In her 2014 debut novel, which was later adapted for television and nominated for an NAACP Image Award, Natalie Baszile’s “Queen Sugar” follows the Bordelons, a Black family in Louisiana struggling to maintain an inherited 800-acre sugarcane plantation, amidst some of their own strained relati onships with each other, and the realities of racism in the south. They are dealing with the loss of the family patriarch, trading the familiarity of one career for the foreignness of farming, and the assertion that they don’t belong in the White and male dominated farming community there. “My dad was born in Louisiana, in a little town called Elton; so even though I’m a California native, a suburban kid, I feel that I have the right to claim the place as part of who I am,” Baszile, who spent 12 years researching and writing her book, said in an interview with Penguin Random House Canada. (She will discuss her book as part of the Black History Month programming with the University of San Diego and the San Diego Public Library from 7 to 9 p.m. Monday, in the university’s Mother Hill Reading Room; she’ll also discuss her current non-fiction book, “We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land Legacy.”) To further explore these ideas of loss, reclamation, and resilience, a panel discussion with professors from USD — Cory Charles Gooding, Olutoyosi “Toyo” Aboderin, and Kyle Brooks—will focus on “(Re) Claiming Space: A Discussion of Resilience, Loss, and Land in Baszile’s Queen Sugar” at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, also in the Mother Hill Reading Room. Both events are free. Aboderin, an assistant professor of history and Africana studies, and Brooks, assistant professor of theology and religious studies, each took some time to talk about some of the historical context of the loss of land for Black farmers in the United States, what resilience has looked like for Black people, and an indigenous framing around a relationship to the land that doesn’t involve ownership. (These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.) Q: In this conversation about reclamation and loss, there is the history of land that was taken from Black farmers in the United States. A 2023 report on reparations and the loss of Black-owned land from The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit that conducts research and provides consulting and advising to organizations focused on equity and social change, notes that Black farmers owned more than 16 millions acres of land in 1910, and by 1997 had been stripped of more than 90% of those acres, resulting in ownership of just three million acres as of 2023. They estimate that loss to have been worth $326 billion at the time of their report, noting that the loss of that land affected residential housing, small businesses, and entire Black communities. Can you talk about how this story helps us understand the historical connection that Black people have to the land in the U.S.? Aboderin: Yeah, definitely. As I read through this story, there are just so many layers and so many ways you can interpret this. Of course, on the surface is the story about Charley Bordelon coming from L.A., going back to south Louisiana because of land that she was given by her now late father, and how she made sense of it. On a deeper level, you’re reading about how these characters manage grief, loss, disadvantage, poverty, systemic and economic barriers, and how they make sense of that, how they respond to that. While reading that, I couldn’t help but think of African Americans and how we, as a community, have made sense of all of those things in the United States. So many promises broken, not just to us as a Black community, but to many, and throughout our history here we’ve been promised, over and over and over, freedom and equality; we’re still having to fight against a system (to) acknowledge us. So, I see the experiences of African Americans through these characters, and I believe, for many readers, they’ll be able to do the same, and hopefully it’ll help them make sense of how to respond to that in the future. Brooks: When I think about the relationship of Black people to land, a couple of things come to mind. First, I think about the dispossession that happens through colonialism, that Africans taken into the transatlantic slave trade are taken from their lands, taken from places where they have an indigenous relationship to the location and to the physical, material land itself. I think this is really important because part of what happens in that process and that transition is that these Africans who are taken to the Americas have to think about how to adapt. How do you transform your rituals, customs, and traditions in ways that can take advantage of the land where you find yourselves. I also think about the very interesting ways that Black folks negotiate a relationship to land and space; particularly folks such as the Gullah Geechee people and the Maroons, who stole away from the plantations and kind of made a life in the swamps, in these places that were kind of far flung and often thought of as inhospitable or uninhabitable land. They made life there, they built culture there, they created communities. So, there’s a way in which land offers, figuratively and literally, fertile space for imagining a way of life, a way of being, that can be sustainable, that can be flourishing. As it relates to the story of “Queen Sugar,” I think there’s something to be said for the fact that this land has been in the family and it stayed there long enough for it to become an inheritance. That land comes at a cost, both in terms of the resources needed to maintain it, and I think here, particularly, even folks who have been able to inherit land, inherit homes that have been in their families, we operate within economic systems and structures that make the retention of land, the retention of property, a much more difficult task, whether through payment of the property taxes, or various ways in the cultivation of land. The ability