The floral progress present in a forest differs from the floral progress present on a farm in a way that helps us understand imbalances at work in higher arts education and other arenas where hierarchies are ubiquitous but not essential. Where are futures created by innovation and where by accident? Where in the freedom of the autonomous forest does fear of death disrupt radical creation? What does the farmer sacrifice for the certainty of yield’s demands? Where do these metaphors cloud critical sense? What do they help us see? If we have chosen to name this piece Of Forests and of Farms : On Faculty and Failure we will be generous and correct in first defining the quartet here.
Of Forests and of Farms : On Faculty and Failure
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves
December 2020
Precision and compassion were never such emboldened sisters as in her work.
Matt Longabucco
What do plants want, and where within our bodies might we know it? Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves’s bibliomantic excursion unearths pastoral metaphor in books she used to inspire, direct, and reflect upon her performance “unschoolMFA” (2012-2015). If you see me, and I am glowing, it is because I did not let my first teachers kill me. An ouroboric Blackness traverses a settler fantasy of The Cultivated Wild. A fable of fruit trees and alphabets to feed a wilderness that refuses its name. Take good care / to shape with language / worlds that want to hold us all.
This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral. To view a full list of pamphlets, click here.
About the Author
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves (New Yorker, b. 1980) is a Pushcart-nominated poet concerned with postcolonial ethnobotanical literary criticism, the limits of language, and archive as medium. Greaves has most recently been published in The Brooklyn Rail, the collections Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing (Kore Press), and Creature/Verdure (Pinsapo Journal), as well as in her chapbook Close Reading As Forestry (Belladonna*). Formerly a Monday Night Reading Series curator at The Poetry Project, she will be an artist-in-residence with The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on Captiva Island, Florida in early 2020 and serves as Site Director of Wendy’s Subway in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Praise
No writer I know is able to bring together, so closely, a deep but productive doubt and an exquisitely deliberate movement toward world-making at a scale and pace so unique and formed that it almost feels like it must have preceded us—but no, she devised it, it’s part of the life-project she’s constructing piece by sure-footed piece. Precision and compassion were never such emboldened sisters as in her work.
Matt Longabucco
In the News
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-42-8
Pamphlet
Staple-bound. 48 pp, 5 x 8 in
Publication Date: December 15 2020
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: 2020 Pamphlet Series