Fariha Róisín: Finding healing beyond the wellness-industrial-complex (ep330)
How have the wellness and beauty industries thrived off of a dominant culture of non-acceptance? And what might be the healing potentials that lie in plant medicines—when their sacred origins and rituals are honored and respected?
In this episode, we welcome Fariha Róisín. As a multidisciplinary artist who is Muslim queer Bangladeshi, she is interested in the margins, in liminality, otherness, and the mercurial nature of being. Her work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam, and queer identities and has been featured in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Vogue.
Róisín is the author of the poetry collection How To Cure A Ghost, as well as the novel Like A Bird. Her upcoming work is a book of non-fiction entitled, Who Is Wellness For? and her second book of poetry is entitled Survival Takes a Wild Imagination.
She is also the founder of Studio Ānanda, a space of cultivation and archive for radical, anti-colonial wellness.
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Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Lil Idli
“How we can both be harmed and harm, and that cycle, is something that actually has to be seen for us to do something about it. Oftentimes, within this binary of good or bad, evil and pure, we lose so much essence of our true humanity.”
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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 clarity.
Fariha Róisín: I didn't even have the language for what it was that felt like I was always at a loss, but that's how my writing came about. It was a reaction to something that I didn't have. It was trying to claim the absence of that space that I was always existing in, and still exist in... This state of longing. Nobody had any answers for me, and I was seeking, I was getting into bad relationships and going in very soul-destroying journeys with myself. And after a while, I came out and it was a moment of deep depression that pulled me out of my sadness. That's what led to writing How To Cure A Ghost—it was really trying to make a decision, and acting towards freedom and liberation, and jumping towards my own autonomy.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for your openness and for sharing this. As you've had to, and are still in, the process of healing, and perhaps as guidance for writing your novel Like A Bird, what has troubled you about the dominant media narratives and public discourses on survivorship that might make it more difficult for people who have suffered abuse in its various forms to speak out and seek support?
Fariha Róisín: I hate the one-dimensionality of trauma. I hate how trauma writing, or the idea of survivorship, is all of a sudden, whether anyone says this out loud or not, relegated to this space of anti-intellectual writing. It's always interesting for me, as somebody who does consider herself an intellectual, to look at the "canon" of writing, of the great novelists of all time, and see that most of them are white, cis men, and usually straight as well. I've been thinking a lot about that, and who gets to be canonized. There's a lot to be said about how whiteness subsumes everything. Obviously, we understand how it subsumes institutions, but what we don't really understand, or at least we don't look at, is the insidious ways in which it occupies space. And for me, occupation is really interesting: the idea of occupation, and occupying territory.
I don't think that writing healing or writing trauma is seen as anti-intellectual because it's anti-intellectual: it's that way because it's been made to be so, in the guise of who gets to determine what is good writing and what is bad writing. And those people don't care about healing. They expect and think about art within this very limited dimension, but all great art to me is about a sense of humanness that I think modern literature just doesn't really understand. As a Bangladeshi, queer, immigrant in America, growing up in Australia, in Canada—all of that, and what that means...
Within an American audience, within the literature world, where there are people who get to choose what is good writing... they don't understand me, and the context. It's not even just struggles, but it's also the joy, the ancestry within that—that's laced with so much trauma—history. We don't think about the ways in which our stories, our lives, our families all add to who we are. But some of us become people that alkamize all of that information, which is what I believe I'm doing. Who makes space for us in the world of writing? I don't think anybody does.
With Like A Bird, I felt very frustrated by how people weren't looking beyond the fact that this isn't about just trauma, it's about so much more. But also it's okay to write about trauma…
Kamea Chayne: Also, that the emotional and feelings tend to be viewed as anti-intellectual, as you mentioned, that feels reflective of our greater culture that seems to privilege, for example, logical thinking and rationalism over sensitivity, and how people are feeling emotionally. I wonder if you have any thoughts that you would want to add to that?
