Professor: Bénédicte Boisseron
Research Assistant: Rowan Freeman
Students: Jazmine Brown, Tiffany Harris, Sophia Lane, Shakirah Lieffers, Peyton Martin, Diya Mitchell, Stella Ojukwu, Shao-Chi Ou, Essence Peterson, Chidimma Udegbunam, Rayne Walkowicz, Leslie Washington
I realized I ate so many eggs, I should get to know the chickens laying them.
-Alice Walker
In Black Faces, White Spaces, cultural geographer Carolyn Finney challenges the common idea that environmentalism is a “white thing.” Likewise, in Sistah Vegan, author Harper Breeze advocates for a veganism that would be more than a “white thing.” Concerns about the non-human world have often been seen as white privilege, but a growing number of Black authors, artists, and scientists have been outspoken about their dedication to nature, animals, and anything beyond the human. More than a white thing, the environment has been instrumental to the construction of Blackness in the Americas. From the ocean carrying slave ships, to the enslaved working in the fields on the plantation, dogs trained to track the maroons, to rivers and
swamps embracing enslaved fugitives, the non-human world has been the silent witness of Black suffering and resistance.
As the author of Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, I wanted to create a capstone course that would invite students to think about Blackness not only in relation to animals, but also within the larger contexts of the non-human, nature, and the environment. In this course, students look at the many ways in which race and ecology converge both in an environmental justice framework and a Black contemplative lens. This course looks at the past, present, and future to reframe preconceived ideas about Black people’s relationship to nature.
In 2022, poet and scholar Joshua Bennett, in collaboration with the Poetry Society of America, curated an outdoor immersive exhibit in the New York Botanical Garden. The installation was entitled The Bond of Live Things Everywhere in honor of one of a poem by Lucille Clifton. The exhibit was composed of twelve wooden signs of nature poems by African American artists. Bennett saw it as his “own contribution to a tradition of transmitting black ecological consciousness through public works.”
After New York City, Bennett was going to bring this installation to the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University in Massachusetts. My first thought was, why stop there? Why not start a chain, an earthly movement, from one end of the country to the other, from east to
west, north to south, within the country and beyond, in a Black Diasporic chain? My students were all in. It didn’t take long for them to select their favorite nature poems from Camille Dungy’s anthology, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Together, in our own Arboretum at the University of Michigan, we curated a walk through the trees, all the way to the clearing. We named it Earth Song, in honor of Langston Hughes. Now, my wish is
that this walk never ends, that someone, somewhere, at some point, takes the baton and marches on. Walk through the garden’s dormant splendor. Say only, thank you. Thank you (Ross Gay).
-Bénédicte Boisseron
Project Design + Website by Rowan Jack Freeman
Poem 1:
the earth is a living thing
Poem 2:
#175
Poem 3:
White Dog
Poem 4:
I Am Black and the Trees Are Green
Poem 5:
Laments for Black Peoples
Poem 6:
Barriers
Poem 7:
Emmett Till
Poem 8:
Winter Poem
Poem 9:
Joy in the Woods
Poem 10:
Thank You
Poem 11:
At Last... Another’s Heartbeat