Black Material Geographies
Episode 1
Precolonial Textile Cultures, Pt.1
Teju Adisa-Farrar (00:03):
Hello, and welcome to Black Material Geographies. My name is Teju Adisa-Farrar. I am speaking to you from Oakland, California, the unceded territory of the Ohlone Chochenyo speaking people. This is a place where I have spent most of my. As a baby, the first house that I lived in was in west Oakland, born to two parents who are academics. My dad has a PhD in archeology and anthropology and my mom in literature and ethnic studies. So I grew up in a very creative intellectual political household. I've had an interest in the intersections of black identity, space, and place because I noticed growing up that not all neighborhoods were designed equally.
My family used to say when I was younger, that I had ``save the world” syndrome. Whenever I consider any issue, but especially how our environments are designed and operated, it is often that black and indigenous communities are excluded at many levels.
So my work focuses on connecting the dots between environmental justice, black identity, colonialism, and history, because what I've learned is that all of these layers impact our present and our future. When we look at these layers, we realize this has been happening for centuries. This is not new. It's evolved to be so endemic that now we don't notice it.
Teju Adisa-Farrar (01:35):
The goal of my work is to unearth and show how these systems work in tandem with each other and how most things in our modern lives are linked in some way to systems of exclusion and inequity.
The biggest industrial polluter on the planet is fossil fuels, specifically oil. And the second biggest polluter on the planet is fashion. We worry about how we get our food factory farms, pesticide, but we rarely consider that most of our clothes are made with toxic chemicals and have polyester and nylon in them, which is plastic. And most of the refineries and petrochemical plants in this country that produce plastic products, including materials for our clothes and plastic bags and bottles are located in Black and Latinx communities.
Teju Adisa-Farrar (02:34):
Welcome to Black Material Geographies. A collection of conversations and stories using blackness as a lens to explore textile material culture, and how we can create more sustainable systems amid the global climate crisis and Western lifestyles that are deeply entrenched in colonialism. We will explore what Black futures could be with scholars, designers, researchers, and many more.
Why am I doing this show? Because it's vital that people understand how all of these systems are connected so that we recognize that true sustainability will only be successful if we are all included.
When we become more aware of how these systems work together, we can understand how to transform them and support the alternatives that are being created by those of us who are intentionally forgotten.
From before we are born to when we die, humans are impacted by our environments and simultaneously we impact our environments as well. All of the materials and products that make up our daily lives, from what we eat to what we wear come from the earth, our collective environment. The current material conditions of our lives in the Western world are the consequences of several historical events that can't be overlooked if we want better futures.
Teju Adisa-Farrar (04:01):
The journeys and actions of Christopher Columbus and other European colonists led to significant geographical and social transformations of the modern era. In a matter of a hundred years, nearly 60 million Indigenous Americans were killed due to foreign diseases, displacement and wars waged on them by European colonial settlers.
More than 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to work as slaves in the United States and across the Americas. This was made possible by European colonialism on the continent of Africa, which began the largest of natural resources in human history. These events changed the physical landscape of the Americas, altered global trade and cemented anti-black racism. And as my father says, “You can't end history in the present”.
Tarik Farrar (05:06):
Material culture is, uh, what is created through what we refer to as technology, the basic technology. It, it includes agriculture farming. It includes woodworking. It includes pottery manufacturing. So making of textiles. So material culture, uh, those things which have been shaped from the natural environment to serve human needs and human existence.
Teju Adisa-Farrar (05:33):
By looking at Black people, humans identified as Black. We can better understand a few things. One, how the material conditions of our lives are created through exploitation and systems that are dependent on racism.
Two, the human capacity for innovation outside of, and despite capitalism.
And three, alternatives and more ethical material realities that are good for the planet. They are possible and they are happening.
Now, the only question is who gets to make our futures and are they truly sustainable if some people are left out?
Teju Adisa-Farrar (06:19):
Africa is often left out of the stories we tell in the Western world about our societies, the modern era and material culture, although without the continent of Africa, the resources it provides to the world and the people descended from there, the West would not be the global power that it is today.
One of the main things that unites us as Black people is that our ancestors come from the continent of Africa. And like the continent, we too are left out of these conversations. Our labor ingenuity and, and resistance has shaped cultural expression, agricultural practices and society more broadly.
