Whether one acknowledges or respects indigenous animist belief or holds fast to the pseudoscience of psychometry, there is a sentience to things. Objects, as well as the terra from which they were extracted, contain their own grammars of meaning that endure even as they are re-spatialized.

What if we forget about things altogether? I’ve been wrestling with (the implications of) this fragment on grammar from South African photographer Santu Mofokeng: “My approach to landscapes is informed by cleaving the word landscape into its portmanteau component parts: ‘land’ (the verb) and ‘scape’ (to view)....” I’m committed to the idea of “land” (the verb) and the question of what it means to view a verb. It feels like a demand to think of the land as something we do (a collective happening)—a process, procedure, and practice rather than a thing. So maybe sentience is the name we give to what it feels like to watch (view) a transformation in progress? I get the sense that normative (colonial) grammars rely on fixed meanings (and fixing meaning, violently) and presuming objects are distinct from actions. So sentience and agency become a privilege reserved for some approximation of whiteness. But beyond the horizon of that approximation, transformation is the ground of meaning and if everything transforms then everything is a particular locus of meaning (and grammar).

The Land can and often does become like an inert and monumental proper noun in our political imaginary. But as a verb, it is defined by the amalgamation of geological, social-political, and material phenomena occurring on and beneath its surface—capturing processuality and multiplicity that better resist colonial enclosure (and our inadvertent re-enclosure in our honorifics). Maybe a more productive non-imperial grammar is one that does not rest in the ease of counter-narratives that produce other kinds of staticity: ones that capture The Land with inert pre-colonial meaning and mythos that remain vulnerable to hegemonic controls even as they attempt distance from them? The verbed land is what is sentient? Or another word beyond this privileged, Euroempiricist binary of living and non-living?

I like this word: amalgamation. It feels like we need a grammar for thinking about communities of phenomena. The Land is maybe a way to name the partial sum of a set of relations in which geological, ecological, and other chemical interactions are inseparable from spiritual, economic, and other cultural interactions. Land is not simply a territorial proposition but a kind of biochemical-spiritual-political system that is possible in particular ways through particular relations. Enclosure truncates relation, it brings the horizon of possibility so near that the land (as a processual multiplicity) is no longer visible—in Santu’s terms we can no longer “view” the relations we call land. Instead of relations, we are forced to deal with definitions (always in need of policing).

I think the sentience of stolen things is also a way to talk about the pain of recognizing, in an object, a shared longing. When we feel that stolen artifacts (that which is removed) synecdochically represent stolen land (that from which we are removed) maybe what we also feel is the stolen (captured) relation between ourselves and the planet in general. What we need, as part of a non-imperial grammar, is probably a relation in which these categories (sentience, human, non-human, object) are no longer viable. Maybe there’s a (k)new relation where things are not representative but formative and trans-formative?

It feels like communities function as capital R-Relation. I think in order to better begin to comprehend the multiple temporalities of/in/on land, oceanic thinking ironically might be more methodologically useful. Tidalectics permit land[’s biochemical-spiritual-political processes] to inhabit the same fluidity as water. (1) It’s an ecological imaginary of accretion and erosion, nurturing and extraction, etc. that resists the ahistoricism of representational certainties that claim to mark each process’s discrete beginning and end.

Heritage objects are made from earth into which our bodies, primarily made of water, will dissolve and into which our ancestors’ bodies have dissolved. The object made from earth is thus made from spirit and further imbued with metaphysical power and quality both upon its creation and in its capture and subsequent placement into new relational order in the archive. A terrafeminist materiality to Astrida Neimanis’s hydrofeminism. (2) An attempt to translate her ebbing and flowing embodiments into a never-ending unmappable (if we’re resisting border-being) processuality of land containing a transcorporeal ethic. A mutual recognition of person-related-to-thing through this ecology of sentience and shared origin. A responsibility to all sentience of/in/on land complementing the indigenous ways of knowing (ubuntu/hunhu, for example).

This feels like a good starting point.

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