Fariha Róisín: Oh my God, I have so many thoughts. That's why I think I brought in that context of colonial thinking.
Colonial thinking has determined how we see the world, but also how we think about the world—and therefore who we privilege, who we prioritize, and who we don't.
There's a very specific reason why we have been forced to look away from ourselves, why we've been forced to look outside of ourselves, why we've been really severed from this core sense of being, of belonging. All of that is what I'm trying to understand.
So much of How To Cure A Ghost is about colonialism, white settler identity, being a trauma survivor, and my mother, and all of those kinds of elements. Streamlining this world where we don't focus on who we are and what we feel at every given moment has allowed us to exploit each other and the Earth. It's having such a residual impact. But this is why I think writing is so necessary right now because we are embarking on a very long and arduous journey as humanity.
Kamea Chayne: The time feels ripe for us to disrupt this pattern and cycle of harm, to move towards collective healing.
And there's often the saying that hurt people, hurt people, and that sort of underlies the transformative justice framework, which at its core seeks to break this cycle of harm and create the conditions that can ideally prevent or at least minimize harm in the first place.
I wonder if you've had to process this idea as a part of your personal disruption of harm and path towards healing, and perhaps how you've contextualized your experiences with larger systems of extraction and exploitation that we just touched on that may have contributed to creating the conditions that you've had to confront.
Fariha Róisín: There are a couple of layers to that question. Firstly, people are messy. What are the next steps for us to actually be an abolitionist society? For me, that comes back to how we interact with one another.
The next part is that I'm also a survivor and I know what it feels like to not be seen within that framework and understand that my body, especially as a child sexual abuse survivor, as somebody who's experienced some of the worst abuse that, at the hands of a parent, it's extremely difficult.
Those things are things that I've had to accept about my own life, but also, healing for myself on an individual level, I've had to appreciate and know that there are certain things that led to my mother doing the things that she did, and that holistic perspective is something that's still missing. How we can both be harmed and harm, and that cycle, is something that actually has to be seen for us to do something about it.
Oftentimes, within this binary of good or bad, evil and pure, we lose so much essence of our true humanity. That's where we get stuck.
That also comes back to this idea of who gets a say and who gets a voice? Which also brings us back to this binary understanding, of what is good and what is bad.
Kamea Chayne: Maybe part of the challenge is that our dominant culture and society, and a lot of people within it, aren't seeing this present moment, and how people are. We're not seeing these things clearly enough. Oftentimes people want to jump to solutions, to seeing what we should do next, saying that we should stop focusing on what's happened in the past. But if we aren't able to see clearly, then we're not going to be able to know what it will take to transform this current reality.
Fariha Róisín: Exactly. I think that's why so much of my writing is rooted in the past, and in the reality that we are very much still synthesizing what happened to our ancestors, what they were not able to process. In my life, for example, my family survived Partition, and the civil war in Bangladesh in 1971. That's a lot of impact. And when we think about world wars, which wars are we thinking about, and what death toll matters, the ways in which people are invisibilized: whose genocide gets categorized as a "genocide", whose doesn't?
With my family, there is a personal sense of frustration, as a person who feels like I have had to do so much of the work that was impossible for my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, to do. But that then becomes this state of transformation. Ecologically and spiritually, we're all aligning at the same time, which is why this time is so important.
There is this precipice that's shifting, where all of a sudden, even though there's been so much pain that we've not looked at, we're finally being asked to look at it. It is an immensely exciting time, regardless of how much we have to process.
Kamea Chayne: I definitely feel that. And healing, of course, goes hand-in-hand with wellness. One of the topics you explore is the wellness industrial complex. We had talked about a lot of different industrial complexes on the show before, like the military, media, prison, medical, NGO, and even museum industrial complexes. Can you introduce the wellness industrial complex to our listeners?