All of the textiles that we use and wear on a daily basis and the fibers they are made from have journeys, impacting different regions, communities, and our environment. I have been thinking about material geographies for a long time. And a lot of that has to do with my Traiq Farrar, whom I endearingly call Baba. So I had a zoom call with him recently to figure out how he became interested in material culture, even before I was born.
Tarik Farrar (07:33):
What does it mean that this is being recorded?
Teju Adisa-Farrar (07:35):
And I asked him to introduce himself
Tarik Farrar (07:37):
Teju, this is your podcast. I'm your guest, aren't you supposed to introduce the guest?
Teju Adisa-Farrar (07:43):
And after some convincing
Tarik Farrar (07:44):
They pay money for this. So how do podcasters make money then?
Teju Adisa-Farrar (07:48):
I finally got him to say a few words about hisself and his experience.
Tarik Farrar (07:53):
My name is Tarik Farrar. I'm currently sitting at my desk in Oakland. Originally, I'm from Boston. Right now, I'm retired, but for many years I was a teacher. I am an anthropologist. Now I was trained in an archeology program at UC Berkeley, but you know, mostly what I do is history. The way I describe myself is as a historical anthropologist, another term is sometimes used that is ethno historian, but it's one that I don't particularly care for. My area of specialization as a college student, you know, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate, was Africa, particularly west Africa. That was the part of the world that I was most interested in, that I studied.
Teju Adisa-Farrar (08:39):
My father has the most African shirts of anyone I know as well as the most books, he calls himself a former Black nationalist and his love of Africa came from the Black consciousness that he developed as a teenager. Ultimately, my dad is a nerd and I mean that in a good way. He finds the historical details of what makes up human life to be incredibly interesting,
Tarik Farrar (09:05):
But I never lost that interest. And I never stopped paying attention to that. How people built their houses, how they built the boats, that they, you know, traveled along the river systems with how they made the clothes that they wore. What the French, uh, historian Fernand Braudel called the everyday structures of life.
I wasn't interested in political history so much as the history of, uh, a study of the way that people lived, the material conditions of human life. I wanted to know how people built their houses, how they grew their food, how they made textiles or fabrics that they wore, how ordinary people lived.
Teju Adisa-Farrar (09:42):
As for Baba’s interest, the material culture of precolonial Africa was vast and overlooked. When my father was a student, historians were just starting to pick apart the false narratives that had been woven by white, colonial and scholars for centuries.
Tarik Farrar (09:57):
And they began to write and talk and challenge at least some of the stereotypes of Africa, but most African American people didn't have access to that. Most African American people were, you know, we were subject to the, you know, the characterizations in the imagery of Africa that came from, um, the educational system, the popular literature, you know, and that had people with bones through their noses, running around mostly naked and notions of cannibalism. And this is what we were exposed to.
They even had cartoons like this, you know, there's this cartoon that was very popular, this African with the spear and a bone through his nose. And, you know, and it was nothing but music. And he was hopping to the music. It was the spear chasing after some animal that was a whole cartoon, dun dun. And he would hop in rhythm, you know, with mine, with the spear.
Tarik Farrar (10:48):
But then there was the Tarzan movies. That's what the image of Africa was. And I was always interested in history even before I knew what the name was. I was interested in culture. I wasn't interested in basketball, baseball, football, none of that stuff was I interested in, but I was interested in the Vikings, the Romans, the ancient Greeks, the Native Americans, but there was nothing about Africa, nothing serious. So the period of the middle, late 1960s, it was like the metaphors often been used as a blind person being able to see for the first time when we discovered African history, it was truly like the blind being able to see.
Teju Adisa-Farrar (11:29):
After first learning about African history, Baba never looked back and dedicated his life to studying the material conditions of African and African descended peoples. Although his perspective is historical, the impetus was political.