to cultivate the land still necessitates the ability to actually sell your product and to work within a sort of economic system that is deeply racialized. All this is to say, too, that land suggests the kind of place where people can belong, where they can set roots. I have some deep Southern roots, a lot of family in rural Georgia, and one of the traditions of our family that is common to a lot of Southern families is the tradition of homecoming. Every September, lots of our extended family from across the country return to rural Georgia for the homecoming celebration to eat and to hang out, to just to be present with family. So, homecoming is possible because you have a home to return to. For me, that is one of the animating aspects of land. They’re not making any more land, here’s only what there is. It’s important to hold on to it. Q: When you read about and think about this massive loss of land experienced by Black folks, that Charley Bordelon was working to avoid in “Queen Sugar,” what comes to mind in terms of what all is lost alongside the physical land itself? What have Black folks in this country lost when we’ve lost land? Aboderin: There is a term called “mental incarceration” and there are many scholars who speak about this, but what it describes is that enslavement was not just physical, but it was mental, it was psychological, and that psychological piece is still ongoing. So, when we talk about land, when we talk about broken promises, when we talk about land being taken away-not just promised, but taken away-I believe it is a form of that mental incarceration to keep Black people from believing that they are capable of ownership, capable of responsibility, capable of space. There are so many ways we can see mental incarceration alive, unfortunately, still today. I think land and controlling who gets land, land that isn’t even our right to own, to be to be fair. The Indigenous and Native Americans understood that this land should be shared. All of this just makes me think of how we are still having to contend with this psychological process and psychological enslavement. Brooks: When we have lost land, we have lost physical spaces where life has happened, where memories have been formed and shaped. I think about the feeling one might get if they drive past a home where they used to live, and someone else occupies that home, but your memory is still occupied. It becomes a kind of holding ground, a space for, I think, just the sacredness of life. So, part of what is lost is the physical manifestation of these longer histories and heritages. I think of how the work to obtain land, part of what is lost is that longer term investment. There are the millions of the material cost, certainly, but I also think about the kind of labor that was necessary to position oneself to have land in the first place, especially given how many African Americans across the south-post emancipation, post the Civil War-are relegated to sharecropping. So, the idea of land that they can have for their own was a distant dream for many of them. Part of what’s lost, too, is a sign or symbol of one having, even in a small measure, overcome some of the challenges and obstacles of White supremacy. Land, not even just as possession, but land as a place of inhabitation, a place of communal gathering and being. It’s very difficult for folk to gather in the same way. It’s very difficult for people to have the same kind of relationship to physical space. It matters when you know a particular terrain, when you know the plants that grow there, you know what kind of soil is good for which kinds of crops you can sell. So, part of what’s lost, too, are these sort of indigenous relationships to the natural territory, the loss of a sense of relationship to the land. The land is not, primarily, a thing to be possessed or owned; it’s a thing to be experienced as part of this larger cycle of life. I think, particularly for many African Americans, certainly the land represents a kind of a measure of economic stability, the ability to have something to ground you to fall back on. Also, I think most importantly, the idea that land is a thing that, for many people, is unthinkable to sell. The point of it is not to make money as much as it is to offer a place for making life. People’s relationship to land is not just about what the land gives them, but it’s also an opportunity for reciprocity. Q: In thinking about this discussion you all will have about resilience and loss, and the ability to recover from and adjust to change and upheaval, can you talk about what our recovery from so many of these losses, collectively as Black people in this country, has looked like? Aboderin: Yeah, such a great question. That’s honestly my favorite part about Black history; and I’m not just talking about Black history in the U.S., but all over the globe. One thing about us, no matter how difficult things get, no matter how far back we’re set, we have always been resilient people. We’ve always responded. In fact, when we look at history, some of the most disturbing times of history is when we created the most beautiful things. I was just doing some research on the Jim Crow south and that Jim Crow era. Many forget that the Harlem Renaissance existed during that era, as well. You had these Black artists and musicians and poets and writers thriving-Tulsa, Oklahoma and Black Wall Street. You have Black people thriving in one of the ugliest times of our history, so we’ve never been a people, we’ve never been a culture to freeze or to stop existing when things are not going our way. I think this story, specifically Charley as a character, embodies that resilience that we have as a community. There’s also this term called “victorious consciousness” that was coined by Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, and it is this belief in having hope and resilience, and understanding that even though our history is marked with moments of defeat, we are not defeated; victory is still possible. So, I choose to look