Dark Mountain Issue 25: Spring 2024

Dark Mountain: Issue 25

The Spring 2024 issue is a hardback anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork from around the world, inspired by the struggle for land rights, and by the living land itself. It gathers voices from Cameroon to Mexico, from Portugal to Palestine, from Singapore to the Oxfordshire stockbroker-belt. Ahmad Al-Bazz and Juman Simaan walk us through the day-to-day reality of obstructed movement around the West Bank, and their practice of resisting by continuing to travel, despite the occupation. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Murairi Bakihanaye Janvier writes of true groundedness in the act of laying the bones of his ancestors in the earth. Sophia Pickles connects the story of her Ukrainian grandparents’ flight from Stalin to Russia’s current war, and her work of bearing witness to the consequences of unceasing mineral extraction. Tabitha Pope designs Tŷ Unnos, a house that can be built in a night to outwit the landlord in Wales, just as the shantytown dwellers did in Sara Pereira’s piece about a revolutionary Lisbon.

Alongside poetry, protest song runs like a river through this book: in Robin Grey’s transcriptions of ballads from 17th-century peasant revolts, in Briony Greenhill’s modern folk songs seeking dialogue between landed and landless, and in a song of grief and rage from Uganda, where tribes like the Mosopisyek face violent eviction from their lands for resource extraction. Struggle continues in the fiction of Zakiya McKenzie, who gives voice to a formerly enslaved man from Jamaica who leads an anti-colonial uprising, and in the quieter transgressions of Stuart Wrigley in England, forced to navigate barriers daily on a simple walk to work. Megan MacInnes and Maria Latumahina, respectively from Scotland and West Papua, discuss the connections between their struggles for fairer land distribution. Damian Le Bas and James McConachie write of how Britain’s nomadic cultures, from Romany Gypsies to New Age Travellers, have faced systematic persecution, while from Mexico Chris Christou illuminates the often-overlooked flip-side of migration: what happens to the communities that are left behind?

It has often been women on the frontlines of displacement and dispossession. Silvia Federici describes how the destruction of the English commons was achieved through the persecution of the peasantry as witches, and how witch hunts continue to this day on capitalism’s new frontiers. Alice Albinia reflects on how women’s stories of and from the land were nearly erased by colonisation.
Various pieces in this book highlight Indigenous connection to land. But what about those for whom the concept of ‘indigeneity’ has difficult, even dark, undertones, or others who feel little connection to the land that they are ‘from’? What about those who live in cities, now over half the human population? Albert Woods urges us not to fetishise the countryside but, like a magpie, to find what glitters wherever we might live. Esther May Campbell’s photographs document the subversive play of children reclaiming the urban commons, while Joe Black Ardy uses found images to explore separation from nature in human-built environments. Paul Powlesland writes of his love for the neglected river on the outskirts of London where he has made a home.

The language of rights can be anthropocentric, couched in terms of ‘who owns what?’ But what happens when we flip such assumptions on their heads? Does the land belong to us, or do we belong to the land? What happens when we expand our perception beyond the human? Heather Gorse describes how her life, made precarious by renting, is transformed by a prickle of hedgehogs, while for artist Madison Emond, a stream in Aotearoa New Zealand is not the subject of her work but an active collaborator. This flows from the rights of nature movement, another undercurrent of recent years, which recognises that rivers and forests, and the beings that live in them, have their own right to thrive independently of humans.

Susan Raffo’s essay explores the land’s aliveness, awareness of which – as with all Dark Mountain books – underpins everything. But the land can be unstable. Fred Warren reminds us that the ground beneath our feet can easily be swept away, and that all of our claims on it – and our illusions of control – can ultimately be dissolved, like cliffs crumbling into the sea. That the land has never been ‘ours’ at all. Whatever the ground on which you stand, we hope the words and artwork in this issue offer different ways to navigate its changes.