Barbara Glowczewski, alias Gloska, to her daughters, Milari and Nidala
Translation: Drew Burk
Barbara Glowczewski is emeritus Professorial researcher at the CNRS, Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. She is the author of 12 books including Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze (EUP), Totemic Becomings/Devires totemicos (n-1 ediçoes), Réveiller les esprits de la terre (Dehors). For over 40 years she has advocated for Australian Aboriginal creativity through a variety of artistic, cinematic, and narrative explorations. Two of her last conferences online: “Barbara Gibson Nakamarra, a ritual custodian from the Tanami desert” and “Les luttes autochtones sont aussi les nôtres.”
To my dearest daughters,
So many terrestrial orbits have passed as the water flowing through my body evaporated into the heavens above only to fall back down to earth as rain. Don’t be alarmed. I’m writing to you from a pluriversal space-time of dreams and voyages. Here, matter that is billions of years old rests side by side with our pre-human ancestors and their becomings including the multiple actual forms today of the living: what your family and the peoples of the North-Western Australian coast call Bugarrigarra.
Nidala, my youngest daughter, do you remember when we went on our shamanic journey together? There we were, 15 of us, all in a trance. Spread out on the ground in the shape of a star. Our heads touching each other, our eyes closed, we were guided by the words and percussion of Anita. We all found ourselves projected into an apocalyptic world where each of our singular visions became entangled. You were there, turning in circles, standing on a great ebony-colored egg. And you noticed more people: other warriors fighting on other eggs, forming a huge sphere of black smoke that enveloped you. A triangle opened itself up bearing a human heart ravaged by wolves. You ran, covered in blood, and you all danced together in joy and solidarity. And there I was, a tiny lizard. A prisoner of the walls of the citadel, I felt like the tiny line of cement between the stones in the wall, already dead, a spirit from another world. But you were all there, fighting, each in your own way to defend the earth.[1]
Milari, my eldest daughter, do you remember when we danced at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Geneva for the exhibition The Beast and Adversity? I invited a Brazilian friend to be part of a performance. I projected images onto her I had filmed in Florianapolis. They were part of the Umbanda rituals; she entered into a trance, inhabited by a female spirit which shook her body. And the next day, there were 30 of us: men and women, dressed in painted skirts with our eyes hidden behind a veil, dancing in circles like Sufis to the beat of a drum. And we listened to songs from the contemporary terreiro of the Candomblé who had traveled from Rio. Do you remember each of us also suddenly beginning to “embody” a spirit (term used in Umbanda) by receiving a different orixá inside us? Milari, you became the spirit of inland fresh waters, Oshum, and I became the spirit of the sea—lemanja. Here in, Bugarrigarra, echoing from the wind, water, plants, animals, and stars I can still hear your spirits singing. I sometimes see them dancing with the orixás of thunder or those forest spirits who crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas along with the slave trade. The spiritual guide of the Florianapolis terreiro (ritual ground) confided to me that the Afro-Brazilian orixás also took care of the historical, terrestrial, and cosmic flows, in the same way as the Totemic spirits of Australia.[2]
I’ve shared so much with you my dear daughters. And the time we spent together were the happiest moments of my life. And yet, I regret not spending more time with you when you were little and I was working too much. I’m sorry I wasn’t always there to help you through your suffering as teenagers in Paris when your father moved back to his native land of Broome where you were both born… In the terrestrial years of the second millennium, we used to like quoting the philosopher Donna Haraway, “make kin not children”.[3] She placed an important value on the term kin. And thanks to your larger Aboriginal family, including the Djugun and Jabirr Jabirr peoples, you have both experienced what it means to make kin beyond mere blood relations. This image resonates well with what in Polish is called pszyszywani, “a patchwork” of uncles, aunts, sisters, and brothers. Close friends and their children “stitched” together as part of a larger family. Milari, I won’t forget your beautiful jewelry—the silver chains you crafted to wear around the neck and waist (like the traditional Indigenous pubic covering of a mother-of-pearl shell hanging from a belt made with human hair)—you called your jewelry pieces skinship. I loved this term skinship playing with kinship and skin —the term skin being, as you know, another way for Indigenous Australians from the desert and the North West coast, to relate all people in kinship relations which are applied not merely to the flora and fauna but also to the rains, winds, stars, and a myriad of other sacred sites. All these sites are thought and sensed as portals to a different space-time of the Dreaming: What you call Bugarrigarra, and which theWarlpiri and their neighbors call Jukurrpa. They taught me so much. I was 23 when I first met them during my Phd research in Anthropology in the central desert of Australia.
When I think back about the 40 years of traveling back and forth between the two continents: first I was by myself, then with your father, then with you, Milari. You were four months old when we went camping with your father’s mother, Theresa, for three days out in the Western desert to partake in inter-tribal ritual gathering restricted to women. It was there that my Warlpiri teachers covered you in red ochre and then passed you around from woman to woman before entering a spiral of hundreds of women with their chests painted and singing in order to regenerate the land and water. You were thus completely infused with the collective force of these women in an attempt to ease the trauma which you and I had just experienced in Paris with my mother, Bozena, as she was dying from pancreatic cancer. And two years later, Nidala, as you were seven weeks old, your jaja, your ”maternal grandmother,” my Warlpiri skin-mother, Barbara Gibson Nakamarra, came especially to Broome to bathe you in the scented smoke of the fire ritual in order to make your bones strong and help you grow and persevere through life’s struggles.[4] You have become a powerful warrior voice for the earth. Your songs and speeches seek nothing less than to unify all peoples— indigenous and non-indigenous— to partake in the shared custodianship of the sacred sites responsible for the health of all life-forms, including water and stones.
