When you’ve been a wanderer for so long, belonging feels like a foreign concept. Not because the land ever rejects you, but because people do. I’ve lived in so many countries and travelled through others, and in each, I am told I do not belong. The words are expressed defensively, as if somehow my existence itself is a virus and they are the vaccine.
But we – as humans – have always been wanderers. We have crossed oceans, we have traversed deserts, and we have waded through tundras. Our lives are short, and we have been taught to forget. Our capitalist cosmologies have made us believe that the lines we draw on a map are real, and with that desire for control, we have drawn borders across our own bodies. We have trapped ourselves in quicksand.
Where does my body end and the world begin?
I am a body of water, ever-shifting in form, never static. I am a communication of living beings, a cacophony of fungi, bacteria, and viruses composing and recomposing ragas. I am a being of consumption, extraction and addiction – alive only by the lives of others. I am a continuum.
Capitalist mythology defines and categorises us as individuals – a being that cannot be divided. But I – we – are made of multitudes. We are interdependence, lives interlocking and relating.
And yet, the spectre of alienation haunts us. We dissect space and time into units of control, excluding more than we include. In our fear of unbelonging, we sever the invisiblised ties that ensure our interconnectedness. We have learned to destroy the very things we yearn for. What is this unbearable grief? And how can we heal?
Alienation is not so much of a feeling as much as it is an action. We make foreign; we make unknown; we make unknowable. To alienate is explicitly an action of disconnection, of disassociation, of dispossession. Alienation is an act of loss.
Our capitalist cosmologies have taught us that to understand is to alienate. Our knowledge systems are constructed taxonomies of divide and conquer, defining through othering rather than through connecting. We define through extraction, using knowledge as a tool of control – and to control is to create the appearance of alienation.
Fields of narratives
I am unlearning my belief in alienation, and the land has been my teacher. I do not need to know the name of a tree to connect to it, watch as the seasons transform it, and observe the many relations it has with the beings around it. I belong simply because I am.
Every time I pass a body of water, I am urged to dive in. A younger version of myself is jumping in puddles and singing in the rain. An older version of me sits in hot springs, allowing my muscles to loosen and reconnect. And when I bask in the ocean, I can feel my body reach out, connecting to every land and being that I have ever interacted with. Water reminds me that I always belong.
Our lives exist only in narrative; stories of connection, disconnection and all relations that exist beyond and in between the limited meanings these words can provide us. We give meaning by storytelling, understanding what is through the ways in which all the stories connect, contradict and entangle.
By the story that land can be possessed, our world has been reimagined. By the story of racial supremacy, genocide has been vindicated. By the story of technological progress, surveillance has been normalised. These myths have become imagined truths, existing only because we cannot dream any other way of telling those stories. It’s just the way it is – as if the elements of that narrative cannot be revised.
The world – in all its complexity – reminds us that there are so many stories and so many ways of telling them. When I walk with a friend in the hills around my home, I am bewildered by the glowing orange-gold hue that only a sunset can cast. My friend is enamoured by the way in which a goose can glide through the skies, the very idea of wings being a source of profundity.
We are liberating ourselves. We are listening to different stories, and reimagining the world.
Nish Doshi (they/them) is an Edinburgh-based community organiser, dreamer, researcher, and facilitator who focuses on building cultures of care. They have over 15 years of experience in grassroots organising, in areas as diverse as disability justice, digital rights, and environmental justice.