Eshe Lewis: Black anthropology and streamlining storytelling (ep406)
“Black women are living in a state of emergency. I thought it would be tremendously irresponsible of me to ask these women to share their stories with me and then keep it to myself, within academia, and safeguard it in a way that would place this information outside of the reach of any institution or organization that needed this.”
In the episode, we welcome Dr. Eshe Lewis to discuss her life and learnings as an activist, anthropologist, and storyteller. Eshe walks us through glimpses of her time with Afro-Peruvian women as part of her doctoral research and how this experience transfigured beyond the siloed parameters of academic study into personal, historical, and political realms.
Eshe’s conscious intent of questioning, complicating, and re-positioning anthropology not only as an academic discipline, but a field of ethical practice, casts an inspirational light on the role and reachability of storytelling. Join us as she voices this critical exposure of in-between, multi/cross-lingual modes of communicating—not only as a means of empowerment but as an invitation to lean into joy and awe.
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About our guest:
Eshe Lewis is a leading contributor to Sapiens as well as a teacher, advocate, co-conspirator, activist, guest lecturer, researcher, guide, and student. Learn more about Eshe Lewis here.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Ben White
Episode-inspired artwork by Taylor Tinkham
Dive deeper:
Learn more from Sapiens, the anthropology magazine
Learn more about Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: Some of the most significant research work you've engaged with is studying Afro-Peruvian women's experiences with intimate partner violence. I would appreciate it if you could share how you landed on this focus, what you had to be sensitive about during your research process, and how you then took your findings forward as a scholar-activist.
Eshe Lewis: Sure. Well, let me try to answer in succession. So I ended up working in Peru, as I do with most things in my life, by accident. I was attending the University of Toronto and I was in Latin American Studies, this wonderful small program that came across some money for undergraduate students, which is pretty uncommon. And initially, I wanted to go to Colombia and do work on Afro-descendants in Colombia. Colombia, like Cuba or Brazil, are countries that are much better known for having a Black population and a very strong Black presence. But because of the civil conflicts that were taking place, the war at that time, it wasn't safe. And so I ended up through another member of my program finding out about Peru, and it just became really interesting to me. It also seemed to be very similar to Canada in many ways, thinking about a country that had a Black population that people don't speak about very often. I ended up winning a grant, going to Peru, and that kickstarted about ten years of work.
A few years into that research, which initially was just working with veteran and new Afro-Peruvian activists, I was in my master's program at the University of Florida, and I was interested in working in Peru more, and I was interested in women's issues and trying to get a feel for what it was that I wanted to work on for my research. And I was sexually assaulted during my master's program right at the end, right when I had to do all of my writing. And it interrupted my life. And I took that interruption with me when I went back to Peru.
I started asking the women I worked with who I love and respect very much, and I said, I don't hear people talking about sexual assault and Afro-Peruvian women, and I want to know if that's because it's not happening, or if it's because no one's talking about it.
And if it is that it's happening, is there something that I could work on? Is this something that I can research, recognizing how little money there is for these kinds of projects and how important this could be?
And they said this is absolutely happening. It is really important. And for several reasons, people are not talking about it. So if you have the money and you have the time, then you should do it. And so that's how I ended up doing this work. And it was a really beautiful moving project, but also deeply difficult. I think some of the things that I had to think about being sensitive about, first of all, is understanding the context of Peru. I'm an anthropologist, and so I think a lot about contexts, like regional contexts, international contexts, but also local contexts.
I think that working in a place where people don't understand Black history is very difficult. And you can say that for just about any of the countries that are in South America or Latin America, I think it's getting more common to talk about Afro-descendants and their history in whatever place you find them. But people have very limited knowledge about the legacy of Afro-descendants. And they have an even I would say, scarcer knowledge of what Afro-Peruvians have been through.
There's a need to focus on and understand both how race works and how gender works, how they work together, and how oppressive they can be in people's lives.
