This lil' film was inspired by the writing of Báyò Akómoláfé. One hot August day I felt a roiling, burning feeling of being pulled towards something scary, and I decided to make something in a medium I knew nothing about (that would be film). As a celebration of play, spontaneity, and experiment, as a resistance to notions of productivity, perfectionism, and the pressure to monetize all our passions. Below I'll paste the excerpt from Thinking Feelingly that includes more, but here are the lines that you hear in the film:

Encircled by crumbling fences and by an encroaching wildness
without maps and without answers
surrender to the journey
let the loamy fingers of this dark soil
envelope you unmake you fiddle with you disturb you unsettle you conspire with you
and birth you.
The world needs you to fly
to wait for guidance from a tree
to do something preposterous
to tell us why one and one could equal sixteen.
The future is not fixed, and the past is yet to come.
This home that is a dance with exile
drives us to find new kin
the cow down the street
the wet anointing she spills on everything
the moon that nods as we stroll by.

This play was a way of practicing, rolling around in his language and in sensation, that enabled me the following day to risk loosening my grip on the familiar to invite a new haunting by shaving my head. More on that in a bit!

FATHER’S DAY
Ashley M. Jones, “Photosynthesis”
 
When I was young, my father taught us
how dirt made way for food,
how to turn over soil so it would hold a seed,
an infant bud, how the dark could nurse it 
until it broke its green arms out to touch the sun.
In every backyard we’ve ever had, he made a little garden plot
with room for heirloom tomatoes, corn, carrots, 
peppers: jalapeno, bell, and poblano--
okra, eggplant, lemons, collards, broccoli, pole beans,
watermelon, squash, trees filled with fruit and nuts,
brussels sprouts, herbs: basil, mint, parsley, rosemary--
onions, sweet potatoes, cucumber, cantaloupe, cabbage,
oranges, swiss chard and peaches,
sunflowers tall and straightbacked as soldiers,
lantana, amaryllis, echinacea,
pansies and roses and bushes bubbling with hydrangeas.
Every plant with its purpose.
Flowers to bring worms and wasps. How their work matters here.
This is the work we have always known,
pulling food and flowers from a pile of earth.
The difference, now: my father is not a slave,
not a sharecropper. This land is his and so is this garden,
so is this work. The difference is that he owns this labor.
The work of his own hands for his own belly,
for his own children’s bellies. We eat because he works.
This is the legacy of his grandmother, my great-granny.
Ollie Mae Harris and her untouchable flower garden.
Just like her hats, her flowerbeds sprouted something special,
plants and colors the neighbors could only dream of.
He was young when he learned that this beauty is built on work,
the cows and the factories in their stomachs, 
the fertilizer they spewed out--
the stink that brought such fragrance. What you call waste,
I call power. What you call work I make beautiful again.
In his garden, even problems become energy, beauty--
my father has ended many work days in the backyard,
worries of the firehouse dropping like grain, my father wrist-deep
in soil. I am convinced the earth speaks back to him
as he feeds it—it is a conversational labor, gardening.
The seeds tell him what they will be, the soil tells seeds how to grow,
my father speaks sun and water into the earth,
we hear him, each harvest, his heartbeat sweet, like fruit.

Copyright © 2021 by Ashley M. Jones. From REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press, 2021). Used with permission of Hub City Press.
 

Gustavo Hernandez, “Marte”
 
Around the time
the first holiday billboards
go up
 
I raise a finger to a point in the night.
 
To my eldest sister say,
look                 that red light is Mars.
 
We have been more than one year
without him, and just now 
we are starting to see things again.
 
So much of our knowledge
about the skies is gone.
Chart-blind,
codices black—all questions
we have forgotten to ask:
the color of the orbs
the slabs of moonlight.
 
I tell her the planet has been
floating there for weeks,
and I really mean to say,
we must try to hold on
to everything we can still recognize, 
even the need to look
for our fathers
in the 
sky.

“Marte” by Gustavo Hernandez, from Flower Grand First, copyright © 2021 Moon Tide Press. Used by permission of the poet.
 
