Pulling at threads of liberation

Interspecies ethics | Things that make me feel hopeful this year | Towards more regenerative belonging in 2024: some news

The start of the year is an inherently exciting thing for me. I usually feel a short, sharp burst of energy and hope—perhaps tinged with manic tendencies. This is in stark contrast to the depression and heaviness of the previous winter months, laced with overwhelm and rage. Anger at a failed global system and brutalising political rhetoric that renders us complicit with depraved, dehumanising behaviour. We must revive our ethics in 2024. Our sense of moral responsibility needs a so-called ‘glow-up’.

Poet and author

Anthony Anaxagorou

’s recent pieces, Christmas Through the Long Hour of Genocide and Tragedy Hunter, I find perfectly reflect the tone of the final months of 2023. As ever, I’m grateful to Anthony for his moral and lyrical insight—for capturing this all with the right words. You can listen to my conversation with Anthony on the Xeno podcast earlier in 2023 here. We must keep demanding a ceasefire. Beyond a hundred other feelings these past months, I have also been psychologically wracked by the evident breaches of well-established moral principles of just war theory and war ethics (I recommend reading The Ethics of Killing in War by Jeff McMahan (2006)). Reflecting on the wider holiday season or the ‘Christmas industrial complex’ and what it means for our spiritual and philosophical lives, I recommend listening to this episode by the Overthink podcast.

For me, looking at social media since October 7, 2023, feels like experiencing Marina Abramović’s performance titled Cleaning the Mirror #1 (1995), in which Abramović continuously scrubs a grime-covered human skeleton on her living body. Five TV monitors are stacked vertically playing the three-hour-long performance as she works towards what we hope might become a ‘clean’ skeleton. The performance, Nancy Spector notes, is reminiscent of ‘Tibetan death rites that prepare disciples to become one with their own mortality.’' Tone-deaf content online is like scrubbing the skeleton, in an obtuse way, trying to clean away ourselves of mortality and vulnerability. It also feels like Frida Kahlo’s Lo que el agua me dio (1939)—what the water gave me. In it, severed bodies, death, and violence coexist with nature, sexuality, motherhood, birth, and femininity. A phallic, capitalist Empire State violently erupts through a volcano. The conflict surrounds us like water.

This is what the water, or Pachamama, for Kahlo, has given us. El bueno y el malo. Death and life. Violence and love. Past, present and future.

Reflecting on interspecies ethics

Recently, I have been deeply engaging in works on animal ethics. Their argumentative potency gives me hope for change in the subjective lived experience of billions of sentient beings across the world in the future.

I find landmark works of animal ethics inspiring and radical in their approaches, in particular to interspecies communication. Indeed, it is our reluctance to engage with other species’ ways of communicating that has allowed us to silence them and ignore their moral claims.

Instead, some deem non-human animals less valuable and of lower moral status than us simply because they lack a ‘complex language’ like ours. Humans continually maintain prejudiced views towards our non-human kin, like arguing something as ridiculous as ‘They should be able to communicate like us to be able to claim any rights’. We ought instead to adopt practices of deep ecological listening.

Here are some of the works I’ve been reading:

• Animal Liberation by Peter Singer

• Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility by Martha C. Nussbaum

• Puppies, Pigs and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases by Alastair Norcross

• When Animals Dream by David Peña-Guzmán

• Interspecies Ethics by Cynthia Willett

What studying these works has helped to unravel is this: how can we live well interdependently with others—including all species? All liberation is interlinked. Our work is to find the invisible thread that binds each other together. Human and non-human animal freedom are tightly woven together. When we belong to each other, ignorance is impossible. When we belong, I cannot disengage or avoid your pain and suffering.

Encompassing other species requires nothing less than a transformation of the moral status quo. I am convinced that our work is to transition towards an interspecies communitarian ethics. The growing. more popularised narrative around veganism has been giving me some morsels of hope in this respect.

P.S. As someone who’s been plant-based for five years now, since it’s ‘Veganuary’ and I’m feeling generous, I will buy a coffee for every single person who reads this and commits to going plant-based for the month. ☕ Hold me to it. I’ll do the same for you. I’ll even suggest a few recipes (with permission, of course)!

Things that make me feel hopeful this year

One of the first things I watched this year was Past Lives (2023), written and directed by Celine Song. This film deeply touched me, speaking to the nuance of intercultural relationships and their life worlds—and portraying love in such a complex, delicate manner. I was crying within the first five minutes (and then throughout the rest of the film) because the sense of both joy and longing is so palpable in every shot. Even reflections of multicolour city lights in a dirty puddle felt rich in longing and desire. Each of the protagonists’ performances stuck deep in my mind for days and I was captivated by the film’s respect for the ineffable. No part of the female protagonist’s identity was forced to be more easily digestible for a mass audience. Perhaps that’s why she looks directly at us into the lens in the film’s opening scene—a power play with the audience. It’s the most real love story I’ve seen.

