Gathering: Women of Colour and Nature

Words by Durre Shahwar.

Gathering: Women of Colour and Nature is a video diary and a poetry film that explores the ways in which we define and create our identities within nature, and the safe spaces we seek out in an increasingly unsafe world. It is a meditative and explorative piece of work that brings together poetry, research, conversations, footage, and recordings exchanged between me and writer and filmmaker Kandace Siobhan Walker. It invites the audience to engage and converse on the themes of identity, nature, belonging, landscape, and memory.

The idea for the project came about in September 2019. I was sitting on the beach at Langland Bay with a friend. The weather in September in West Wales often hits the sweet spot: the days are long and still warm enough, yet the heat isn’t swelteringly hot to be unbearable. I had just ended a long week of work and thesis writing and this was my small joy to fend off burn out. I was thinking of my place in the world, and of what I wanted to do creatively that would really nurture me, rather than exhaust me. That's when I realised, I wanted to write about nature. I had always seen nature writing as something that was only done by people who went on long hikes, knew all the names of the birds and plant types;  people who were equipped and knowledgeable on these themes. Not people like me, who live in the city, and access nature for leisure and peace and occasionally grow some vegetables and plants. Especially not POC, who I saw far and few on walks in the countryside, be it due to lack of accessibility, or a lack of feeling like they are welcome and belong there. Yet spending that day on the beach and driving home in the evening afterwards, watching the trail of fire that the sun left across the sky, I felt joyful and inspired.

My family moved to Wales from Pakistan when I was a kid and not being born here has always added another layer of "otherness" to navigate in my work. I always felt Welsh, but I could never quite pin down exactly what it was about Wales that made me feel at home, besides having lived here for most of my life. But when I got home that night it hit me: I feel the most connected to Wales in nature. In its waterfalls, coastal paths, seaside cities. I make it mine in these peaceful, healing moments. In the moments where I don't worry about less or more, here or there, this or that. In the moments that I let go and sink my toes into the sand and feel lucky to have all this on my doorstep.

The project was initially funded by National Theatre Wales as a ‘Located Residency’. Alongside having collaborative chats with Kandace over Zoom during lockdown, I also spent time walking along the Wales Coastal Path in Swansea, where a lot of the images, footage, and poetry come from. I had a lot of conversations with other women of colour about their relationship to nature and tried to bring all these ideas together in the film. Ideas of history, heritage, the idea of occupying space and seeing nature as a space for liberation.

The more I started to investigate the topic, the more I realised that although this project was meant to be joyful and exempt from the ‘heavier’ themes that bear down on creatives of colour even when we choose to autonomously explore them in our work (identity, race, migration, trauma), elements of these still seeped into the topic of nature. It would be naïve and ignorant to pretend that they didn’t when majority of nature writing is by white men. When communities and countries in the Global South are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, as evident by the recent floods in Pakistan, a country that is responsible for less than 1% of global emissions. When period cleanliness is an issue for so many women across the world because of lack of access to clean water. And so, thinking of all these issues, I wanted to not only celebrate nature and the healing that it brings us, but I also wanted to challenge who gets access to nature, who gets to write and talk about it, and how it is portrayed.

Towards the end of the project, I also started thinking about Kashmir, where my grandparents moved from during the Partition on foot to Pakistan. I have a longing to visit Kashmir, which is a contested territory still and said to be ‘heaven on Earth’ due to its natural beauty, and this longing unknowingly seeped into the film. My mother tells me stories about my grandfather buying farmland once they migrated to Pakistan, that became the home of my grandparents’ that I visited as a child. Farmland and a house that I have many happy memories of that I can never return to, that I have ‘hiraeth’ (a deep longing) for as we say in Welsh. The film is therefore also a bit of a nostalgic nod to the ‘inherited attachment’ we may have to nature, as much as it is a claim to space because nature is for everyone, regardless of where you live or where you come from.

We wanted the images and the clips of the film to portray all these moods, emotions, meditations, and thoughts. Me and Kandace spent a lot of time making notes and discussing the type of film we wanted it to be and agreed that we wanted the visuals to be reflective of words rather than a literal depiction of them. We also didn’t want it to feel like the words came first and the visuals after, or vice versa. And so slowly came together a montage, a hybrid poetry film, and a video diary rather than a cinematic, one-way performance or a show. A visual conversation that the audience can take part in, and where the gathering of images and clips over lockdown is part of the process of writing and creating. It is intended to be a way of reimagining how we tell our stories and challenging the creative structures within which we work. Because history, memory, identity, and emotions are intertwined and non-linear and breaking out of pre-determined Westernised linear boundaries to form our own creative expressions seems only right. 

Since this, I’ve expanded the premise of this topic into an anthology of essays titled Gathering that will feature essays by women of colour from across the UK on the themes of nature, climate, and the landscape. It feels like a step in the right direction to come together collectively and challenge the very white and male dominated genre of nature writing. 

Credits:

Writing: Durre Shahwar

Footage: Durre Shahwar and Kandace Siobhan Walker

Editing: Kandace Siobhan Walker

Funded by: National Theatre Wales

Social media:

Durre:

Website: https://www.durreshahwar.com

Twitter: @Durre_Shahwar

Instagram: @Durre_S

Kandace:

Website: kandace.co.uk

Twitter: @Kandacesiobhan

Instagram: @kandacesiobhan