Fariha Róisín: The wellness industrial complex is quite a recent phenomenon in a lot of ways. It's been building for the last couple of decades, and you can see that in the sixties in America, with the introduction of yoga and meditation, and that idea of a "new age" shift. That was a specific era within the wellness industrial complex. But then we have the modern era now, which has gone completely bananas. It is, at the end of the day, the concept of extraction of knowledge, and not just any kind of knowledge. We're talking about indigenous knowledge, that is not given the respect that it deserves.
Vandana Shiva talks a lot about patenting, and who gets to patent their ideas. Something like basmati rice, who gets to own basmati rice?
Within wellness, it's a really interesting thing that we haven't quite looked at yet: who gets to be a wellness company?
What does it mean when a white company is now selling turmeric products from India, but they're not aware of the farmers' strike, for example, and the context of what turmeric means in Indian society. Also what does it mean to constantly extract, and not give back to a culture that you're taking from?
Turmeric is just one example of that. Now we've got turmeric, ashwagandha, ginger, acupuncture, yoga, meditation. And then there are more insidious aspects, like ayahuasca, and even psilocybin mushrooms, where we're getting into territory that's faux spiritual, but again, not being cognizant of the impact of colonization. What does it mean for white companies to continue to take, while Black and brown people, Indigenous people are being incarcerated, are having to protest against militant fascist governments just to have the bare minimum? What does it mean to take the customs of something like a sweat lodge or ayahuasca, but not think of the ancestral lineage and what it means to sit with these plants, to connect to the spirits that exist on this land?
A couple of years ago, I was on a panel with an Aboriginal Australian poet named Lorna Munro, and she said, "no protest is political on stolen land". I think back to that a lot. If we're not thinking about or unpacking what it means to be well when you live on stolen land, what it means to be well when you pay people five dollars, and then sell that same thing for thirty-five dollars.
To me, that's what the wellness industrial complex is: it's just a desire to take. In a lot of ways, it is neocolonial. It's just a new concept of how to take as much as possible while giving nothing in return.
Kamea Chayne: When you talk about anti-colonial wellness, that's really about having a more holistic and context-dependent understanding of what it means to be well. That feels like a recurring theme for us at Green Dreamer at this point, as I'm sure a lot of our regular listeners may recall from past conversations, the importance of contextualizing everything.
You also have a journal for women, femmes and non-binary folks to work through body dysmorphia, called Being in Your Body, and in thinking about this together with the wellness industry, and even the beauty industry by extension, I wonder how much these industries have been built off of and are really reliant on a dominant culture of non-acceptance, and so are offering these faux solutions that don't get to the deeper roots of why so many do feel perpetual inadequacy?
Fariha Róisín: Capitalism relies on that. It really is a nefarious system that relies on us hating ourselves. That is what keeps the engines churning. There is this complete denial and disregard of how to intentionally sit with oneself. It's always looking outside of who we are.
I grew up poor. I didn't have the access to nice things, I didn't have the kind of life that I really wanted when I was in my twenties. And then ultimately, I realized, I had this feeling of liberation, that I wanted to understand how to remove myself from within a system that not only doesn't see the layers of my identity and my humanity and what that means, but also just relies on me disliking everything about myself, so I can continue to fill in that gap. When I realized that I no longer wanted to participate in a society like that, I began to see my own flaws and began to see how I perpetuate these things. And that journey is never ending.
It's not just about capitalism, it's also about patriarchal standards. If we're talking about beauty, about fashion, what we have to think about is, who gets to say what is beautiful, and whose gaze are we trying to impress? There are so many layers to all of these things, and I'm trying to understand and reveal all those layers because I don't want to live in denial.
I want to live truthfully to myself, but I also want to break these systems. They're so easily breakable, if we all did it together.
And I think a lot of my writing is about trying to remind people that we can do this. It's not impossible. Capitalism is a hundred years old—this is very recent history. And getting to the bottom of it is really about looking towards the future, and how we actually get there. I'm looking back to look forward, always, because I think that those steps bring us closer to the core.
