Deep Listening
Conversations beyond the human.
One day, all gardens sprouted
from our names, from what remained
of hearts yearning.¹
(Heba Abu Nada, 1991-2023)
Words define territorial boundaries and define their content. An act of language can cut off a piece of land; it usually leads to physical violence soon after. Marking a piece of land as terra nullius preceded its appropriation by European colonizers, who, through legal twists and turns, annulled the very real presence of its inhabitants, first by word, then by force.
Language can also determine our relationship with the elements of that land, including its living beings. Foragers (2022, 64 min., 2K video) is a film by Palestinian artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna that blends elements of documentary, fiction and archival footage to trace a story of dispossession and domination.
In the film, we learn of the practice of herb foraging of certain edible plants in Palestinian and Israeli lands. Foragers explores how certain Israeli legislation for the protection of nature ended up limiting (and punishing) the collection of 'akkoub and za'atar, two traditional herbs that are not easily found and are part of the Palestinian knowledge of those lands.
It is a meditative film, where the story also leaves room for humor and conviviality. We see women from the community talking about the plants and their memory of them; also fierce denunciations of the situation, clandestine searches sheltered by the night and discussions about the concepts that govern life under occupation. Manna lets her images breathe, lets them flow at their own pace, and somehow it begins to feel like a dialogue, an immersion in a conversation of many years in which, for an hour, we participate and learn.
Forbidden herbs, deceitful words
Wild za'atar, related to thyme, is Origanum syriacum, of long tradition in those lands and attested in writings since antiquity. As always, it also carries a popular tradition: in different preparations, it is said to awaken the mind and sharpen the senses, and other medicinal properties are attributed to it.
In 1977, this species was designated by the Israeli government as a protected species, with fines and punishments intensified since 2005. It is the little things that make up an occupation. One after another. And on top of that, the big things: the seizure of land, language, property, calmness.
Foragers delves into that history with admirable patience, with a keen eye for the gestures and ideas that reverberate in a simple weed. There is joy in its finding and preparation. Memories that float in the air. In an interview in Failed Architecture, Manna says that despite the latent risks, “(Palestinians) do this hard work throughout the season to sell the herbs to their neighbors and surrounding communities. Palestinians are the masters of continuity under catastrophic circumstances.” (2)
The tensions between the protection of certain areas of nature and the traditional use of local communities have been widely studied. Of course, the conditions of Palestinian dispossession by Israel give other meanings to the designation of certain land as “no man's land”, virgin land to be protected... or, of course, colonized.
At the bottom of Foragers there is a discussion about the concept of mushaa, or agricultural land for common exploitation, not entirely public or private, but the community's. When it was parceled out, its meaning and its ties to the families that used it were disrupted, so everything has been diluting over time. The gathering of plants is part of the old understanding of the commons that constitutes the mushaa. Thus, its prohibition alters the relationship with the land: it curtails an ancestral practice by redrawing the boundaries allowed for the Palestinian inhabitants. When confiscated, it is often burned, as illegal cargo. Manna refers to this gathering of herbs, in the face of danger, as an “act of survival and anti-colonial resistance. Foraging these plants is part of an effort to hold on to forms of memory and practice that are rapidly eroding”. (3)
The camera that seeks and gathers
Foragers is a film whose energy emanates from contrasts. Fictional elements and records of the ordinary collide to reveal the tension inherent in the subject matter. In some sequences, the camera itself adopts the gathering gaze, a camera that explores among the grasses in search of 'akkub and za'atar.
It is interesting, of course, to pick up on the tensions inherent in a dispute over nature in this type of conflict, where a need for nature conservation is intertwined with the colonial mentality and a disregard for community practice. It is something that resonates with indigenous struggles throughout Latin America, where what comes into question is the way in which territories, their living and non-living beings, and the “use of resources” are defined: we are well aware that the same landscape can be seen as both exploitable and sacred land. Evidently the current situation in Palestine places us in a different context when watching Foragers and other works by Manna, given the violence of the Israeli government and the dispossession to which the Palestinians have been subjected.
Recalling a Palestinian film festival in New York in the early 2000s, filmmaker and curator Annemarie Jacir noted that Palestinians in their homeland and in the diaspora had learned how they were rendered invisible in the absence of “their own voices and images”(4). It is clear that confronting the implications of colonial violence can destructure our thinking in every minutiae: the designation of nature, with its living and non-living beings, with its rhythms and histories, cannot flatten strictly human violences.
In a scene of Foragers, we see some people in the street selling plants, analyzing them, thinking about aromas, flavors, all that which ties them to the earth. To life too. I will also remember the plants in the hands of women, who talk and talk while they prepare them. Or they keep silent. Being present there, in their land, with their herbs, which have their own names in their own language and their own accents.
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With each issue of the column, Fernando takes us into the world of creative documentary through a piece relating to the volume's theme, opening us to the infinite possibilities of this genre that blurs the boundaries between reality, experience and imagination.