Meet the plants: cotton
Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.
― Haruki Murakami
Gossypium hirsutum
Let us not forget that cotton is a plant, part of the family Malvaceae (mallow family); the same family as hollyhock, okra and hibiscus. There are over 135 varieties of cotton, that share gossypium’s folklore, magic and medicine. All of it is overshadowed by a history of exploitation, mass production and consumption. A cool, versatile and elegant fabric, but has cost more in human misery than any other textile.
Undeniably, cotton changed the world. One of the most important non-food crops in the world, this plant was a mainstay of the tri-continental slave trade. Cotton was the first domino to fall in America’s Civil War and the catalyst for the industrial revolution. Before colonization of The Americas, cotton industries already existed in what we now call Peru, Mexico, Pakistan, China, Japan, and Korea.
The industrialization of cotton in the 1780’s increased demand worldwide. The demand created more cotton fields, particularly in the continental US, Barbados, and the Bahamas. Mono-crop cotton fields are brutal to the earth. During times of chattel slavery, colonized America was shipping over 4-million bales a year overseas. Cotton production not only tortured the soil on but human lives.
With the rise of global capitalism in the 1800s, what once happened intimately in the household, moved to the chattel plantations. Capitalism, motivated by profit and fueled by exploitation, created what Sven Beckert calls, “The American Empire of Cotton.” Like many things, a once sustainable handicraft became systemized through machinery and the capitalist hunt for profit, erasing the communal nature of the craft, culture and community.
“We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer
A cotton plant growing in front of sugarcane at Solitary Gardens. Both cotton and sugarcane are folded into our revolutionary mortar to build prison-cells-turned-into-garden-beds. Illustrating the evolution of chattel slavery into mass incarceration.
The history of cotton is rooted in painful memory and forced disconnection. How has settler-colonial history and capitalism replaced connection with production?
In what ways is the current imperialist-capitalist society taught us to see the planet as property?
In what ways are we taught to ignore the connections between innovation, greed, and exploitation?
What does deep connection mean to you? How is it part of an abolitionist’s landscape?
How is forgetting, erasing and disconnecting part of the architecture of white supremacy?
Cotton flower, clearly part of the mallow family :)
