Witten by Youngsook Choi
Delivered by Breakwater

🔔(Youngsook)
타박타박 타박네야 어드메 울고 가니
우리 엄마 무덤가에 젖먹으러 찾아간다
물이 깊어서 못 간단다 물 깊으면 헤엄치지
산이 높아서 못 간단다 산 높으면 기어가지
우리 엄마 젖을 다오 우리 엄마 젖을 다오
🔔
(Taey)
In the early morning of January 1800, a strange boy appeared out of the woods near the small French village in the Aveyron (아비론) district. He was digging up vegetables in a tanner’s garden. He acted like a wild animal. And he couldn’t speak, only making the sound of strange cries. Even so, he had managed to develop an easy-going relationship with the people in the area. They sometimes let him come in and eat. However nice they treated him, the wild child always returned to the woods. 
 
This freedom ended when the Parisian intellectuals heard about the wild boy of Aveyron (아비론). The social scientists and philosophers saw this boy as a perfect case to test their theories on human nature. Soon, the boy was dismissed as an idiot as he showed severe disorientation and anti-social behaviour in the first few weeks of their experiments, except for Dr Jean-Marc Itard. He named the boy Victor and devoted six of his productive years to the single task – bringing out the humanness in Victor. 
 
Despite Dr Itard’s effort, Victor never managed to speak. However, Victor became able to associate written words with common objects like a key, a book and a knife. One day, Dr Itard locked his study where Victor learned these words and asked Victor to retrieve a knife in different rooms. Victor returned empty-handed. He didn’t understand the word ‘knife’ meant ‘all knives’, not just the one he was trained to make the association. The wild child saw differences rather than similarities. Every knife looked different. It didn’t make sense for him to choose other than the one he knew as a knife.                     
🔔
(Youngsook)
God-Angels-Humans-Animals-Plants-Minerals
God-Angels-Humans-Animals-Plants-Minerals
God-Angels-Humans-Animals-Plants-Minerals
 
‘The Great Chain of Being’, in this medieval order of the world, everything descends from God. Carl Linnaeus, a revered botanical scientist, spent his whole life refining the taxonomic system for nature. First, he removed the spiritual sphere from the world of science. Without God, without angels, the hierarchy of his science kingdom descends from a very specific human variety – Europaeus Albus, white European along with sub racial species of red Americana, tawny Asiana and black Africana. The white European became the equation to God. Since then, the world has had to follow their order and serve them.
🔔
(Taey)
This is the extract from Sonia Sha’s book ‘The Next Great Migration’:
"From a colonial perspective, it was more convenient to cast foreigners as so strange as to be unrelated or perhaps not even human at all. When the Dutch first settled southern Africa, for example, they’d considered the local peoples whose lands they invaded not as humans but as animals. They even claimed to shoot and eat them on occasions." 
🔔
(Youngsook)
What truths ahead
When you become a widow, you see widows everywhere.
When you lament, the ghost becomes no longer a stranger.
When you speak to a tree, you witness language obsoletes meanings. 
When you refuse the world you are in, you notice all other worlds co-existing.
Infinite ways of presence in this cosmos beyond our eyes and alphabets. 
History might select a few but the story needs all of us.
 
What truths ahead
What truths…
🔔
(Taey)
The field was full of bright yellow spots. A calling from dandelions. I imagined the bitter salad, tea and liquor containing mineral goodness. I imagined my hands touching the wet soil tightly cuddling around dandelion roots. I thought of my mother, who always manages to forage something regardless of the season whenever we go to the mountain together.
 
I started digging up to harvest a few dandelions. But soon, a man with angst approached me.
“Excuse me! Look what you are doing! I am the keeper of this garden. We got the funding for landscaping and managing it. There was nothing here before we came. We worked really hard to create and protect this ecosystem. Now, you are destroying it!”
 
I was frightened and quickly hid my dirty hands and dandelions behind my back.
“Sorry, I didn’t know.”
It wasn’t just the scolding man who irritated me at that moment. The whole situation must have been comic to these dandelions as I heard them laughing and giggling and saying, 
“Who protects whom?” “Did he just say nothing was here before he came?”
I wished it wasn’t just me who could hear the dandelion voices. I wished that the man could understand the land he is standing on is beyond his capacity of protection or destruction, and certainly beyond the funding schemes for conservation.   
🔔
(Youngsook)
There is a national organisation called Rewilding Britain. Their slogan is ‘Think Big Act Wild’. What does it mean? They said, ‘by protecting, restoring and regenerating species-rich mosaics of habitats, rewilding helps reverse biodiversity loss and bring back the abundance of Britain’s wildlife.’ Again, I hear dandelions laughing. The mischievous yet reasonable laugh.     
 
We will never be able to rewild nature until we rewild our knowledge. Until we become the wild children who understand a word or name is not for categorisation or objectified knowledge container. For the wild child, the name is a relationship. It carries the time and space he engaged himself with the very object, that taught him the word ‘knife’. There cannot be any other knives that he can identify as a knife. There is the only one, not ‘a or the’ knife but ‘Knife’ with capital K.
🔔
(Taey)
우리엄마 무덤가에 기어기어 와서 보니
빛깔 곱고 탐스러운 개똥참외 열렸길래
두 손 모아 받쳐들고 정신없이 먹어보니
우리엄마 살아 생전 내게 주던 젖맛일세.
(together) 우리엄마 살아 생전 내게 주던 젖맛일세.
🔔