Today in a seedkeeping workshop I attended, we talked about how seeds have memory. How every time you plant one, you’re changing its material, creating memories of climate and condition that will be passed onto future generations. It made me think about the many forms of remembering held by materials and living things: the memories held by salmon, metal, water, soil. The knowledge of how to return to the same place each year, how to hold a shape, stories of movement and change encoded into lineage.
Bodies, too, hold often inarticulable levels of memory. You don’t have to have read Bessel van der Kolk to notice the ways personal or collective traumas can live inside you somatically, the ways bodies can mark anniversaries and encounters that your conscious mind has forgotten. The ways experiences of gendered violence, starvation, genocide can echo through generations in unspoken ways. Sometimes it can feel like we’re inevitably shaped by the past, inheritors of harms we had no say in. But I’ve learned from African diasporic spiritual practice that time doesn’t only flow in one direction; it can be an ongoing conversation. To pray for the wellbeing of your ancestors and your descendants is to accept that your healing can ripple both backwards and forwards in time, to engage in a Black metaphysical tradition that exceeds western linearity. What I mean is, we’re always touching each other. Always imprinting on land and spirit and living kin, always shaping each other in ways that become memory.
This week in particular, I’ve been thinking a lot about touch—about who labors to touch others, who is seen as entitled to touch and intimacy under racial capitalism. The murders of mostly Asian massage parlor workers and customers in Georgia exists within a long legacy of white violence against women who care for the bodies of others. Of brutality against Asian women sex workers, nannies, domestic workers, restaurant workers, mothers. News reports say the shooter’s rage came from an addiction to sex and an inability to resist the “temptation” of massage parlors. To whom is touch seen as a birthright?Through torture techniques like solitary confinement and “no-hugging” policies for the imprisoned, the state mobilizes touch and its absence to enact regimes of violence. At the same time, white men incels are allowed to use sexual rejection and lack of bodily pleasure as an excuse for mass murder, transforming their personal relationships to touch into a collective threat.
In a world where white supremacy structures who is seen as deserving of touch and pleasure, whose bodies determine the market value of exploited labor, it feels like a revelation to witness Black and brown people leaning into deep embodiment with each other. Back rubs, belly laughs, the glances across a room that gather you up and hold you close, throwing it back on your friend in the club in the living room, a survival strategy stretching before and beyond a pandemic that has made touch fraught in different (and still racialized) ways than ever before. Even though this reality tells me I was born to a body meant to give physical sustenance and not receive it, even when touch is a commodity that whiteness laid claim to before my birth, these moments remind me of tender and tentative possibilities for an otherwise world. As Eloghosa Osunde writes in a recent Paris Review essay, “My favorite way to be touched is like I can be lost. My favorite thing to remember is that something else is always possible.”