on This Earth

BY UMARUL KHAIR BIN ZAINAL MUTTAKIN

(Blog Contributor)

We do not perceive individual beings of grass. We simply pass by casually or cast little more than a passing glance at the grass. It is in the language; grass is an uncountable noun. Thus, if it is uncountable, it does not count. Grass is, as much as Ranciere would have never considered it, is the natural demos, the count of those who do not count.¹

We have consciously been programmed through colonial culture (English is pretty much a coloniser language) to be unable to perceive and ponder upon the multitude of beings that grasses are. I am consciously using the plural here in an unconventional way. In English, the word grasses is used to either describe an abundance of grass or different types of grass not distinctly perceivable, discrete beings of grass. This is in stark contrast to the Algonquin language, an indigenous language from North America, where the default noun for grass is distinctly singular. The noun ‘mashkosiw’, a general term for grass denotes a single instance or organism of grass, (essentially properly translates to a single grass plant) not an undifferentiated group of grass in a general area as we often use grass in English. When trying to refer to a mass of grass generally the plural ‘mashkosiwag’ is used. Further significantly, terms like mashkosiw and mashkosiwag are within Algonquin grammar ‘gendered’ (not quite but) as animate nouns, the same class human and animal nouns are gendered in. This demonstrates the diametrically different ways in which nature and natural beings are conceived in the indigenous and colonised world.

All of this produces an image of the sidewalk grasses as an undifferentiated mass. Individual existences of mashkosiw are simply not worth speaking of. Through the experience of sidewalk grasses, we can observe how colonial erasure of the vibrancy of individual beings was first practiced upon non-human natural entities. The operation of collapsing countless distinct beings into catch-all collective nouns like ‘the Native,’ ‘the Indian,’ ‘the Black,’ and ‘the Arab’ was first—and continues to be—rehearsed upon non-human beings like ‘Grass.’ Erasing the individual vibrancy of these beings through reductive yet encompassing terminology makes it simpler for the colonizer to relegate them to the background, rendering them invisible and excluded from what Rancière calls ‘the count of the sensible.’ It is no accident that when the machine guns of colonial regimes are directed at indigenous peoples, colonial authorities speak of ‘mowing them down like grass’.

The ingrained despecification and backgrounding of grass and the larger natural world it represents in colonial imaginations is the product of conscious spatial operations.

The spatial operation in question here is the sidewalk.

The sidewalk grass patches that line or accompany sidewalks, just like the sidewalks they adorn, are defined, bounded spaces codified and designed for a specific purpose. One possible purpose is that sidewalk green spaces are there to serve as some sort of natural irrigation. Various forms of earth, at least untouched earth, possess the capacity to retain water sustainably while also preserving the stability of the ground. The fact that the human artifice (of containing greenery in sidewalks) significantly worsens the capacity for the green space to act in this way demonstrates it is not for this purpose even if it is cited by park authorities as a possible motivation. If the greenery was left unmolested by concrete sidewalks and bitumen roads it would be far better at retaining water to maintain land stability.

Another purpose of sidewalks is to serve to beautify what are otherwise deeply ugly artificial concrete cityscapes. However, the beauty that is contained within these sidewalks is of a particularly colonial sense of beauty. A tamed, natural beauty. Not unlike the trimmed hedges and carefully managed flower beds of colonial botanic gardens.

Sidewalks just like these colonial gardens express beauty as an expression of ordering power. Sidewalks are a site for a highly ordered, docile and ‘drawn within the lines’ greenery. Much in the same vein of Fanon’s description of colonised world as a “compartmentalized world”,²  the ‘drawn within the lines’ nature of sidewalk greenery express the colonial power’s capacity to order and consciously keep grass and greenery within the desired distribution of the sensible determined by the colonial gardener.

Here the “drawn within the lines” quality of sidewalk grasses is key. Not only does it reveal the ordering power of colonial gardeners but also highlight the defining feature of colonial power, violence. The colonial agent, “uses a language of pure violence.”² Just like colonial police against natives, humans in colonial cities consciously, regularly and violently ensure the grass stays in its place and within the lines literally. Through labour unique only to cities, all of which this essay argues are colonial, labourers regularly trim and prune the grasses to keep them within bounds and contained.

However, to simply valorise ‘untouched’ nature at the expense of these more immediate but apparently enslaved instances of nature would still render sidewalk grass as an uncountable, indistinguishable mass and to never count the vitality of the sidewalk grasses. The fact that the obedience of the sidewalk grasses must constantly be demanded violently through the police actions of pruning, trimming and ‘gardening’ to force nature back into the partition of sensibility that humans have forced her into is indicative that there is nothing docile about the sidewalk grasses. The reason why pruning and trimming is necessary is because the sidewalk grasses are constantly growing outside the partitions set for them. They grow into the sidewalks which humans have partitioned as their exclusive domain. The grasses grow into and creep onto the concrete of the sidewalk. They shape and disturb what was meant to be the realm of the unfettered flow of humans exclusively.  Buttress roots creep underneath these sidewalks and crack and shatter them. The crack in the sidewalk the buttress root has caused is a visceral moment when the defiant vitality of nature literally ruptures the logic of dominance and enclosure the human has sought to impose on nature. When you trip upon the now cracked sidewalk you are painfully forced to recognise the vitality of nature as it forcefully defies your distribution of the sensible and demands you recognise its vitality. The defiant vitality of grasses and natural things constantly defies the distribution of the sensible the police regime of pruners, grass cutters and ‘gardeners’ seek to maintain. Thus, all the attempted partition that humans have imposed on the sidewalk grasses has done is to make impossible to ignore the defiant vitality of nature. Nature makes manifest she is the first native and thus the first anti-colonial revolutionary.

By looking down, at the defiant vitality of some of the most mundane of natural beings I hope I have opened a door to how we can all begin to understand how nature lays out a process-model of indigeneity we can all follow.

1. Ranciere, Jacques (2010). Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Continuum. Edited by Steve Corcoran. ↩︎
2. Fanon, F. (1965). The Wretched Of The Earth. pref. by Jean-Paul Sartre. translated by Constance Farrington. Grove Press. ↩︎
3. Fanon, F. (1965). The Wretched Of The Earth. pref. by Jean-Paul Sartre. translated by Constance Farrington. Grove Press. ↩︎