Detroit is a bad city. I mean, Michael Jackson bad. Urban Dictionary
bad. I love the country feel of the East side because it reminds me of home. I
love the stylish realness of the West side because it reminds me why I left
home. I love being in a city full of
black people where I could walk into a room, a bar or a party and not feel the
heft of an entire race on my shoulders.
Detroit gave me a profound service that perhaps no other
city could: it taught me that agriculture is cool and that black is beautiful.
When I was 14 I left my family farm so that I could go to school and escape the
fate of being a lowly small-scale farmer in the bush (by small scale I’m
talking less than 100 acres). In Belize,
like anywhere in the world, farming is for peasants unless, of course, it’s a
big old mega farm where the owner is not really a farmer but a lofty manager of
managers or farmers.
Farming—putting your hands in the soil—is just not a
respectable trade in most parts of the world. As much a I loved watching things
grow, I knew I had to leave if I wanted to wear shoes or eat cheese more than
one day out of the year. But despite the hard times, farming followed me
around. Plants wouldn’t leave my head. Up until the day my dad died, the day I
left Belize was the saddest day of my life. I was 14.
For four years I felt ruined, I stuck with my decision
because I believed I had a better future. After enduring all the pain, culture
shock and homesickness, if you were to tell me that I would end up in
agriculture in the end I would have felt defeated. It would have shaken my will
to live.
But being in Detroit changed me. And then this happened: After
16 years in Michigan (seven of them in the city of Detroit) I moved back to
farm in Belize.
Right now I am sitting in my room here in Belize City at my
family’s house. It’s dry season here and everything is crispy hot. A few
thirsty frogs are croaking in the empty drains under the window. Through the
darkness I can hear people talking in the street, trying to get their kid to
take a bucket bath. The barking of dogs
is so constant I hardly hear it anymore. The backs of my heels are on fire from
walking around the city in new shoes. My tongue feels gritty from eating too much
cashew fruit (more on that later).
Today was my first day of having a real job. Before this I
bounced from contract to contract hoping ends would meet. I scraped by with writing
work, mostly corporate puff pieces, and selling goods grown on vacant lots in
the city of Detroit. In fact, I threw all my energy into a one-acre (about 14
city lots) urban farm operation for three years only to realize that unless
you’re prepared to live in poverty, work for a nonprofit, live off of grants
and/or are privileged enough to get periodical cash lump sums from your
parents, then small-scale urban farming is not a realistic, sustainable source
of income.
The reality is that the global food system is simply not set
up in a way that allows for anyone to survive above the poverty line by working
off of anything less than ten acres of land. It’s just not. One or two acres can feed a whole lot of people,
but when it comes to income, rent, utilities, etc. that incredible value of
fresh food doesn’t transfer into cash. Over the years I started looking at it
like an overtime job with less than part-time pay. Not only do you gotta love
it, you gotta be obsessed.
I am saying this
because I put three years into trying to make it work; I mean, all in. By any
standard I lived in poverty, making less than
$12,000 USD a year and that’s without subtracting taxes. But I grew up
in poverty so I found a strange comfort in it and was able to make it work (or
not work) for so long. I wrote some grants; that helped. But I don’t have any
financial support system. If I fail, I fail. No parental subsidies.
I could be ironic and
say I’m moving to a (so-called) third-world country to get out of poverty, but that
would be irresponsible. But it’s way more complex than that.
Living in Detroit did
something magical for me. It exposed the cruel design of the American food
system and beyond. Not only did I get exposure to the unjust systems in
Detroit, but I got a hand in challenging it.
Detroit made it okay to be me: a wild and strange bush girl with the reflexes of a single quash.
Detroit cured my bitterness about farming. The city linked me with people whose faces lit
up when I told them I grew up on a farm; people who openly admitted they wanted
to farm. Good people, cool people, smart people, stylish people. My mind was blown. I didn’t know
how to take it. At first it made me mad. My head raced with sharp thoughts,
like: “What could these city slickers know about farming? If they really had to
farm to live, they would hate it. It’s not cool, it’s not glamorous, these
fools! If only they knew the suffering I endured in order to escape the farm
life!”
But after five years
of working with people who have made farming in the city a part of their life,
I realized that if it’s done right, urban farming is an act of social justice
and community building more than anything else. In the city, the moment you
tear up even a patch of grass and put in kale, it’s an act of defiance. It’s a
powerful thing to do.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where food is not
currency. Our food system has taught us that it’s an insult ask for $3 for a pound
of carrots while it’s a status symbol to buy a shot-sized cup of coffee for $6.
I know people who work tirelessly to change that. And they are doing it one
heart and mind at a time. But that takes time. The hard truth I don’t want to
even say out loud is that in the given current system, micro-farms cannot fully
financially support the amount of people/energy it takes to run them without
some sort of subsidy.
This isn’t something we can work within the system to
change. We have to find new models. In
the meantime, though, I can’t starve waiting. So I got a job managing a cacao
supply chain in my hometown in Belize.
I’ll be working with a company whose
mission it is to support small farmers and develop their access to resources to
scale up their production and their income. I’ll also be rehabbing my old
family farm with my main goal to revive our subsistence farm that will
ultimately hammer down my cost of living so that the amount I make in cash
isn’t a reflection of my quality of life.
While my experiences in Detroit helped clear the static so could heard the tropics, my birthplace calling. One thing Detroit is not is tropical. To me, the winters became more frightening to live through than hurricanes.
Detroit, hopefully my mark on
the city will live on in the farms I built and worked and supported with all of my energy. Hopefully my work will show in the
perennials I planted, the grants I wrote, the dirt I dug and buried my heart
into. Detroit became such a part of me that in a way, I haven’t really left. When I lived in Detroit, that's how I felt
about Belize. They say home is where the heart is but I wonder: can the heart
be in multiple places at once without being broken? I am starting to think the
answer is yes.