at history with that lens, and I believe this book (“Queen Sugar”) does a great job of showcasing a character who did the same. Brooks: I think one aspect of that recovery has been the writing of these stories. I think Natalie Braszile’s novel represents a desire to retain, to put into concrete form, the expression of the deep sorrow, the joy, the struggle, but also the resilience that comes along with not just keeping the land, but being able to flourish through it and to give the family something that anchors it and grounds it. Another aspect to consider, with respect to this question of resilience, is that part of that resilience functions by finding ways to sort of recreate and to create the new. As a native Midwesterner with Southern roots, going to visit the places where my predecessors and my family grew up and where they lived, and considering what they left behind in order to move to the larger cities, one of the things I realized is that even in moving, you don’t lose the capacity for imagining what can grow here. When I think of land, I think of how there are native species that can grow in certain places and not in others, but wherever you are, you can still have the potted plant. You can still have that element of the living that has to change in scope and scale, but you can still have elements of life, even in places that are not as familiar to us. Resiliency also shows up in a willingness to remember and to return. We tell these stories because it’s important to remember who we have been, where we have gone. It’s important to know that the struggle of those before you makes possible the life you’re living now. I do think we have often had to rely so heavily on resilience. I think there are times where it would be a wonderful luxury to simply rest, and to be. I think this is part of what the desire for land, the desire for a place of one’s own, is about-rest from an ongoing and continual struggle, as African Americans have had to, historically in this country, fight just for the simple acknowledgement of our humanity. It occurs to me that resilience shows up in how we live daily life. How do we create spaces for for joy, for celebration, for laughter, for creativity? That even with the loss of land, we turn any kind of territory we’re in into something new and beautiful. We get hip hop in the middle of a concrete jungle and it finds a way to take root and to flourish and grow. I think, metaphorically and literally, we do the same wherever we are. That resiliency shows up in the stories we keep telling, the worlds we keep creating, the styles that we adopt and shape, and the ways that we sit and create an influence on others who copy what we do. All of that is resilience. We, literally, do not die, we multiply. Q: What does it mean to, first, claim space as Black people; and then to reclaim it? Particularly in having this discussion now? What is the significance, or importance, of doing this? Aboderin: I don’t love the idea of claiming and ownership in the traditional sense of land. Going back to Indigenous and Native Americans who understood that this was here before us, and that we really don’t have that right, and shouldn’t feel so entitled in that way. But, I like the term “reclaiming” because “reclaiming” doesn’t just speak to ownership, but how you’re using that space, how you’re understanding it, and how you’re showing up in it. For me, that’s how I understood that term, and I think that speaks more to our experience as the Black community, and especially when we’ve been promised so much and given so little. I think “reclaiming” just does a better job of encapsulating what we’ve gone through. Brooks: Particularly when I think about the 100th anniversary of Black History Month, I think of Carter G. Woodson’s intention for us to pay attention to the wide range of Black experiences and lives. Carter G. Woodson had a deeply internationalist and diasporic focus. He said, ‘No, Black history everywhere is important,’ so part of the reclamation is acknowledging and understanding, or coming to learn, that, in a sense, we are everywhere. We have been all across this world. There is the necessity for us to name those histories, to be proud of them, to not shy away from them, and to resist the measures of attempted erasure. I was teaching abroad in Argentina and I got to take this tour built around Afro-Argentinian history. One of the things that the tour guide stressed was that, for a lot of people, the way they talk about Argentinian history and culture is as if there were no Black people there, there were no folks of African descent, there’s nothing of them worth mentioning or remembering. Honestly, that’s been the way folks have tried to treat African American life in this nation and abroad. Also, I think the ways that we see these attempts, now, to reimagine historical narratives, or to obscure elements of it that make folks uncomfortable, I think part of that claiming and reclaiming is being willing to let folks be uncomfortable with the presence of Black life and being. It means taking up space, it means not apologizing for the fact that our creative expressions, our intellectual achievements, those things matter and we keep them alive. We keep the traditions alive by continuing to tell the stories, by continuing to unapologetically affirm that blackness is beautiful and that within blackness, even as blackness has become a space for so many people to dump off their worst beliefs and ideas and desires, in blackness we find something that is not shameful, but something that is deeply rich and resilient. We have been here for so long, and we continue to be here. For me, the reclaiming is about acknowledging that you have claim to this land, to this history, as well; but how we claim it is not for the sake of ownership or dominance. It’s not for the sake of erasing others, but I think it’s about restoring the proper relationship to history, to culture, and to our shared community with other human beings and other citizens. ...read more read less