"Here and Many Places"

Where I'm from, belonging is not usually framed as a question of knowledge. More often, it's spoken about in connection to place and to others: Where were you born? Where do you live? With whom do you feel "at home"? But what we know about a place—deeply, historically, relationally—reveals how we belong to it.

When I return "home" to where I grew up, in rural Minnesota along the Mississippi River, I often look out at the river and watch the summer sun rise. I know which way the current pulls the river. I know the sound of a cardinal in a nearby tree and, farther away from the house, the prehistoric call of a sandhill crane. I could tell you which of the flowers my mom has planted are hostas, which are lilies, and which are basil. I know which boats that pass on the river are for fishing, which are for wakeboarding, and which are for leisure—pontoon boats that now increasingly fly US and Trump flags as they drive by. I know the trees out back are maple, because we tap them in the spring, but that the trees to our northwest are pine. I know my parents bought the house and the land from a couple that used to run a dairy in the town across the river to the east. But I don't know anything about the land before that—who lived on it, what they did, or what it meant to them. That was never part of my family's story of the place. It started with their purchase; it started with a sense of ownership and property. I wonder if, where you live… were you taught to see land that way, too?

My lack of knowledge about the history of the land where my family lives reflects one way that settlers in the United States are socialized to belong to a place: through property and patriotism. Less often we are socialized through a longer history of multiple peoples' relations to land—a reckoning that would include the troublesome fact that many of us perpetuate acts of dispossession. Reflecting on this fact has compelled me to search for conceptual resources that locate belonging somewhere other than in property or country. I have found some of these tools in Simone Weil's concept of roots, in the way Raymond Williams asks us to see country life, and in Edward Said's readings of both Weil and Williams. But I have also found—as the Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) circulates images of settlers with the caption "A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending"—that even raising these reflections can lead to being exiled from conversations whose participants want to stay civil, positive, or "apolitical."1 So naturalized has dispossession become in the United States that the basic fact of our settler heritage can at once be promoted by the President and denied by citizens and scholars alike.2

In his influential 1984 Granta essay "Reflections on Exile," the Palestinian theorist Edward Said begins with the memorable line: "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience."3 In the middle of that essay, he points to a key source for thinking about questions of exile and belonging: the French mystic and philosopher (and fellow exile) Simone Weil. In Said's words, "Simone Weil posed the dilemma of exile as concisely as it has ever been expressed."4 In one of her most quoted lines, Weil says that "to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,"5 and Said does indeed quote that line next. But he underscores an additional point: "Weil also saw that most remedies for uprootedness in this era of world wars, deportations, and mass exterminations are almost as dangerous as what they purportedly remedy. Of these, the state—or, more accurately, statism—is one of the most insidious, since worship of the state tends to supplant all other human bonds."6

For Said, then, we turn to Simone Weil not only because she stressed our need for roots, but also because she "exposes us anew to that whole complex of pressures and constraints that lie at the center of the exile's predicament," including how the exile faces pressures to join "parties, national movements, the state"—all forms of "a new set of affiliations" or "new loyalties" that come at the cost "of critical perspective, of intellectual reserve, of moral courage."7 In introducing a later volume of his writing—published under the same title as the famous essay—Said observes, "I have found that the greatest difficulty to be overcome is the temptation to counter-conversion, the wish to find a new system, territory, or allegiance to replace the lost one, to think in terms of panaceas and new, more complete visions that simply do away with complexity, difference, and contradiction."8 Ultimately, against this temptation and wish, he encourages pursuing exile in an intellectual sense even for those who are not political exiles.

Said's reading of Weil leaves us with one central question that motivates this chapter. To repeat, this time more precisely: Is there a form of belonging, or rootedness, that finds its home neither in property, nor country, nor through this "counter-conversion," but instead stays with the complexities and contradictions of our time and maintains what Said calls "critical perspective"?9

Simone Weil wrote the line Said quotes near the end of her life while living in England—in exile from her native France, fleeing persecution for being Jewish. It is an early line from her final book, The Need for Roots. Despite her transcendental language of "the human soul," which reflects the influences of both Plato and Christianity on her late work, she wrote The Need for Roots in response to a concrete context: the potential renaissance of post-occupation France, which remained her focus while she lived in physical exile. She hoped her book would contribute to the political and spiritual reorientation of her country.

By the start of the 1940s, Weil had diagnosed a troubling phenomenon in modern France, a diagnosis that could also be applied across the Americas: when we look through the lenses of money and property instead of relationships and balance, we can't even see that we have this need for roots in the first place. Instead, we are caught up in what, for Weil, are idolatrous attachments to money and country—attachments that, she was one of the first Europeans to see, reflect the values of a colonizing country.10 Those who are "rooted" through idols, Weil observed, not only live troubled lives themselves; they will also uproot others. It was in such a context of normalized violence—one where many were attempting, nevertheless, to rebuild a better society from the ruins of wars and genocides—that roots emerged as the most important need of the human soul. But what did she mean by roots?