It seemed poignant to me that the film was birthed out of a single real-life encounter of the director, Celine Song, where she was sitting between her Korean childhood sweetheart and now friend and her Jewish American husband in the East Village in NYC, translating between these two different life worlds in Korean and English. For Song, there was a story there, something ineffable that needed to be expressed. A story of diasporic identity that so often remains hidden from the mainstream consciousness. At that moment, she knew, ‘There’s a whole film there.’

Song’s Past Lives reminds me how powerful our stories can be and the restorative properties they can have. In watching the film, I realised a part of me still mourned the loss of an adolescent sweetheart that spoke to an important part of my identity. Why does this make me hopeful? Because it’s a reminder our stories matter. Even though our intersectional, marginalised identities are complicated and unable to be easily consumed, our experiences have spiritual and philosophical nutrients.

Other things that make me feel hopeful for 2024:

Lily Gladstone winning a Golden Globe for her performance in Killers of the Flower Moon; vegan Dan Dan noodles; winning chess games against AI; embodied animal movement workshops with the inimitable

Ruth Allen

—this month we’re dancing the vulture; Wong Kar-wai film marathons with my love; plant-based Chinese kitchen workshops with

Jenny Lau

a la Celestial Peach (you should also follow them on Substack); building strength on the bouldering wall; roller discos and more dancing—I’ve decided I’m learning to salsa this year 💃 (and here’s some cha-cha inspiration from 蘇絲黃的世界 World of Susie Wong, (1960))!

Towards more regenerative belonging in 2024: some news

Looking ahead, it feels like I’m pulling at threads of liberation.

For post-human ethicists “Becoming-Animal” is the ‘route out of a cramped capitalist culture of abstract human life.’ (Cynthia Willett, Interspecies Ethics) It’s about tapping into our intrinsic bio-social nature.

There are so many exciting things to come with the podcast: This year on Xeno I’ll be publishing more interviews with some amazing authors who have deeply inspired me, and sharing more conversations about the outdoors, belonging, and connection to nature. I’m starting 2024 in conversation with the wonderful

Soraya Abdel-Hadi

of

All The Elements CIC

(live on 31st January—sign up to the pod newsletter for our episode updates).

What I’m most excited to share with you, is that I’ll be launching my own non-profit Roots of Belonging later this year, after the Spring Equinox.

I’ve had the privilege of being in the current cohort of the Opening up the Outdoors (OUTO) Launchpad programme with Hatch Enterprises, helping me to launch my social venture working to diversify the outdoors. OUTO is a non-profit initiative that focuses on the continued inclusion, education, and enjoyment of outdoor spaces by people of the global majority.

Why belonging?

Belonging is an existential issue that uniquely touches each of us. Our sense of home and belonging—especially for people of colour and other marginalised groups—are threatened on a global scale.

In our late-capitalist world built for othering, home-building must be a collective, imaginative act rooted in nature (what we call the more-than-human world).

At Roots of Belonging, we host outdoor workshops for people of colour and other marginalised persons to reconnect with nature and cultivate their regenerative belonging. It’s a space to replant ourselves in the universe, together.

If you’ve ever asked yourself the question ‘Where do I belong?’ or have struggled to answer the question ‘Where are you from?’—this is the safe space for you.

We are building a diverse and inclusive community that deeply understands we belong to nature.

Our Values

We believe that being in embodied kinship with the more-than-human world is the direct route to being at home and feeling that we belong.

These are the values that shape us and the work we do:

1. Deep ecological listening

2. Animal joy and presence

3. Connection through play

4. Finding comfort in discomfort

5. Cultural curiosity and humility

6. Transcendent empathy

In practicing this interspecies work in the outdoors, we recognise that people come from all different contexts, with unique lived experiences and cultural lenses that inform their connection or disconnection with nature (on a continuum rather than binary). We therefore prioritise the safety and support of our community members—to be together as their most compassionate, curious, and generous selves for the benefit of all species.

Please get in touch if you’d like to join our community, if you’re keen to learn more, collaborate, or if you’d like to get involved in some other way! 💌

We’re so excited to meet you. ✨

And finally, here are three things I’m exploring/reading this month to craft regenerative belonging:

1. Fanonian phenomenology (Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks)

2. Intergenerational memoir (Thea Lenarduzzi’s Dandelions)

3. Family Constellations work

Image by Marley Hutchinson