Transcript

To my unborn daughters,

We’ve had an ineffable sense to belong, to orient ourselves towards oneness with the world around us. Historicity illustrates this once was a state of being rather than an idealist thought. Not too long ago, humans and nonhumans lived in co-dependency. We intuited, breathed, and created together. Their offspring was mine and my offspring was theirs. We reared together since our children shared equally the responsibilities of maintaining a protective balance on Earth Mother. Our abundant love was rooted in faith, in openness—an act of trust in the natural world’s unknowns.

We’ve grown a fragmented society since then. The worst thing that happened to mankind is when man put a fence around territory and marked its possession. He created an agora and an oikos. A public space and a private space. And he ranked himself in the public, while dethroning you to the private. Your identity remained still one with the lands. Therefore he marked you as property too.

You have to question how the visibilizing of him relies upon the invisibilization of you. This moment began the resistance to our relationship with one another, humans and nonhumans, as a collective, and attempted to monetize value to invaluable soil and labour. And now we witness the heartbreak of the world, as she overheats in our division.

Our irrevocable commitment to property is not only an intellectual death; it closes the mind to any new vision of the world beyond what he fragmented.

Dispel this illusion of our current worldview by thinking about revolutionary, radical love that impacts our very social and political structures. This ancestral knowledge comes to you if you silence your thoughts so a reimagined world can find you, and you can find yourself in it again. Resist your body being marked as property, dear child, and connect with nature once again. We await you here,

Your loving grandmothers

“Not too long ago, humans and nonhumans lived in co-dependency. We intuited, breathed, and created together. Their offspring was mine and my offspring was theirs.”

In an intimate letter from an older generation, Raji Aujla links gender-based oppression, economic logic, the invisibilization of non-Western forms of knowing, and environmental destruction. “Dispel this illusion of our current worldview,” she intones, “by thinking about revolutionary, radical love that impacts our very social and political structures.” Aujla’s powerful rejoinder to capitalism and colonialism spans personal and collective experience across generations.

Raji Aujla is the founder and president of Willendorf Cultural Planning and editor-in-chief of Newest Magazine, sister companies that focus on better representation and inclusion of IBPoC voices in Canadian arts and culture. She has been a cultural builder, curator, creative director, and advocate in the Canadian arts sector for the past ten years. Prior to this, she worked in journalism, spending tireless hours researching and developing stories focused on racial, gender, and caste injustices. Throughout this experience, storytelling has been her greatest superpower to help bring together people of different backgrounds and beliefs and to empower her generation to design a better future. She believes that the arts have a transformative power to bring people together and build empathy.

Aujla studied Visual Culture at the University of Toronto. She sits on the boards and committees for Canada’s National Ballet School, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Baaz News, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Toronto Foundation’s Vision 2020 Alumni. She was selected as an Independent Curator for the City of Toronto’s Year of Public Art in 2021. Raji works as a freelancer for The Globe and Mail and has bylines in the CBC, Chatelaine, The Globe and Mail, Huffington Post, and Baaz News. She also co-founded the aujla + vukets foundation with the aim to mentor and fund female-led social impact ideas

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