Tarik Farrar (11:45):
There was clearly a political motivation there to challenge the stereotypes of this notion that black people were without history
Teju Adisa-Farrar (12:00):
Over the years, the contributions of Africans, and thus black people, have been forgotten or excluded. As my dad says, it's a learned forgetting. Forgetting the contributions of Africans and black is learned and not based on historical evidence of our contributions. There is a long and rich history of textile commerce across the continent that is part of Africa's agricultural legacy. And it is not very well known
For Laurinda and Fatuma. Their brand is about paying homage to the contributions African culture has made to contemporary design and the world. They are sisters and together they run Collective Closets, a clothing label based in Melbourne, Australia.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
A lot of what is about Collective Closets is about celebrating our heritages as Africans living in the west in Melbourne Australia, um, that the heart and the DNA that makes up our brand. We knew that we wanted to start a business or something that delved into our passion for clothing. We grew up with parents that made our clothes, that sewed, that really allowed for us to, to dig deeper into our creative outlets. So, yeah, hence Collective Closets came about, we traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, and it was kind of like a light bulb moment for us that we were like, Ah-huh I get it. I see what the aesthetic of the brand could look like. And hence the marriage between our upbringing, hence the marriage between our mother's love for the fabrics that she grew up with.
Teju Adisa-Farrar (13:31):
The two sisters were intentional about using clothing to honor their mother's home country of Angola and their African heritage. Their goal in opening Collective Closets was to marry African aesthetics with Western fashion. Like many people in the diaspora, their connection to their heritage was through seeing family wear traditional clothing, textiles, and patterns.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
So our mom’s from Angola, and we grew up watching her and my aunties all wear traditional clothes. You know what I mean? A lot of the time, whether it was just at home in some sort of outlet, she'd always wrap herself in, in some sort of textile that was from home. That was also always reminiscent of her childhood as well. Um, so I think that was a piece of her that she kept quite close. Um, even now, when we look back at photos of her, it's like, oh, this is just, I can see where the love for us also came from of just watching her, you know, really appreciate, um, yeah. The textiles and everything that came from from her background. So she taught back to us. Yeah. So that's what we wanted. Collective Closets to be
Teju Adisa-Farrar (14:27):
A love of textiles is passed down through generations. It becomes part of our familial lineages. Just as I grew up seeing my dad wearing different styles of African shirts, Laurinda and Fatuma, as children, witnessed their mother wearing Angola textiles. Textiles create a connection to a source outside of the west. In this case, Africa, for those of us in the diaspora. Whether our ancestors were forcibly taken from the continent a few centuries ago, as is the case with my family in both the US and Jamaica or your parents arrived in the west a few decades ago as is the case with Laurinda and Fatuma, it is a culture of textiles that links us all.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
So we do two seasons, a year, and for our colder months, autumn winter-ish months, we use the textile that is called the shuka, reminiscent of the Maasai tribe of Eastern Africa. So we use that particular textile throughout the colder months. And then through the warmer months, we use our cotton base
Teju Adisa-Farrar (15:32):
Laurinda and Fatuma have a base knowledge about African aesthetics. Through Collective Closets, they are expanding on it and bringing Africa into conversations about fashion in the west. This is not an easy task considering, as we learned earlier, Africa is often excluded or forgotten in conversations about innovation, even though the continent has continually displayed its resilience and ingenuity. We can see how there are challenges just trying to source fabric from tropical Africa, even though it has a long history of natural fiber and fabric production.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Our research and our understanding, a lot of the challenges that we've come up with, especially more so with our summer print, it's taken, like I said, almost six, seven years to be able to get to this space because we didn't, we couldn't find a supplier. We couldn't find anybody. We didn't know anyone that was making the fabrics from scratch from the beginning to the end. So that's been a really challenging experience for us, a really, um, challenging journey to be able to find that we're very lucky now that our supplier was also venturing into that. So she's put a lot of money into starting that process and that's essentially her business. And we've been lucky to, like I said, our paths cross really essentially at the right time. And even still now, like with conversations with her, she says, it's in a dying art form.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
You know, in Senegal, in the west of Africa, there are not many, not many people or families. It's normally families that take on, um, from generations has passed on from, you know, son. A lot of the men do it apparently. Um, they pass it on to their son and pass it onto their sons.
Um, it's also that the space has also been infiltrated by copycats. So a lot of the times in the markets, what our suppliers are telling us as well is that the people that actually dye the fabric are being phased out by, you know, big factories that are able to copy for far, far less.
