Growing a Garden at the End of the World
Issue No. 6: Food, Nutrition, and Access in Our Communities
Words - Deja Beamon
Illustration - Jeremie Rose Wimbrow
It is the weekend following Earth Day and I have decided that this is the ideal time to plant my garden. This is my second year attempting to be in relation with the Earth; last year’s garden was sort of a fluke. It yielded fruit, but something about this year told me to invest more in this land. Alexander Chee writes that gardening allows for the individual to build a place that feels safe from imminent threat. In the coming weeks, a national uprising will begin—a revolutionary spark that many in my generation had unknowingly been preparing for since Ferguson. We show up and place our bodies on the line because we know how we must fight and often forget for how long.
When the uprising first begins, my disordered eating practices reveal themselves. I exist on a diet of cigarettes and coffee as I anxiously anticipate the violence the state will bring. While I wait for my appetite to return, I cook large platters of pasta and salad for my friends, to nourish them in the ways I cannot nourish myself.
Much of my relationship to food lately pivots around this line of feeding others as a stand-in for myself. I started hosting gatherings in my home in which I cook for my people, making sure they are fed. Sometimes we gather and discuss literature after a meal, sometimes we play Uno and Spades, sometimes we let weed smoke fill our lungs and sing songs from times when we could claim an innocence—that we now might label ignorance—but was ours. How we calm ourselves in the face of anti-blackness revolves around these things: communal spaces, food, song, marijuana, liquor, laughter. These gatherings offer me more sustenance than the food I cook for them, allow me to feel less alone, allow me to take root amongst my people.
This Juneteenth, I hosted a party in my backyard. The garden I planted near Earth Day is now its own entity, its own altar, leaning graciously towards the sun. As Black people begin to gather on the grass, I encourage them to have a snap pea from the garden, to touch the tomato plant and smell it. Like us, these plants know how to use some of the worst conditions to their benefit. Nothing can harness the sun quite like they can.
We often forget that the Earth precedes us and that it will outlive us as well. We have been in a tenuous relationship with the land through violent colonial projects for centuries. Once we are gone, there will still be an Earth and it will still flower in ways we might never imagine in our lifetime.
This summer, right as protests began in Columbus, I taught Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler to my students at Ohio State University. I felt that the scenes of Olamina gathering seeds, planning futures, and leaning into change might help my students deal with the despair of COVID-19, and allow them to think through how we can build community and futures when all the structures we have relied on for a false sense of stability have gone. The religion Olamina creates, called Earthseed, is built on the idea that we must constantly evolve to meet the demands of our worlds, and that the Earth is central to this evolution.
The Earth too is uprising, and I think it is on the side of all of us fighting against anti-blackness. Our moves toward freedom and abolition include changing our relationship to land and understanding its history. We must feed ourselves in order to feed our communities by tapping into the food practices of our ancestors, of ourselves, and of the futures we want. Food can be a way forward on the path to our collective liberation. It can be a way to ground us, to reteach our history, to build community around the table in my backyard garden over a game of Spades.
