Rastrojo: Re(in)surgent forests

Abstract

In 2016, the Colombian state and the country’s largest guerilla group, the Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia - Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP) declared the end of a decades-long war. “Peace” in Colombia however is what one campesino called “otra guerra”—a “war” waged on forests and their diverse life-worlds. These poems emerged in response to this ongoing war I encountered throughout my ethnographic fieldwork in Putumayo, Colombia. These poems were written throughout my fieldwork in Putumayo, often in collaboration with the forest itself, through a practice of listening to and learning from forests and the communities who defend them. Poetry, like ethnography, is grounded in listening. These poems emerged through forest walks, working with those communities on their forest farms, and in ceremonial contexts. Poetry enabled me to go deeper into what is often considered “excess” in ethnographic research, which transformed my relationship with forests and my research itself. Listening engenders a poetic practice of writing in relation to forests—a collaborative form of co-resistance to their ongoing colonization and destruction that works to regenerate relations oriented towards resurgent futures.

Listening to the forest drew me into the earthy redolence of decay and decomposition, to the germination of seeds, the comings and goings of pollinators and seed dispersers, and to the silences—the penetrating silence of cattle grass, dead soils, and desiccated crops on farms in the war on Colombia’s forests. Listening to the forest is to witness the loss of connectivities: of death nourishing life and the rupturing of the generative relations of Indigenous and other forest communities that together form the life of the forest. Listening also led me to their entangled expressions of resistance that emerge in rastrojo. Rastrojo indicates forest destruction and the possibilities for resurgence. Rastrojo is the forest growth that emerges following disturbance. It is intrinsic to the forest cultivation of Indigenous and other communities living with these forests. The cultivation of rastrojo involves “learning from the forest.” It contributes to restoring degraded soils rendered lifeless from ongoing war, generating the conditions for life’s ongoingness. Rastrojo constitutes a form of resistance to ongoing colonization and destruction grounded in a reparative relationality with the forest. This is the forest resurgence of rastrojo in which peace with the forest germinates.