So instead of buying, you know, the yards at quite expensive rates, you're gonna get an imitation or a copy for far, far, far less. So that's also sweeping through and phasing out the people that are actually making the fabrics from scratch
Teju Adisa-Farrar (17:41):
In the 19th century, European colonial governments and parts of tropical Africa, centralized textile manufacturers, and tried to control or eradicate decentralized artisanal textile production instead of textiles being made over time by hand in communities using plans that were endemic to an area, colonial governments created centralized manufacturing hubs. This centralization was based on producing in mass, saving on costs by lowering the quality of the materials and the skill required to make the fabrics. Decades later finding handmade fabrics that are created using these traditional textile practices is a real issue. Collectives Closets is trying to address this. One way they're trying to reclaim and re those practices is by co-creating their own fabric with an artisan in Segal
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Just recently actually with our suppliers who are in the west of African Senegal, we've actually just started for the first time ever creating our own batik print. So we've chosen two colors with, with them. We've designed this beautiful batik. So the staple of the actual fabric itself is a cotton. And then they go ahead and they hand dye it, hand, press hundreds and hundreds of yards of fabric that take weeks and weeks and weeks to meticulously hand dye and create. So that's a first for us, which has been an amazing experience to be able to understand and to learn that process. That's how it all came about. It was honestly almost by chance. We were talking to our supplier and we were just saying, you know, we're a bit frustrated with really knowing whether or not our fabrics are coming from an authentic place and what the supply chain is.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
And she was saying exactly the same thing. I think we're all in a space now where we want to be able to bring, you know, not just authenticity, but, um, also just understand from an environmental perspective where everything's coming from.
And that's what you're paying for. You're paying for knowing who has made your fabrics. You, you know, for us, we're paying, even though we're paying far, far, far more, but for us, we can sleep at night very well comfortably knowing that we know who the makers are. We know that we are paying them very fairly. We know that we're allowing them to sustain their craft. And we know at the core of it, the idea that this craft will continue on for as long as possible.
Teju Adisa-Farrar (20:02):
When most of us buy products, be they clothes, food, or technology. We have no idea who makes our stuff. All of the people involved and their labor is made invisible in consumption. Collective Closets takes on extra costs to support the traditional artisanal practices of west Africa, and to know who is making their fabrics.
In order to design more sustainably for the future, we have to look to the agricultural and artisanal practices of our, as my father has done with his life work, and as Collective Closets does with their brand. While we can't reverse the consequences of colonialism and the environmental and cultural violence that it has caused, we can be critical about how we move forward and how we value the ecosystems our products come from and the people who make them.
It's time for the wind down. I invite you to take a deep breath and stretch your body. Release tension in your shoulders, jaw, neck. Taking a moment to reflect on and process our conversations today. Our journey into Black consciousness and tropical Africa. Our journey of honoring the brilliance of African people, and those of us in the diaspora paying homage to our heritage.
Teju Adisa-Farrar (21:54):
We talked about some things today, so let's just take it all in for a few moments. I invite you to take a deep breath and thank yourself for listening to something new today. I invite you to take a deep breath and imagine the black and brown hands that have carefully made your clothes.
Thank you to those humans who craft our material realities. They are the ones we owe our comfort to. Thank you to the land from which everything comes; our home, our planet, our earth. Thank you for spending time with me and my Baba. Thank you for caring about Africa's innovative, ancient past. Thank you for listening, learning, and experiencing the material geographies that we are all made of.
Teju Adisa-Farrar (23:03):
You can subscribe to Black Material Geographies anywhere you get your podcasts. Black material. Geographies is part of Whetstone Radio Collective. This podcast is a team effort.
Thank you to the Black Material Geographies team. My producer, Tiffani Rozier; Audio Editor, Ray Royal Researcher, Haven Ogbaselase; and Intern, Kai Stone.
I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, Steven Satterfield, Westone Radio Collective Head of Podcast, Celine Glasier; Sound Engineer, Max Kotelchuck, Associate Producer, Quentin Lebeau; Production Assistant, Amalissa Uytingco; and Sound Intern, Simon Lavender. You can learn more about this podcast at whetstoneradio.com on Instagram and Twitter @Whetstoneradio. Subscribe to our YouTube channel Whetstone Radio Collective for more podcast, video content. You could learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at whetstonemagazine.com.