For Weil, to be rooted is to feel connected to others, to know our history, and to feel we can act in ways that will meaningfully determine our future. But roots are not just about feelings or affect; they are also about how institutions and systems enable or disable feelings of belonging and security. In this sense, roots reflect what the Welsh literary critic Raymond Williams later called a "structure of feeling."11 In this structuring role, roots are about time as much as they are about place, and they are bound to and conditioned by community more than they are simply autonomous, personal, or individuated.

Importantly, Weil does not center her account of roots on the nation-state, the nuclear family, or organized religion, three institutions people today might cite if asked where they are rooted or to what they belong. Rather, in The Need for Roots, Weil lists the nation-state as an uprooting force. She alerts us to how state formation causes the dispossession of some in favor of what ultimately becomes the private property of others.12 For his part, Said found Weil's claim to be correct from his own position as a Palestinian living in exile; Israel confiscated his family home in Jerusalem in 1948.13

While Weil also includes hierarchy and private property as "needs of the soul," a careful reading of The Need for Roots shows that she defends a very limited sense of individual property (objects, tools, a house with "a little piece of land round it") and argues that this form of property should be balanced by the need for collective property.14 Her recognition of the need for private property is meant to be compatible with a transformation of "the present modes of acquisition and possession," leading toward an overall democratization of property; what Weil endorses would never lead to increasingly unequal ownership of property. She is clear on this point later in the book: "Nothing can justify the property rights of a townsman over a piece of land," and she also criticizes any ideal of property relations that relies on the Roman concept of sovereignty.15

By the end of The Need for Roots, Weil leaves us with two important social tasks: first, to recognize our need for roots while helping others see that we have this need; and, second, to cultivate roots with others in the face of so many uprooting forces—not just police states and ongoing wars but also an economic system that leaves workers without ownership of what they produce and yet, by necessity, more attached to money as neoliberal governments withdraw from infrastructure, education, healthcare, and welfare spending. So if we should look for roots beyond our current conceptions of family, country, capital, and church, then where should we look?

Another author Said turns our attention toward is Raymond Williams. Born into a working-class family in rural Wales, Williams would go on to study on scholarship at Cambridge University, fight fascism with the no. 21 anti-tank regiment, and become a leading literary critic in Britain, influencing Stuart Hall among others associated with the New Left.

Williams's 1973 book The Country and the City is not just about place, as the title indicates; it is also about displacement. Said argued that it "is such a compelling work because it restores to individual works of literature and art the lived experiences of losers in the social contest, losers whose absence Williams was the first to point to as having an essential part in the aesthetic work's structure and meaning."16 For example, Williams shows how a portrait of a country house fails to account for what it doesn't show, namely, the dispossession of peasants.17 This is true of much "high" art, and we could take for example almost any landscape painting and its accompanying wall text at famous museums across the West. For his part, Williams takes as an example Ben Jonson's poem, "To Penshurst."18 In that poem, there is no account of who lived on the land before it was an estate, and the family isn't keen to address it, no matter that "[e]ach morn and even" the children "are taught to pray." This failure to address former relations on land some now call home—the "generosity" and religiosity of the family notwithstanding—is part of what Said would call "the politics of dispossession."19

"I was born in a remote village," Williams says near the beginning of The Country and the City, but "[i]n the course of education I moved to another city, built around a university, and since then, living and traveling and working, I have come to visit, and need to visit, so many great cities, of different kinds, and to look forward and back, in space and time, knowing and seeking to know this relationship, as an experience and as a problem."20

For me, reading these lines was one of those magical moments of encounter in which a writer gives you words to name something you have felt but haven't been able to articulate. When I first read these words, I was returned to how moving to cities for my own education has reshaped my habits. Indeed, the country-city tension is still borne out every single day in my speech and my dress, my posture and my manners, at once an "experience" and a "problem"—and most importantly, a "relationship" that could be known, or at least, Williams suggests here, a relationship about which knowledge could be sought.

"[C]ountry has many meanings," Williams says before a beautiful passage about what those meanings are to him.21 Country life has many meanings to me, too. It is the maple trees, the squirrel and the woodchuck, near the river, beyond the back windows of my parents' timber-frame home. It is my dad's attempt to shoot the squirrel and the woodchuck with his air rifle as my brother and I tell him not to. It is my mom calling us to pick up sticks strewn across the yard after a summer storm. It is feeling that the day begins when sunlight enters my room, and it is the ability to go to any tennis court or soccer field in town and play for as long as I want without making a reservation. It is the belief that there is such a thing as a short-sleeved dress shirt. More than anything else, for me, the country is language, a certain way of speaking. It's the "ain'ts" and the "gonnas" and the "them theres" and the "you betchas" and the "boy oh boys" that I have systematically cut from my speech as I have lived in cities, ending up (perhaps hilariously) not with sophisticated urbane speech, as I desired, but with a curious combination of some Minnesota vowels meeting the sounds I have picked up from living in Georgia, Toronto, St. Louis, and Texas ("root" still rhymes with "foot," but "uh huh" has become "mmhmm").

