When I began this writing project, I had the vague idea in mind that I wanted to explore the margins. In ecological science, ecotones – the transitional zones between biological communities – are known for nourishing novel, adaptive biotic regimes, and I wanted to see if marginal human communities were similarly resilient. After all, from the sixteenth century up until the 1800s, escaped slaves in the Americas established self-sufficient societies in swamplands that were considered to be “economically negligible” by the powers that be. And right now, the slums of the Global South’s urban centers are humming with an informal economy of trading, recycling, and repurposing global neoliberalism’s material waste. I wondered if similar processes of subversion and inventiveness were taking place out of sight in my own home territory in the Northeastern United States. Such ponderings led me to incorporate a study of northern New York’s indigenous Mohawk community and Shelter Island’s historical slave community into my honors essay collection while also lending this website its name “Towards the Edges.” I completed my thesis in the spring, and soon I will have in my hands a print and bound copy of my writing. But before I can begin unpacking my findings, I need to expand upon my consideration of the margins and from where they derive their fertility.

Transitional zone between woodland and saltwater marsh in midcoast Maine.

In These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search For Home, author Bayo Akmololafe is told by a traditional Yoruba priest that “You have chased away the spirits with your roads and development projects. They hide in the thick forests, and it is there we must go in order to understand what is happening” (130). Another priest expands upon this injunction when he tells Akomolafe that if those of us who live amidst the trappings of modern culture want to find our way back to the spirits, “we must first come away from the road and become lost” (xxxiv). As a whole, the message is both literal and metaphorical. If we want to apprehend the wisdom of nonhuman nature, then we must venture to those redoubts where nature is still allowed to flourish according to a logic that defies anthropocentrism. I had the same idea in mind when I dedicated one of my thesis essays to my suburban hometown and what insights I could glean when I focused on those pockets of land in Darien, Connecticut, that have not been given over to McMansions and manicured lawns. Yet we can become lost without physically going anywhere at all. The priests are intoning Akomolafe (and, by extension, the rest of us who live amidst roads and development projects) to abandon our certitude about what constitutes correct and proper human conduct. On a metaphorical level, then, to go towards the edges also means to consider alternative modes of being human on this planet.

To Akomolafe, nothing embodies the spirit of the edges better than dust. He writes, “As the world…grates upon us, we shed our cutaneous cells and hair and pieces of ourselves, contributing these into a commonwealth of dust that includes their beings and their shedding. Edges bleed in traces of becoming, melding dying and living, beginning and ending, into an always pregnant middle (19). Furthermore, “dust unsettles foundations and eats borders, and yet gives birth to the world” (21). According to Akmolafe, the components of the material world and human society cannot be reduced to stable essences. The physical processes of reality simply do no allow for absolute stasis. With that understanding in mind, the edges take center stage as the places of creation. Left to its own devices, dust eventually accumulates into humus, and the entire province of terrestrial life depends upon topsoil for nourishment. Were it not for the constant disintegration that takes place on the edges of things, that topsoil and the abundance of nature it supports would be nonexistent.

So, can the fertilizing properties of the material edges be applied to human society? Can the persistence of swampland communities of runaway slaves in antebellum America be attributed to their consolidation of the most useful teachings of European, African, and indigenous American society? I am inclined to say yes. I would even venture that many marginal human communities point the way towards a more tenable way of conducting our affairs in an age of converging global crises.

Consumerist culture and neoliberal capitalism aspire to the shining metropolis – the utopian city on a hill, free of effort or want – that will surely come about if stocks keep rising, or if we give free rein to the wizards of Silicon Valley, or if we finally elect the right politicians. Ambitions and promises of these sorts have their origins in the early days of Sumer and Shang Dynasty China, when palace elites established the world’s first state granaries and standing armies, thus ushering in the age of empire. But here we are, five thousand years later, and we are less than sixty growing seasons away from completely degrading our topsoil; the exponential growth paradigm is pushing industrial society into collapse mode; and our drive for microbial purity both in ourselves and in our livestock is breeding frightening new strains of antibiotic-resistant infections. Like the Babelians told of in Genesis who tried to construct a tower to heaven, our aspirations towards dominion over the planet are unreachable. This time around, however, our strivings for transcendence are threatening our very survival as a species.

But edge-dwelling communities, which by their very nature embrace the promiscuity of the margins, rebuke the myopia of transcendence. Bayo Akomolafe comes to this realization when he befriends Kutti, a rickshaw driver in Chennai, and spends a night in the slum home of Kutti and his family. One of the first things he notices about Kutti’s cramped home is that “Space is performed differently here…Everything bleeds into everything else, and in this scandalous perversion of boundaries, politeness is often fatuous” (42). Nevertheless, Akomolafe takes note of the the neighborhood’s intricate abundance of human cooperation, a collective attention to hygiene and hospitality, and concludes that, compared to Chennai proper, the slum feels like a sanctuary: “This Indian slum, hidden behind a phallic Samsung glass building, cordoned off by asphalt, shushed by the traffic of cyborg saints seeking glittery heavens to go marching into, and forgotten in the headlines that tout India as a fast-developing nation with abilities to launch satellites into space, tells a revisionist story…where humans and nonhumans, in chaotic and oftentimes risky configurations, are learning to press closer and closer to each other and live with each other” (49). By embracing the base materiality of existence and that materiality’s ever-disintegrating borders, Kutti and his neighbors have crafted a convivial antidote to the isolation and anonymity that are endemic to most modern cities. In so doing, they have also proved that monetary wealth, consumption, sterile environs, and blind individualism are not paths towards self-realization.

Knowing that our current preoccupations with consumption, neurotic cleanliness, and individualism are choking the planet and destroying our own communities, should we then revert to slum dwelling, open sewage ditches and all? No. Adopting all aspects of Kutti’s and his neighbors’ lifestyle is not the point. What we should focus on instead is finding ways to let the edges back into our daily affairs. Rather than aspiring towards 5,000-square-foot palaces with spacious lawns that are clearly delineated from the clutter of “nature,” it’s time for us citizens of the Global North to downsize to a way of life that recognizes the wonder of the full spectrum of human and nonhuman life.

I’m reminded now of Birdsfoot Farm, an intentional community in St. Lawrence County, New York, that I visited about five years ago. Birdsfoot Farm, with its miniature cottages backed up against gardens that bled into the surrounding woodlands, was where I first encountered the beauty of alternative modes of human organization. I’m also thinking of the Ramapough Lenape people of northern New Jersey, who have kept their cosmology alive by erecting traditional handmade artwork and performing tobacco ceremonies in the midst of a suburban housing tract. I’ve also seen how the subversive sense of place developed by enslaved Africans and indentured American Indians on Sylvester Manor has now been honored by the Manor’s recent transformation from private property into a not-for-profit cultural museum and CSA farm. All of these endeavors are carrying into the present a spiritual mythos that our modern world of striving has forgotten. Salvation and wisdom lie not in some pure realm “up there,” but in the dense materiality of the nature that surrounds us as denizens of Earth. The wisdom and teachings of earthly existence are the spirits of the thick forests that Bayo Akomolafe is told of, and as many current edge-dwelling communities demonstrate, those spirits and their powers of generativity  can still be accessed even in this era of spiritual deprivation.