 
Báyò Akómoláfé, “Epilogue: Re/Turn”
(A prose piece appearing here as a poem, with his generous approval)
 
Home is such a slippery concept.
Maybe there are no words to finally rope her in.
In the stead of words, a gasp:
home is then the moment when
in a fit of sovereignty
you would have given names
to the glory-weary sun
and to the council of mountains that hum
gently in his praise
and to the sea
and the bulbous shapes that hang from trees
names for all
only to hear behind your ears
the whisper of the world
“You! We shall give you a name too!”
It is not enough to find one’s way home.
The things that stand in our way
are aspects of our ongoing reconfiguration
enemies, bottlenecks, seething memories, gnarling fetishes, haunting creeds, howling specters, grumbling boogeymen, careening splinters, frowning clouds, green giants, gaping holes, chuckling forests.
A good journey is about dismemberment, not arrival.
Look for the path with the dead end
the unmapped one
haunted by Sphynxian riddles
And yellow slit-eyed peering shadows.
Encircled by crumbling fences and by an encroaching wildness
without maps and without answers
surrender to the journey
let the loamy fingers of this dark soil
envelope you unmake you fiddle with you disturb you unsettle you conspire with you
and birth you.
The world needs you to fly
to wait for guidance from a tree
to do something preposterous
to tell us why one and one could equal sixteen.
The future is not fixed, and the past is yet to come.
This home that is a dance with exile
drives us to find new kin
the cow down the street
the wet anointing she spills on everything
the moon that nods as we stroll by.
 
For me, this feeling of home
it looks like my father—your grandfather…
Dear Dad,
Mummy told us the week before we set sail
that you might not come back with us to Nigeria
the government needed you there
in the raging wars of Kinshasa.
But we knew.
This heavy gravity that pulled down everything within
as if I had swallowed a wrecking ball.
We drove in the embassy’s Pajero SUV to the busy docks.
We got on the ferry across the Congo River
And when the boat started to drift away from the quay
You stood there on the platform, your legs
an actionable distance apart — a long cool figure
cut out from the pestilence of the background,
Silhouetted against he din of the ordinary.
I feel your prickly mustache as you press your face into mine
the anchoring hopes come undone
and the ferry drifts out,
dancing on the currents
in the wake of other departing vessels.
You did come home
many times after that
until the day you came home in a box.
I have a daughter now.
I'm sure you know that because you haunt me.
I write you to let you know
I see you standing on the quay even now
when leaves rustle with passing wind
when your granddaughter asks about you
I see you when I remember the promise
to think with her
to listen to the ghosts that wander the streets
as they whisper about world forgone,
And to live in small places
where I never forget
that to be Alethea’s father is the deepest honor
the universe bestows on me.
I love you. Don't leave me alone.
 
This, all of this,
is how home feels.
Home is your mother
in whose entrails and dust I will be entangled
long after memories are congealed into new stars.
So take these letters
pack them in a neat heap
and burn them in a fire
put the ashes in with us,
where we now lie,
in the single pot
release us into the ocean wind
let her carry us away
so we will always be close to you.
Run through the fields, my darling.
Run to your new kin.
To your new fathers and mothers.
To the ones who hold you close
as our dust churns a new night.
Gather your children close—if you have any--
and tell them of your mother and me.
Especially your mother.
Tell them of your mother.
And when you dance through the wisps
of Thursday's bright morning
know you will not dance alone.
For we will haunt you.
We are cool like that. 

