Reflection: Living Heritage

11th Sept 2024

 

I listened to the podcast yesterday. I am still processing. This is beautiful work.  I hope you bring it further and develop it. 

 

I could smell the jasmine…I was in India in the eighties and I have never forgotten that night time smell. I loved the connection to debates about tatoos as well…

 

I could relate to the Christianised colonial influences  on Nigeria and on their relationship to their own plant knowledge. I remember reading Caryl Phillips book on Europe and on all the colonisers and he included Ireland , which shocked me until I realised of course all the missionaries from Ireland were also colonisers. Not something we talk about much. Our emphasis has always been on the good deeds and the legacy of giving that it created.

 

 

 

My mother was a truth seeker and therefore quietly anti authoritarian but did think that country knowledge was anti intellectual so she had no time for it and my father had all the land lore in him and this ran parallel with his Catholicism. So they were a lovely but difficult mix of contradictions and embodiments of the way this land was at that time.  So, it was lovely too to hear how the Travellers have never let this connection go.

 

But it is the story of Afghanistan that really hit me in the stomach. The effects of war on land , the changing of topography by colonial extractivists and then how women are now denied from having a relationship to nature by the current rule. As well as the beautiful sense of mountain and picnics and occasions of honouring and ritual. I am still processing all the places this narrative has sent me and is still sending me.

 

So thank you so much and to all your beautiful contributors and to all the lovely spaces that people have been finding in Cork and are honouring in their own unique way.

 

Very grateful and very moved.