
MAYA CHOWDHRY
This is an interactive extract.
To take part, get your phone, and a piece of any sweet
substance you have to hand; jelly babies, chocolate, a
sugar cube, ready.
Not ready? Then let your eyes flick over the black ink on
white paper and imagine you are participating.
Ready?
Scan this QR code.
As the first part of the track plays, please taste your sweet
substance, slowly savouring how it awakens your tastebuds.
Then, as the second track plays, continue to relish your sweet
something. In your mind, note any differences between your
eating experience during track one and track two.
Now the theory.
Babies respond to sweetness
by sticking their tongue out,
and to bitterness by retracting it.
Brown or white?
I mean sugar. But I could mean babies, it’s part of the same
story. Sugar is one of those foodstuffs that illustrate our human
relationship to food and food justice in a way that few other
substances do. The history of its production and consumption
has not only changed the biology of humans but epitomises
human cultural changes over 500 years, as the trading of sugar
resulted in transatlantic slavery and capitalism.
Sugar—or rather, the great commodity market which arose
demanding it—has been one of the massive demographic
forces in world history. Because of it, literally millions of
enslaved Africans reached the New World, particularly
the American South, the Caribbean and its littorals, the
Guianas and Brazil
In recent years, my interdisciplinary creative practice has
focused on live art – in particular live art where the participant
and their interactions are the focus of the art. I became
interested in this type of practice as I feel it breaks down the
boundaries of what art is, and how art is situated in the world,
i.e. no separation between art and life, life and art. This essay
asks you to both participate beyond reading and thinking, and
to blur the boundaries between essay, story and art.
From God We Come and
To God We Return
DR SOFIA REHMAN
Muslims are encouraged when they find themselves in
any kind of loss or difficulty to recite the words;
إِنَّا لِِّلّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعونَ
‘Indeed, from God we come and to God it is that we return.’
These are words I recited fervently and almost continually in
the summer of 2021 when my father suddenly passed away.
The words became a way of grounding myself, a sort of
proverbial anchor when I could feel myself unmooring, setting
adrift in the turmoil of grief and the unforeseeable ruptures
that emerged from the loss of my dad. My dad, the man I
looked upon as a mountain. I always thought him invincible
and fearless, undefeatable, not even by death. The Qur’an
describes mountains as pegs that stabilise the earth and that
is what I realised my dad had been in my life; a stabilising force
in his quiet but monumental way.
My first love of the great outdoors was instilled in me by him.
He wasn’t by any means a particularly involved father, but in
the times that he was fully present with his children, he shaped
us with and connected and rooted us to the things he loved,
foremost amongst them his love of nature and the wild. So as
we lowered him into the ground, the July rain gently falling as
a mercy from the sky, the leaves of the tree under which he
was being buried rustling a soothing chorus of hushes like a
mother settling her child to bed, the moment didn’t overwhelm
me as I had thought it would. Instead, I could see the physical
lowering of my father into the ground was only corporeal, on a
metaphysical level the soul was ascending into another space of
serenity. Again, I uttered the words, from God we come and to
God we return. It struck me then that when we come into this
world from God, it is through the womb and when we return to
God, it is through the earth: women and the earth, both portals
to and from the Divine and yet both so utterly exploited and
subjugated by the greed and tyranny of men.
In the days that followed my dad’s passing, comfort came in
many forms; the cup of tea my best friend made when we got
home from the hospital that evening, my children’s embrace,
and our neighbours’ pots of food to name a few. But an
unexpected comfort were the birds from my dad’s devotionally
tended garden. Many times, I would step outside to find a
little bird land on my shoulder, follow me around the garden,
and chirp at me until I sat down on the grass from where it
would proceed to jump onto my knee and then onto my head.
Sometimes there would be the fearless bird who would hop
right over the threshold of the French doors of my parents’
home and stride right into the living room.