Williams is clear that city life has many meanings, too, that it has its own "pulse"—"this identifiable and moving quality: the center, the activity, the light."22 And I have come to love the city just as much, especially New York City. It is marveling at the expense incurred for Patience and Fortitude, the two lions outside the New York Public Library's Fifth Avenue Building, decorative public expenditures that must have cost more than my nascent town's entire budget when they were placed in 1911. It is watching a show by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and carrying that multiracial vision of this country with me for a long time after the performance. (Ailey said about his dance company that it could "hold up the mirror to my audience that says this is the way people can be, this is how open people can be.")23 It is walking through Columbia University's open gates—before the administration closed them following October 7, 2023—on the way to the law school where Paul Robeson studied and feeling myself part of an immensely important story of human advancement.

What Williams invites us to consider is a form of study that can move between rivers and skyscrapers, trees and crowds. It would be able to see knowledge—and by extension philosophy—passed between life in the country and the city. Ultimately, Williams asks us to attend to how waves of knowledge crest and break "now and then: here and many places."24

Part of the tragedy, on Said's reading of Williams, is that modern life has come to lose its connection with the "then" and to stress the knowledge production of only some places. When Williams writes that "in the course of education I moved to another city," we can ask: Why could he not study in his own village? One response is that his village didn't have a university, and addressing this lack is why the building of a university was always tied to nation building in the twentieth century. But do we need a university to have knowledge? Weil asks us to think about forms of social life, including knowledge production, beyond ties to the state and formal schools. Williams's line brings into relief how formal schooling—what knowledge is and where knowledge is valued in a given society—is too often itself a cause of displacement.

In April 1942, although Weil was still living in Marseilles, in her native country of France, she was nevertheless living in a sort of exile, both because of the persecution of Jews in France and because of the sense she had developed from reading the Greeks and from her own theology that "[w]e feel ourselves to be outsiders, uprooted, in exile here below." This is a dual exile for Weil, political and theological: from a safe country and from God, because for Weil at this time, God is not present in the world, so humans can only know God through separations. It was about to become a triple exile when she would flee to the US (via Morocco) and finally to England, where she wrote an essay called "Forms of the Implicit Love of God."25

In that essay, she starts from the problem that, in the world here below, God is not present to the human soul, which itself aims to love God. Consequently, we have to take objects other than God as the object of our love, and this practice thus becomes an indirect or "implicit" love of God. Weil says there are three forms of the implicit love of God: religious ceremony, the beauty of the world, and our neighbor. (Absent from this list are even careful attempts to steward land or property as a way of implicit worship.) Then she suggests that "friendship should perhaps be added"—friendship, she says, is "a personal and human love which is pure and which enshrines an intimation and a reflection of divine love."26

She also stresses, with great clarity, that "[t]here is no friendship where there is inequality."27

And yet, most of our conversations today, even with friends, proceed like the romantic sketch of the Penshurst estate Williams notices: our conversations proceed without discussion of dispossession and how we are implicated in it. To talk about dispossession would be impolite, unprofessional, or uncollegial. Why is that? What is the subject formation happening in these daily practices—what kinds of people are we becoming? We are not taught to ask questions about race and land, and often when we do, we are viewed as contentious, our questions inappropriate at the café, at the family dinner table, or even (more and more in this moment of repression) in our university classes.

Nevertheless, Weil's lived example of exile remains under-studied: she had little time for those who posed questions without any real intention to live them out, so she often existed in a kind of solitude as a result of holding on to this simple criterion that desired theory to be united with practice. With her many forms of exile, however, came tremendous insight: she knew that if we could not find a way to talk about how some find roots in property such that others are rendered precarious, then we would ultimately remain in exile from one another. Ultimately, it is not an exaggeration to say that if we are to address the question of belonging in this century, then we need first to address the question of dispossession.28

To my initial question of whether there can be a form of belonging that does not fall prey to what Said called "counter-conversion," I have not given much of an answer. We are left searching for a vision of human life that encourages critical perspective and that allows us to own up to our contradictions. In response, Weil and Williams invite us to friendships that form amidst an "out-of-place" sensibility, one that more and more of us feel in our increasingly diasporic world, where mobility and migration remain constrained by capital and civic status. This "rootedness" borne in political friendship will likely not be as strong as traditional forms of roots. And while it does not offer a form of resistance to dispossession exactly, it does present a kind of social precondition to a less violent order—or at least a way of encouraging and sustaining alternative models to our current coercive and extractive one.

Weil invites us to a friendship of hard questions and shared pursuits of social equality. In an essay she gave to a friend and in a letter, respectively, she suggested that we ask each other two ethical and political questions: "What are you going through?" and "Is there a nation founded on love, I mean on the love of foreigners?"29 To these astounding questions she added others, these raised not only in her writing but by the example she set as a philosopher in her life: Does your commitment to justice stay the course if it means you have to give up some of the land, wealth, and prestige you own or have access to? Are you willing to acknowledge that perhaps only God, never a person or a country, could be a sovereign, and then to re-think God beyond sovereignty? Are you willing to restore the balance of the earth?