Kamea Chayne: One of the realizations I made, that was so instructive and clarifying as to how this current path that we're on is going to lead to collective self-destruction, is just that in this current system, problem creation and then problem solving is more profitable for the industry, and therefore the system, than just directly addressing the underlying conditions. So if we think about the wellness industry or the beauty industry, making people feel unwell or inadequate, and then selling some "solution" to meet that short-term need, this perpetuating of the cycle, is going to be more profitable for the industry, so they have an incentive to go down that path. But that is part of what is driving our planetary degradation and dehumanization of human civilization.
I want to pivot here a little. As part of your personal healing, I know you started working with plant medicines, and a few months after that journey started for you, you wrote a piece called "Reimagining Our Collective Futures", where you said: "Plant medicine, especially if you work with brilliant facilitators, can do many things—but connecting you to the Earth is its inherent design."
I know you don't really share your personal experience with plant medicines because it is a deeply private journey, but can you speak about this statement more broadly, and what you've come to learn can be the power of engaging in plant medicines, through the lens of connection and remembering our senses of selves?
Fariha Róisín:
Indigenous peoples are the answer to the future.
If I can say one thing in this entire episode is that. That's sort of what I'm pointing to in my work as well: they have all the answers. I just finished Australian Aboriginal writer Tyson Yunkaporta's book, Sand Talk, and throughout all of it, he's braiding indigenous knowledge and trying to show how we are going to move forward. And that's my most prominent feeling, when I think about plant medicines.
It makes me very emotional, because my relationship to them has come with such humility. I don't feel like I'm the right person to talk about them, but I do want to say that I have an immense gratitude for what they've taught me, and that kind of connection. Something like the mycelium network, the intelligence of these plants, and how not only they interact with one another, but how they interact with us, and the ability that they have to shoot like an arrow and directly communicate with you. Something like ayahuasca, which is such a sacred medicine, that I've been fortunate enough to sit with a few times, and really have a very important relationship with her.
It goes back to the extractive nature of healing. People sit with these plants once in their lifetimes and they think, "I've done it. This is it." And of course, these communities that they come from, for example, the Huni Kui tribe, and also the Shipibo people, they're both communities in the Amazon; they do public outreach to sit with non-Indigenous folks, primarily because they've had a download from the medicine... My frustration, and I witnessed it, is with the sort of unconscious whiteness that comes in, that is just all about extraction, and "what can you give me at this moment to make me feel good"...
Wellness is so dangerous when it's just about the self, when it's just about the individual, when it doesn't take into consideration the community, and also who gets to serve you, who serves you, and why is that person serving you, and what are you doing, what are you giving to them? And then the idea of sacred reciprocity—Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about this so beautifully—was something that I learned through these medicines, through these plants, understanding that they give to me, so I can give back. That is the whole point. And if we can understand that, that is what wellness practices in India, with Ayurveda, yoga, tantra, is about: an understanding of humanness, but it's about never the individual, it's always about the community.
This is what wellness practice has come from, an urgency to help the community.
Sacred reciprocity is a thing we need more than ever now, and every single time I sit with these plants, I remember why I'm here. I remember that I'm on this land, that I'm fortunate enough to have had a connection with this land, to feel her, to feel protective of her. That's what these medicines and these plants have given me. It's an immensely beautiful connection that I have with them, and I hope that more people can have that connection, and really come back to the Earth, so we can feel her.
Kamea Chayne: That's really powerful. I think it goes back to this idea of a need to contextualize wellness, and see that so much of our wellness relies on healing our relationships with other people, with our communities, with the land, with Earth. So embracing a more holistic understanding of wellness is critical if we want to move towards healing.
Whenever I think about the little bit that I understand of ceremonial and sacred plant medicines, I think about how there are extensive rituals and cultural traditions that they're a part of, and that they are used with. And then I think about how at least 40% of pharmaceutical drugs are derived from plants, though they end up being patented, controlled by centralized powers, and bottled up into these decontextualized substances that people often take without deep knowledge or respect for their origins or cultural histories, or the rituals that they may have been accompanied by, beyond the act of consumption alone.