That was really crucial, not only in working with women to understand what they were going through and to understand the decisions that they made, how they were fighting back, and how they were trying to make decisions in their lives, but also in dealing with people who work in the government, people who work in women's emergency centers to understand where they were coming from, the things that they understood or the things that they didn't understand were shaped in large part by these large systemic issues like racism, like the way Peru positions itself as an Indigenous country, that doesn't necessarily have enough for the Senate pass. And so I think that being both sensitive and trying to bring some empathy there really helped me as I moved forward in my research there.
Kamea Chayne: I'm curious how you ended up taking your findings forward as the activism portion of your work.
Eshe Lewis: I would say just like an absolute joy that I stumbled upon, and in many ways helped create, while I was doing this work was an Afro-Peruvian feminist collective. It's the first one that ever existed in Peru. Black feminist, not women's organizing, women's organizing in Peru, and Black women's organizing has been taking place for a long time. And I always try to defer to my elders and respect them and the work that they have done. But yeah, I was very fortunate to be able to be a co-founder of an Afro-Peruvian Black Woman's Feminist Collective, and that was a tremendous source of support and love and learning for me during those processes. So I would spend the days at these emergency centers talking to women, talking to people who work in these centers, to try to understand how the government is thinking about race and ethnicity and what Black women and Afro-descendent women are going through. And then in the evenings once a week, I would meet up with these women and we would have these conversations about feminism, about Black women's experiences, about what makes Peru a particular environment and an interesting environment.
There's so much important black history that takes place in Peru. Lima was considered during colonial times to be a Black city, and that is outside of the purview of many people's imaginations at this point because of the way that people talk about Peru these days and talk about Lima. But so much of what people love about that city was if not created, then heavily contributed to by people of African descent. And so being in a space where we could talk about Black women's contributions and talk about our personal experiences and support each other, and learn together, and debate, and fight, and find resolution was extremely meaningful for me.
I think on the other side of that, I got into anthropology not because I love it, but because it was the way that I thought I could best be of service. And I think being of service or using my skill sets to support causes that are important to me is something that was imparted to me by my parents and my community, but also something that I deeply believe in. And so I started that project because I felt I have the skills and I have the funding to do this where other people don't.
For me, this work on Afro-descendant women—it's a state of emergency. Black women are living in a state of emergency.
And I thought that it would be tremendously irresponsible of me, and in some ways just downright disrespectful, to ask these women to share their stories with me and then keep it to myself, or keep it within academia, and therefore safeguard it in a way that would place this information outside of the reach of any sort of institution or organization that needed this.
The government needs it to implement better policy, but other activist groups need this as well when they're lobbying when they're asking for help, they need studies to refer to. They need to know about what other people have done. And so I was always thinking about how I could share this work outside. So I wrote my dissertation, but I also wrote a study for the government, an executive report on the situation of Afro-Peruvian women, and what I learned in those emergency centers so that they could consider it when changing policy. And I also wrote about it in public outlets as well as academic outlets. So I wrote for Sapiens magazine, which is an anthropology outlet, and I did that with the intent to share my work with a broader public. People who care, people who are interested but don't have access to higher education programs, or all the money that you need to get behind academic firewalls to read my work.
And it was also really important to me because I got to publish out in Spanish, and so the women I worked with if they wanted to with an Internet connection, can read at least a bit about what I did and why it was important. And so that's always been a driving force for me. That's always been something that I strive towards, which is to do really good work and then find the best way to share it with people who care about it.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, well, we're going to dive deeper into a lot of this later on. But thank you for sharing your personal story and just turning all of that into fuel for really important work. Also, just this acknowledgment that a lot of your decision to go into the field of anthropology through academia has kind of been a means to an end, like recognizing the skillset that you do have and also the funding opportunities that you could tap into to support a lot of this work. And you share that, "Part of what has been important to your work is the how, which is the process of conducting transparent and ethically-sound research using a range of methods to center the voices of those you work with and provide reliable findings."
There is no generalization, but I'm aware of some anthropological work being critiqued when those carrying out the research take on a sort of extractive dynamic, and maybe go into a community that the researcher doesn't have ties to, spending a little bit of time there, and then reporting on those things based on their cultural lenses and interpretations. What more can you share about concerns like this in the field and what has it meant to you to engage in anthropological research in ways that better align with your intentions and awareness of researcher-subject relationships?
Eshe Lewis: Wow. That's a great question. I think part of being or having studied anthropology, being an anthropologist, at least for me, is recognizing that this discipline has a tremendously harmful past. When we look at the history of anthropology, yes, it's extremely extractive. Barging into communities, asking questions you may not have any business asking, and sharing those results in ways that are not ethical or do not align with the ideas that the people who produce this knowledge, who are the gatekeepers of this knowledge, would approve of. That is if they even have a say in it. We've seen how anthropology has played a role in scientific racism. So going to study people as subjects of study, rather than as subjects in their own right, human beings in their own right, and then using that to further these oppressive and destructive ideas about who is better than others, who should be making decisions, who should be holding power.
And so there is an ongoing dispute and debate within anthropology, especially as time goes on, especially, I would say, in this post-George Floyd world. But I think that that in some ways also goes into service to the fact that there have been Black anthropologists and anthropologists of color, Indigenous anthropologists, making these claims for a long time, it's just that the rest of the world was not willing or ready to hear that yet. And so I think these messages are coming across stronger now because of the context that we're living in today.
But there's always this risk, this question of, can we, as Audre Lorde said, use the master's tools to deconstruct the master's house?
And that is fraught and it's very difficult. And I think that there is a theoretical argument against it. Can anthropology be used for good? But then there are a whole collective of individual and collective decisions around how we want to engage with the discipline, how we want to engage with other people that hint at the fact that it is possible. There are people out there who are doing wonderful work, and I think consciousness and dedication to really scrutinizing methods and thinking about what we're doing and why, can help you to stay on the straight and narrow path. And when you inevitably make decisions that get you in trouble or end up in a situation that could be sticky, for lack of a better way to describe it, give you a kind of compass and a guide to figure out what kind of choices you want to make, how you want to conduct research, how you want to conduct yourself. It doesn't even have to be in the name of anthropology, but just in the attempt to do better and to treat people with dignity and respect.
I think for me as a Black anthropologist, a feminist anthropologist, a Black person, and a woman, I also am in the sort of in-between space where I am an anthropologist, but I also belong to several groups of people that have been on the receiving end of anthropology's oppression. And so that also figures heavily into how I conduct myself. I also recognize that I'm very fortunate to be able to have the funding that I needed to spend significant periods in Peru, with the communities that I work with, to understand people and to try to think through what I'm thinking, really analyze the way I'm approaching the work that I do, to humble myself and to recognize that the people I work with are the experts and that without them, I cannot do what I am trying to do. So I think with those sorts of intentions in mind, to really listen, to learn, and then to assert myself when necessary, and I've had to do that as well.
Sometimes in the case of my doctoral research, being someone who's Canadian, who's an English speaker with the backing of a U.S. institution means that I have a certain amount of weight I can throw around. So if I can use that weight, if I can use that power or leverage to help the people I am working with, then I do that. So it's always kind of thinking about who I am, where I am, what power I hold, what access I have, and trying to use that to the best of my abilities to get closer to my goal, which is to support Black women, to try to do something that can eradicate the violence that we live with, and to treat their stories with dignity and respect. And to show the integrity that I have for myself as well, because my name is also on the line. If I behave in deplorable ways, then that says something about me, and my reputation is also important to me. So all of that is always rolling around in my head as I'm trying to work or write or just exist as an anthropologist.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. Our North Star remains the same. And you're always looking to the resources and tools and other things that you could tap into to leverage those things in support of your goals. And you mentioned this question of dismantling the master's house with the master's tools. Kind of along those lines, various writers and activists whose work I've engaged with have critiqued the limitations of working from within the system when it comes to decolonial politics or Black liberation. And while I used to be a lot more cynical, I would say, I do very much acknowledge that things are never either/or, and there are very real and direct impacts that a lot of incremental policy changes even can have on people's lives today, which really can't be diminished. For example if a family can receive extra compensation of X amount, or if a survivor can get better access to the support that they need today, that matters as much as the larger picture of a systemic overhaul.
And as someone who is tuned into a lot of these social justice and environmental justice conversations and radical politics, as someone who again is guided by a North Star of supporting Black communities, and as someone mindful of how different forms of knowledge are valued or not valued enough in the language of nation-state politics, what more can you share about this nuance and the impacts of conducting academic research, which might help to translate real communities of struggles into language that the policy world validates?
Eshe Lewis: Oh, wow, I think this is tricky. From where I stand, it's very easy to be super skeptical of policy and big institutions, and rightly so. Right. Like, we have so much evidence of how they have failed and how they continue to fail the communities that we belong to. But as you said, you know, I think there are tremendous strides that have been made and they have been made maybe not necessarily because of the institution, but because of the people. I don't like to individualize movements and those kinds of struggles, I think that there's a danger in that. I think that those of us who work around movements or think about radical change can understand that that is not true and that can be a dangerous narrative. But that said, I think that there is something to be said for what can happen when you do have people who are critically minded, who represent their communities in a particular way, in certain institutions, and powerful positions. We have ample examples of that throughout history in different countries and different regions.
For my work, I am trying my best to think about the audience. I think about what information is good to have within academia and within that space, and what needs to go elsewhere and how I need to write, how I need to share. My parents, my family, they're really smart people, but they don't want to read an academic article necessarily—that writing can be extremely exclusive. So I have to think about how I can write for them, I have to think about how I can communicate with academia, I have to think about how I can communicate with policymakers. Those are different languages, and learning to speak to those different people is like learning a different language. You have to know what your goal is, who you're talking to, and what you want them to know.
So I think that for me, that balance of trying to figure out how I'm going to do that, that is really important to me. At this point, I do my work outside of academia, and so I also have this perspective of what it's like being on the outside looking in, knowing what the inside is like, to understand the limitations.
I think that these institutions can offer a good deal of power, but they can also blind you to some degree if you're not careful if you're not vigilant, if you're not paying attention— it is very easy to just sort of slip into the comfort that is living and writing and existing within a bubble.
Of people who speak the same language as you, but are not necessarily interacting or don't even have to interact with people outside of that space who are having conversations that not everyone is privy to.
So I think for me, again, my mission was always how do I do the best I can? How do I share this information? I'm really clear with myself now about what works for me inside and what works for me outside and who I want to communicate with. I think that's kind of the way that I think about this.
Kamea Chayne: What's been interesting to me is learning about how you've learned to write for and communicate to different audiences because you're engaging with a lot of different groups, whether it's various levels of government or international entities, funding institutions, the communities that you're engaging with, and of course, a broader audience beyond academia. And I think for me, this is something that I've personally felt stuck on because when it comes to publishing online articles or newsletters or even doing this podcast, I am aware that there's so much diversity amongst our viewers and listeners in terms of what fields they each work in, what educational or cultural or economic background that they have.
So I think I often feel stuck when writing articles or just doing things that are kind of broadcast media because I feel like I would and should write and speak differently depending on who exactly I'm trying to engage so that I can best reach and speak to them. So I guess I'm curious to hear more about how you've learned to shift gears and voices and language and your storytelling based on who you're trying to engage and what that might say about the different values or perspectives that different groups hold front and center.
Eshe Lewis: Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know how I started thinking about writing for different audiences. I think I was always really aware that I wanted to reach different audiences, right? Like academic writing—learning how to write in academia is a skill. Nobody just wakes up one day in grade three and is like let me use these giant words that most people can't understand, right? It's learning to exist in a particular kind of ecosystem that comes with its norms and languages. But I was aware and I think it's because I work with so many people who make it so clear that academia can still really be a pipe dream for a lot of people, that it's out of reach.
And so I said, those are the people who I'm working with. I know that I'm working with people who are so much less likely to have access to education. So how can I, if I'm writing about people, if I'm writing about communities, I'm writing about us, like my people, like Black people, I can't just be writing this for people who are in academia.
And I will mention again, just because you are university educated, if you are outside of a university unless you're willing to pay for access to all of these different journals, you need a friend to download articles for you, you can't access them. It's not a matter of intelligence; it's a matter of access. Not everyone has access to that, most people do not have access.
What am I doing if I am only writing in these places where there is such limited access that most people can't get to it and when they get it, they can't understand it?
There's a very long history of power-keeping, sequestering knowledge away from people, disguising it up on this high shelf where they can't get to it.
And then also this issue of urgency for me. This information needs to get out there. How do I get it out there? And then I think the third thing is what you kind of alluded to, there are many different ways of passing on knowledge. And one of the things that I love, I'm Caribbean, my family's from Trinidad, I love oral history. I love listening to my aunties tell me stories. I love listening to even just good gossip. And I wanted to capture that in some way in my writing and the stories that I tell. I do work on intimate partner violence and it is painful and it's horrific and it's tragic. But the women I work with, and myself as a survivor, we're funny, we're intelligent, we're complicated and annoying. I want to be able to portray us in our fullness as human beings, as members of communities and societies, and as people who have a history. And I couldn't just do that through one medium of writing. And so I think that my approach or my awareness of different mediums came from wanting to reach different audiences.
Even through my time in academia, I wasn't very drawn to pithy writing. I wanted to write, I wanted to get my point across to people, and that was most important to me. I want my students, whoever I'm teaching, I want them to understand what I'm saying because this message is important. Helping people understand that there are Black people in Lima or Bolivia or Argentina. That's important. I don't want them to get lost. But I also understand that's an institution that has its norms and languages. But then I was always looking, and I was fortunate because I had a friend who was also in my Ph.D. program with me. And she started writing for these public-facing outlets like magazines, and digital magazines. And she was just reaching so many people and having these amazing conversations, and she said, you can do this too, there are tons of magazines out there and these people would be interested in your story. You can't write 30 pages for them, you've got to figure out how to synthesize and get your point across. But you can do that and you can reach a whole bunch of people. Why don't you do it? And she encouraged me to do that as well.
I think one of the downfalls of academia is that you need to write in a certain way to get into the journals so that you can get tenure.
Other things sort of fall by the wayside. Like oral history, that doesn't get me any points, creative writing, that doesn't necessarily win me any points, so you kind of leave those things to the side. And because I wasn't dead set on becoming a professor in that sense, I felt like I had a lot more freedom. And so I got to explore, and I explored ethnographic fiction, which I love, I need to do more of that, which gave me this amazing opportunity to take my ten years of work in Peru and make a story that was true about the people based on people I knew, based on experiences I had, based on the smell of the bus at 3 p.m. that I would take. And that allowed me to share beyond the pain, right? Like beyond the pain, beyond the suffering, beyond the hardship. That is part of sexual violence, but also the existence of Black people. But our existence is so much more than that. And so I think writing for these different mediums allowed me to create a bigger picture. If you take my work as a whole, I like to think that if you read all of that, you get a fuller picture. And that's the point for me. So that's been important.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for sharing all of this. And I know that being able to translate sort of academic research to a broader audience is one of the major intentions of Sapiens magazine and part of the practice of translating academic research to the general public is being mindful of language. And this is something that resonates for me also, because I often converse with people whose articles or books have come out of their scholarly research focuses, also maybe because there's disproportionately more funding for researchers in academia and formal institutions compared to citizen researchers. And like in the field of journalism, that's another factor that kind of skews the lenses and voices of the stories that get published and most validated. But in any case, I have received feedback from listeners before to bring on more guests who don't come from the academic world because a lot of the terminology that they use isn't as relatable for most people.
And I know you've talked about leaving behind jargon when it comes to making research language more accessible. So I'd be curious to hear you elaborate on what else you and your colleagues have had to be mindful of when trying to communicate to a broader audience. And also your thoughts on this question of language more generally, because I agree that it's very important to be able to speak to a broader audience. And at the same time, I also understand that expanding vocabulary is a way to help diversify and deepen our perspectives of other people and the world. How communities that live by the ocean might have a lot more nuanced vocabulary around waves and water, or how cultures that live with glaciers and snow might have a lot more technical and specific language relating to that specific environment, and that's also really important. So I would love to hear what you've thought through on these fronts.
Eshe Lewis: So Sapiens magazine, again, something unexpected in my life. I was drawn to the magazine when I first stumbled across it. Just seeing anthropology laid out for everyone, that's something that I hadn't seen before, that I hadn't thought about before. I knew that was something that I wanted for my work, and it was something that I felt was necessary, but to see it was just really mind-blowing. And even the process of writing with Sapiens was very different. Working with someone who knew anthropology, to have an editor who's a trained anthropologist, who's not just looking at your theoretical argument, but is also interested in the integrity of what you're trying to say is very different. So after I published Sapiens, I ended up working first as a fellow and now as a project director. It's been interesting to look at the process in the way that the magazine approaches public writing.
So yes, leaving the jargon out is important. When you're in a group of people that all speak the same language, then it's really helpful—it's kind of like a quick way to tune people into what you're trying to say.
When you are writing for a general public, those words that are highly specialized can be alienating. It's a great way to get people to shut down because sometimes it can make you feel stupid if you feel like you don't know what's going on.
It's tiring to try to have to figure out what it is that somebody's saying. So leaving the jargon out helps to streamline your argument for someone intelligent and interested, but maybe just not a specialist, that's all it is. You're just not a specialist.
This idea of audience, really thinking about your audience is important too. You're not necessarily writing for your peers. Who are you writing for? Are you writing for Cosmopolitan magazine and therefore writing for their target audience? Are you writing for the target audience of The Economist? Who is it that you're trying to speak to? Because you have to think about meeting people where they are. How am I forming this argument so that it sits with the people you want it to reach? We talk a lot about heart over head, so what is the story? What is something relatable that people can understand, that they can grasp on to using that as an entry point?
That tends to work a lot more than starting with the more technical sides of your argument. Because we also understand that there's so much information out there and it's at the tip of our fingers, which is wonderful, but also intimidating and overwhelming. And people have short attention spans. And if you're not grabbing people, if you're not saying something that speaks to them almost immediately, you're probably going to lose them. So not waiting until the fifth paragraph to start getting into it. Academics like to save the good stuff till the end sometimes. You have to know that most people are going to make it to the end. Especially in public writing when there are so many things to read. Someone's probably scrolling through your article in morning traffic. They don't have time to wait until paragraph five. What is it that you're trying to say?
And on that note, too, academics, where are the 'yes-ands' of the professional world? We want to cram everything into the article. Like, we'll tell you the article is about, A, but when you get to reading, it's about B, C, D, E, and F. You can't do that, we don't have as much space. You don't have 30 pages, right? Maybe you have 2000 words. Maybe you have, you know, 2500. So really picking one story to tell, picking one aspect of your research and focusing on that and laying it out well and being clear about what it is, why it's important, why it's important now, really bringing people into the world that you are working on, and also not dumbing it down. The point is not to dumb this down, it is to streamline it. So thinking about all of these different ways to tell a good story, to tell it well, to tell a story that is contained. Those are all tactics that Sapiens uses and tries to impart to its writers and also to its readers by way of good storytelling to try to get people to think about how they can translate their work.
But on your note about language, you know, language is complicated, too. And I'm fascinated by language. I feel like in another life I could have just been a linguist and learned as many languages as possible because there are some things that you can't translate. And whether that's because it's very local, because it is in a different language and that language doesn't have a word for it. So even in those instances where they're trying to figure out how to capture the essence, whether that is using the term and trying to define it, or giving an example of when it would be used, taking people along with you.
Your audience, they're not stupid. They're not looking necessarily for the easy way out, but they are looking for you to meet them at the door and welcome them in, as opposed to yelling from the hallway, 'The door's open.'
So I think that those are the kinds of things that I try to work through, whether it's trying to write for a different audience or trying to translate Spanish to English or thinking about something in Portuguese and trying to figure out how to move it back across different languages. It's very complicated, but that's kind of what it means to be human. We're pretty complicated, so not running from it, I kind of revel in it and figure out how how to share that with other people.
Kamea Chayne: I appreciate all these insights and they're really important for me to think about as well. And I'm looking forward to just sitting with everything you've shared here. For now, we're nearing the end of our main conversation. But with all of this in mind, as you've been hosting the fifth season of the Sapiens podcast, what are some questions about our humanity or this question of how to be human or what makes us human that you've personally been curious to lean deeper into? And what are your calls to action or deeper inquiry for our listeners?
Eshe Lewis: I'm at once fascinated and terrified of our species. I'm more so just leaning into the awe. You're in a state of awe when you don't even know what question to ask. This season of the Sapiens podcast is my first time being a podcast host and it was such an honor to get to support our fellows through that process. I think that after listening to all of the episodes, it is just kind of sitting back and contemplating like, wow, human beings are fascinating. We are so interested. Like the interactions that we have with plants, right? Who could have predicted that? Who could have predicted that we would have been involved in plant manipulation to the point that we have this incredible variety of chilies all over the world? And not only that we cultivated them, but that we moved with them. We take them with us, we mix them with new things. You know, gastronomy is fascinating. Thinking about organizing, the way that people use shamanism to think about decision-making. Thinking about how we're organizing to combat sexual violence. Thinking about how people are thinking about coastal erosion.
We have so much going on and we're doing so much and we have done so much. And sometimes it's terrifying, but sometimes it's just truly incredible. And so I think for me, it's less the questions and more the awe, like what we're capable of. And I think as someone who I feel like having at least a teaspoon of optimism in whatever I'm eating is just what's keeping me alive. It gives me a lot of hope to just say we've found our way through some tricky instances and we're working our way through them. And we have this amazing ability to adapt, change, accept, reject, and create a world and worlds within it that I think is astounding. So I don't know that I have questions.
I think that if I were to impart something, it would be more of an invitation to just kind of be more in awe.
I know that's hard when doomscrolling is every day more and more irresistible. And we have gotten ourselves into quite a few major messes that we're facing now. But at the same time, there is just so much innovation around us. There is so much capability. And I'm not talking about people way up at the top, I'm talking about everyday people. That is really what I would invite people to do, is to just sit back and be in awe for a second, and take that as an invitation to think about what we can do, what we're capable of. What we can contribute, what we might have already contributed without even realizing it. Yeah, I think that's where I'm sitting. It kind of allows you to embrace the joy as much as we embrace the fear and the dread. And I would say that's something that is both a challenge for me, and that is getting me through the hard moments.
~ musical interlude ~
Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books that you've read or publications you follow?
Eshe Lewis: Oh, I just finished Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, she's an Afro-Puerto Rican author. She wrote a book called A Woman of Endurance. I love it and cannot recommend it any higher. It's just phenomenal.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Eshe Lewis: I just said it. Trying to embrace the joy as much as I embrace the fear. I'm good at embracing fear. I need to lean harder the other way.
Kamea Chayne: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Eshe Lewis: I'm going to say, my aunties. They're all in town right now, or they're coming to town. And I just love them. I love their energy. I love their wisdom. I love how mean they can be. And I love them together. Like, seeing all of them together inspires me. I'm very inspired by everyday people and the everyday things we do to sort of get by and bring ourselves joy and support ourselves.
Kamea Chayne: Well, I hope you have a wonderful time with them. And to our listener, Green Dreamer, if you want to learn more and stay updated on Eshe's work, you can head to eshelewis.com. And we will have more links and resources from this episode in our show notes as well at greendreamer.com. Eshe, thank you so much for joining me on the show today, absolute honor to have you here. For now, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Eshe Lewis: As I said, the optimism. I think it might be annoying for some people, but it keeps me going. So I think just embracing any opportunity to find the awe, find the joy, and to appreciate people like everyday people, people on your walk, people on your commute, people on your I don't know, in the grocery store. People are fantastic and amazing and capable of a lot. And we are all we got. So I encourage you to just pause and look up around at each other every once in a while.