Báyò Akómoláfé from These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home, North Atlantic Books. Copyright © 2017 by Báyò Akómoláfé. Rewritten as a poem here with permission of the author. 
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            Maybe we’re finally ushering in a time of “Parent’s Day.” If I try to hunt down what fatherhood is, somatically and essentially, I guess it might be rooted in a seed and then in the practice of cultivating its growth. In a beautiful bridge to Juneteenth next week, Ashley Jones’ poem recuperates the image of her father working the earth from its history in slavery and returns it to a “conversational labor” of love. Pouring elements of light and water into the earth is likened to speech, the soil has a voice, and the seeds speak back with what they want to become. In this ecology of heart work, there is a comingling of the elemental and the auditory. Our father’s voice grows inside us, so sown into us that we can taste it: “we hear him, each harvest, his heartbeat sweet, like fruit.” “Photosynthesis” helps us see how one thing becomes another, across generations. Sharecropping transmutes into a mode of dropping worries like grain. Great-granny’s love of color shapeshifts from hats and flowers into food. Work becomes power becomes energy becomes a heartbeat.
            If “Photosynthesis” inspires us to listen for our fathers in the earth, “Marte” invites us to look for them in the sky. In fact, this poem is more than an invitation—it’s a plea. The poem’s jagged lines seem to be shaking us, jostling us back to an awareness of the old ways of our fathers, and ancestors further back. The grief of loss leads us into a kind of blindness, a forgetfulness that threatens to take away our maps, our customs, even our questions. Hernandez encourages us to “hold on” to our need, squinting to find traces of “everything we can still recognize”… even our fathers in the sky.
            Which leads me to Báyò Akómoláfé’s These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home. In the book’s foreword, Charles Eisenstein adopts the metaphor of a crystal for the way home refracts prismatically in Akómoláfé’s letters: “It isn’t like the bull’s-eye, the destination, heaven, home, doesn’t exist. It is only that it doesn’t exist in linear time. It is like a crystal hanging above our entire timeline, refracting partial images of itself onto our world that we recognize as home.”
I feel fatherhood, too, in Akómoláfé’s work, as something exploded, expanded, and dissolved into the sense experience of the whole world, from the humming mountains to the “loamy fingers” of the soil to the nodding moon to the wet-anointing cow to the “bulbous shapes that hang from trees.” The universe gives us our name. Fatherhood is bestowed like a gift and then re-gifted generously. Nurture must be shared with new kin, those who will hold us close when our “real” parents are turned to dust. This beautiful paradox of holding on to our hauntings (his own father’s ghost, waving his tall and noble goodbye from the quay), and the need to let go of the finite (the ashes of our parents and the proverbial letters they have written us) is the mystery of Báyò's worlding project. We must release our tight grip on the past so that we can open ourselves to being haunted in new, just as intimate ways: “let [the ocean wind] carry us away so we will always be close to you.” Kinda like his response to me when I sheepishly apologized for presuming to re-sculpt a prose passage so personal to him, so foreign from my own experience. He responded,
No, you are not writing to me about my own daughter or my own father’s death; you are writing to me about yours, about his, hers, theirs. Somehow, in re-presenting those lines to me like a poem, you brought it to me in a new way—in a way that wasn’t mine to begin with, but was and has always been a collective, affective, sociomaterial swirl of homemaking/place-sensing becomings. I say yes to this, sister.
 
#goals: to be, even for a day, cool like that.
         Báyò is doing what he describes, by unsettling, disturbing, and dismembering fatherhood as a home-base. He destabilizes any single, static, in situ ground or moment—even the image of his own father on the quay—and sets it into a movement migration. The ferry, the ashes, invite us to configure our own, tentative, temporary definition of home, in turn to be disturbed, burned up, and recycled.

 
PRACTICE
            How do we invite homemaking/place-sensing becomings into our daily practice? Maybe we could call up a seed memory of a paternal figure and consider an associated sense experience. This might be one of the five senses like listening for a heartbeat in a garden or peering out at the night sky to find Mars, but it also might be a subtler sense impression like the feeling of being ferried away from a static figure. Look for this perceptual experience in your world right now, this day, this week.
If we could shift a parental memory from a moment into a whole field of perception, we might feel more cared for in this world. Right after my dad died I had to walk the dog, and I felt companioned by his spirit in the open horizon of the playing fields by my house. For a while, every morning and night I would visit with my dad at those fields. Now every big open sky carries his imprint, every horizon holds me. We need these re-homing patterns—what’s yours?