I wonder how the wellness and medical industrial complexes may have compromised the true healing potentials of these plant medicines that they extract from, when they leave out or neglect their sacred origins and greater cultural contexts, rituals and practices?
Fariha Róisín: The way that I have understood this, and I'm writing my fourth book, Who Is Wellness For? right now about this, is that pharmaceutical companies do not give a fuck about you. They are not here to make you well. If America as a nation cared about its people, it would firstly care about the land. It doesn't care about the land, so it doesn't care about the people.
We have to think about wellness in terms of food. I have IBS, and it's chronic, I've had it since I was 14, and I've witnessed the ways in which my body has degraded since I moved here when I was 19, and all of it's to do with food, what I put into my body and what kind of good, organic food is accessible—it's accessible to people who have wealth. When you start tracking all of these things, you begin to see that they really don't care about us.
Everybody should have access to plant medicines, if it feels right for these Indigenous communities that sit with them. It's about understanding and knowing what goes into those cultural practices. If we think of the history of tobacco and how it's been exploited, I think that is the perfect capsule of how detrimental globalizing or taking something sacred and then changing it completely, removing it completely, and then making it kill people...
And I think spiritually, what I've also gained from plant medicines, is understanding that there's so much wisdom to these plants that they laugh at greed, and at the absurdity of it. We have to get to a point where we start to see how absurd it is, that people have billions of dollars and they are unwilling to help more than half this planet. And once we start to actually address and look at how everything is connected...
To me, the Anthropocene started the moment that they decided to colonize half the world. That kind of legacy is connected to how we think about what is climate and who gets impacted by climate.
They say that Bangladesh is going to be one of the first countries to go: what does that mean for me as a Bangladeshi, non-immigrant living in America? Everything is just so connected, and it's so interesting how we don't want to know, and we don't want to see, and we don't want to take accountability. But I think the planet is telling us that we don't have much other choice, and that we have to return to her, and a way of life that prioritizes each other, because that's the only way that we will survive as a civilization, if that's what we want.
Kamea Chayne: That really resonates with me, because for me this legacy and history of colonization are what directly led to the severance of relationships to place and to community. We're talking about displacing native communities that have ancestral relations and bio-cultural place-based knowledges of how to care for very specific landscapes. And a lot of that knowledge is being marginalized, and diverse, place-based cultures being assimilated, and so forth. A lot of people talk about climate change, and focus on carbon emissions, but I really feel that it's a lot deeper than that.
In terms of medicines, this isn't to say that there is a definite thing as purity, or that all things that are processed are necessarily worse, but going back to your statement that plant medicines when facilitated by their cultural stewards and respected guides is designed to rekindle people's relationship with Earth, I think of these bottles of pills as like a representation of our disconnection from who we are, as a part of Earth, and how we've created these splits between food, medicine, culture, spirituality and ecology.
Again, this isn't at all to stigmatize the pharmaceutical drugs that people need for their own healing processes, but I think it's always worth questioning the how, so how these medicines are created, how their full potential for supporting healing may have been compromised by reducing their parts, how they've become less accessible because of these patents that allow corporate centralized control, and etc.
What have you been processing as you explore both healing at a deeply personal level, alongside recognizing Earth's signs of traumas and calls for healing?
Fariha Róisín: It was during one of ayahuasca ceremony last year, when I really saw the parallel between Mother Earth and me, for example, as a trauma survivor, as a sexual abuse survivor, as a woman in this world who has experienced extreme, different kinds of trauma, and also mining and extraction. When I was able to put two and two together, and see that that's what returning to the land really means, returning and understanding that her rhythms and her cycles exist within you and her templates, her temples exist within you, that those mountain ranges are in your bloodstream... There is something undeniably connected between us and this earth.
