Gaza Is Our Home
Our cacao trees are older than the occupation of Palestine
Before we get into the newsletter, we’ve recently started sharing a list of podcasts or lectures we’ve been watching or listening to, this month we want to focus on one film. Our friend, Monear Shaer’s film Gaza Is Our Home.
We hope you’ll take time to view Monear’s film Gaza Is Our Home. Please reach out to Monear via his website if you would like to have a screening in your community. Images from the February 17th screening organized by Boricuas Con Palestina.
www.gazaisourhome.com
Note: This month’s newsletter is because of Monear. Let us explain, Monear visited the farm after screening his film (linked above). At the farm we talked about the systems we are developing and Monear’s insights brought up some really wonderful perspectives.
Our cacao trees are older than the occupation of Palestine
We’ve made this month’s newsletter into a zine! This is in response to ongoing calls to disrupt business-as-usual. We are advocating for Palestinian Liberation by creating art that can be printed and shared.
Like Palestine, Puerto Rico’s borders are controlled by the will of another nation, with their own interests put ahead of ours. Obviously, our case is not as extreme as Palestine’s, but as a colony, Puerto Rico is subject to discriminatory import and export laws, making essentials hard or impossible to find. We are literal captive markets.
Embedded in the emulsion of each of our images are the conditions we experience on the farm. Without the luxury of electricity, we are not able to keep film temperature-controlled. The emulsion, much like our bodies, holds our individual and collective experiences, creating beauty as well holding space for loss, simultaneously.
Our system of creating everything we need, feeding our neighbors, our critters, our plants, the soil, and ourselves. A true agroecology involves the whole community.
Since moving out to the farm one (80+ year old) cacao tree in particular has begun producing significantly well. We’ve done little for the tree directly, but by constructing a shower directly uphill and using African Black Soap* as part of a larger gray water system, the shower feeds and supports the tree. Besides utilizing greywater we don’t irrigate.
*ingredients: cacao pod ash, coconut oil, shea butter.
We don’t use synthetic fertilizers because they create a cycle that requires continued spraying to continue feeding the plants. Instead, we use as many natural inputs as possible. This also shields us from the geopolitics outside of our control, which affect so much of what and how Puerto Rico can import food and agriculture products.
Chickens cut the grass.
Centuries of colonial extraction has left our soil bare and unproductive. We are developing a chicken tractor system adopted to the tropical mountains which controls the farm’s weeds, rejuvenates the soil, fertilizes our plants and trees, and produces eggs, bananas, and cacao, all while fueling itself in a perpetual cycle of nourishment. Eventually the cycle will sustain itself without relying on anything from off the farm.
Chicken tractors protect from predators and maintain an equal diet among the flock. High nitrogen chicken poop feeds the soil, fertilizing our banana trees.
The chickens also feed themselves. We give them a seed blend and produce from the farm, and as their tractors are moved they till the soil and sow uneaten seed. They plant sunflower, sorghum, and wheat throughout the farm, which is harvested and fed back to them.
Banana plants are chopped up once the fruit is harvested. The chickens eat the fruit as well as the plant stalk. Chopping up the banana plants also feeds the cacao trees growing downhill.
The old folks in our area tell us they grew up eating from our cacao trees, trees that were planted more than 80 years ago. They tell us about making chocolate squares in ice cube trays and balls of pressed cocoa powder for hot chocolate.
There is more legacy in these pods than settler colonial zionism violently imposed in 1948. The zionist project depends on the myth of a long history, when in fact, the history is shorter than the stories of making chocolate from a single tree.
It is a reminder that the occupation of Palestine is not ancient history.
The fight continues until liberation.
FREE PALESTINE!
Print out the zine!
(Paper size 11x17in)
Zine front: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ACD4lzBGHH0-L_eXdABlc8O89G2wKgNu/view?usp=drivesdk
Zine back: https://drive.google.com/file/d/161hw1PI0Jvpd6W7jj2jFbVww4o54DAdA/view?usp=drivesdk