“Make kin, not children”, we ended up doing both… you made me a mother and an ally of your great coastal family and the other Indigenous people with whom the Djugun performed exchanges of objects and rites into the desert. Milari, you didn’t want to have children, Nidala, you wanted them, and together, in your maternal sisterhood, you made me a grandmother. I was en-chanted—in the fairy-like meaning of the term—through songs. I no longer possessed the agility of my youth and I left you here too soon. But we all agreed that if I began to lose my senses, like my father who suffered with similar problems, you would accompany me to the border where the law would grant the right to choose how one left this life.
Since then, I got back in shape, well, even if I’m changing all the time! Sometimes, I’m a lizard, sometimes a fish or a mermaid, I can feel you from Bugarrigarra. You can speak again to me at dawn at certain sites where we spent time together and show me new places in dreams. “C’est si beau de sentir là sous ma peau, mon cœur battre à nouveau…” to recall the lyrics of Suzy Delair from 1948. Your generation and the following one have succeeded, in spite of all the obstacles which seemed insurmountable, to take care of the Earth with a beauty and grace, along with all its inhabitants.
In France, everything changed in 2023, after the government’s attempt to dissolve the environmental movement, Soulèvements de la Terre (The Earth Uprisings)[5]. Due to pressure from lobbyist groups, the government began to discredit the ecological alerts and interventions by labeling them as “ecoterrorists.” The result of such an attempt led to an opposite effect: French people rebelled against such a climate of terror generated by a State blind and deaf to life. The firing debates which opposed the pacifists against those who performed civil disobedience or claimed to “disarm” destructive infrastructures (by acts of sabotage), finally ended up in favor of a common ground. An incredible solidarity of collective intelligence ensued bringing together people from villages and towns, large and small throughout the countryside. The same year, massive support erupted in protests across the country after the death of Nahel in Nanterre (Paris suburb), killed at just the age of 17, by a police gunshot, while he had stopped the car he was driving. He was the 13th victim killed due to police violence within a six-month period. Ecological struggles, struggles against racism and poverty against police brutality, against private or governmental lobbyist groups, all began to coalesce in France and around the entire world.
It took decades to counter-act the violence of the State. A violence which outraged you Nidala so much that, at the age of 12 years-old, you wrote to the Australian prime minister calling for the arrest of the policeman responsible for the death in the holding cell of Mulrunji: the 100th violent death of an indigenous Australian between 1994 and 2004 which eventually led to a revolt on his island. The Palm islander Lex Wotton,[6] who was imprisoned with others for having protested for justice, led a class action lawsuit which was finally won in 2018: the Queensland government made an official apology to Wotton and the inhabitants of Palm Island for the death-in-custody of Mulrunji. The Indigenous claimants were awarded the amount of 30-million-dollars in compensation by court ruling due to social injustice. It was a historic win. But since the prosecutor refused for the claimed money to be put into a collective fund to benefit all the 3,000 indigenous inhabitants of the island, the actual money was distributed and quickly spent by the 400 claimants. It took many more sacrifices for people around the world to understand that money would never fix all the racial, social, and environmental injustices they suffered. Money did nothing but aggravate more conflicts until it simply became useless in the face of no longer having drinking water and the destruction of the oceans, rivers, and land.
The struggles against social and environmental justice have spread across the entire planet. This contagious solidarity has focused on a collective healing and stewardship of the waters and lands understood as a commons under the people’s shared protection and responsibility. And such an attention to the earth has completely changing the global economy and world relations between humans and the rest of the living. The climate disasters that caused the closing of the mega-mines, also gave way to new modes of existence which in part made use of ancient cultural forms of wisdom: that of your Indigenous ancestors and other Indigenous peoples as well as those eco-sensitive groups who sought to make use of these methods for taking care of the earth. When I hear the songs of the planet that resonate here within the music of the spheres, I am overwhelmed with joy by the flourishing imagination of your generation and those thereafter (an imagination which had eluded my own generation) for taking care of life.
My dearest daughters, I know that at your age now, when your hair is turning silver, you still have questions about the future of this earth for your grandchildren. Trust in me, from my vantage point in Bugarrigarra, the planet is regenerating itself, its waters are becoming clean again, the telluric flows resonate with cosmic energy, and new peoples of all colors are inventing new collective forms of attachment through making use of solutions which seemed impossible during my time on earth.
[1] B. Glowczewski et G. Pruvost (dir), Des énergies qui soignent en montagne Limousine, Éd. Maiade, 2021. Collective survey made by 7 students in Environmental studies, EHESS, Paris.
[2] La Bête et l’Adversité, Bâtiment d’art contemporain de Genève, 2016 ; see B. Glowczewski and Clarissa Alcantara, « Cosmocolors – A performance with films of Brazilian incorporations and a conversation with the spirit Preta Velha Vo Cirina », (pdfs English and Portuguese), GIS – Gesto, Imagem e som. Revista de antropologia, 2017: http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.2525-3123.gis.2017.129204.
[3] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2016.
[4] B. Glowczewski, Desert dreamers, Univocal/MUP, 2016 (transl. Les Rêveurs du désert. Avec les Warlpiri de Lajamanu, Actes Sud/Babel (2017, 1re éd. Plon 1989) ; Rêves en colère, Plon/Terre humaine/Pocket (2023, 1re éd. 2004).
[5] https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/en-eu/blog
[6] B. Glowczewski, with Lex Wotton, Warriors for Peace: The Political condition of the Aboriginal People as seen from Palm Island, 2010: https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/7286/ (updated translation from Guerriers pour la paix. La condition politique des Aborigènes vue de Palm Island, Indigène éditions, 2008) ; see also B. Glowczewski, Réveiller les esprits de la Terre (éd. Dehors, 2021) and Indigenisinng Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 