And those pills are a representation of how disconnected we are. The hubris of these science-based companies that refute indigenous knowledge and don't even see it as valuable. How much that creates a myopic understanding of what is healing, or what is good. And instead putting so much power in capital, on a dollar sign, to help you or aid you, not thinking about how the herbs and the plants, and even just going to the ocean, to nature and how these could help. John O'Donohue did this beautiful interview with Krista Tippett, on being, a couple of years ago just before his death. It's really stayed with me, because he talks about how his friend in London went to the seaside for a week and was completely restored from all of her ailments.
Urban environments are there to debilitate, demoralize, or disconnect you from who you are and from the Earth.
You're constantly having to just put yourself into a little box, and compartmentalize all of your needs, when in fact, if you could just go to the ocean, you would probably be deeply impacted by how this Earth continues to move and shift, and how a new day arises and how a new sun rises, despite what we've done to her, how much we've taken from her, how much she is sick and ill right now.
She is mirroring us as a society, and all of the fires on water, all of the bushfires, the pandemic itself, all of this violence, anti-Blackness, police violence—this is all a reflection of what we are doing wrong. It's really up to us to change it. And I am an optimist, because I'm looking at it, and I'm realizing that once you start looking at it, it's not that scary anymore.
Kamea Chayne: These are, of course, pretty heavy topics, but you're so poetic with your words that it's like stirring up this deep part within me, and I want to thank you so much for that. Before we go into our closing lightning round questions, I know you've recently embraced the role of being a multi-disciplinary artist in support of your personal and our planetary healing. As practical guidance, what advice would you give to people wanting to support their communities or our Earth in ways that aren't really valued by our dominant society, such as through different forms of art?
Fariha Róisín: That's why I started to write. I started also because writing is free, and it was my therapy when I was 12 years old and I was starting Like A Bird. I think that writing, and obviously this sort of writing that I'm doing, isn't valued, but I do think that it can be accessible to anybody.
For anybody who's wondering how to do that, all you have to do is just start and really consider what it is that you need to say. For me, it was seeing all the things that weren't being said and maybe this rebel nature that I have at times, where I really love fighting systems. I think I really came on this planet to just fight systems.
Get creative. Think about how you can start really working towards fighting the apocalypse—or not fighting it, but like, how do we actually embrace it, and begin to tend to these wounds and tend to each other. The best way to do that is through art, and it doesn't have to be the art that wins awards. It can be the art that just tells the truth.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Fariha Róisín: To me, what's uplifting is reading Gabor Maté's work and understanding about wounds. I'm currently reading Everybody by Olivia Laing. It's not really uplifting, but it's really making me think a lot.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Fariha Róisín: I say, "keep going", a lot. I'm a Capricorn, so it reminds me that I have to keep going. But something I've learned a lot as well, recently, is to actually root myself into the Earth in meditation, which settles any kind of anxiety or aloofness that I might feel or disassociation that I often can get into as a trauma survivor.
Kamea Chayne: And what are some of your biggest inspirations right now?
Fariha Róisín: Honestly, the Earth. Going out into nature, walking by the river, watching water gleam, seeing how green each tree is, and how it can turn orange and brown, and seeing the roots, and seeing the ways in which bark has different shades and different textures. I've really been allowing myself to be embraced by her, and it's such a revolutionary feeling.
I'd often felt, as a kid, that I was abandoned by God. But what I have actually realized is that God was always here, and God was always accessible, and the Earth is always accessible. How beautiful it is that we get to be with her and commune with her. That is an act of the divine for me.
Kamea Chayne: I'm having chills listening to you speak. Fariha, thank you so much for joining me today, and I really want to honor your poetic presence, rawness and your commitment to being of service to others in your path of healing, and not just for yourself, but really this extended and greater sense of self that includes larger communities and our shared planet. So thank you so much. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Fariha Róisín:
