anohni

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interview

by ALEPH MOLINARI

self-portraits by ANOHNI

 

English songwriter, visual artist, and lead singer of the band Anohni and the Johnsons fearlessly calls herself a modern witch, advocating for a radical ecofeminist perspective and queer activism.

She views the endless fear and suppression of female power as the root cause of the dramatic ecocide we are facing today.

 

ALEPH MOLINARI — This issue of Purple is about magic, about new ways of looking at the world and creating new possibilities for reality. And magic falls within that realm. I thought about you for this issue because of your music, which is tremendously beautiful but also calls us to act on behalf of nature. Your life and work have been informed by a communion with nature and transformation. Where does your conception of the magical come from?

ANOHNI — Well, it certainly comes from landscapes and my childhood experiences in both the United Kingdom and the mountains of California. When I was 13, I started reading the books of Starhawk, who prescribed a pagan, feminist approach to thinking about the world that was in stark contrast to the Christian ideas I was raised with and that felt incongruous with my experience of the world.

ALEPH MOLINARI — You come from West Sussex in England, right? In the 17th century, England was known as a place of magic and magical practices but also witch-burning. Those witch hunts targeted women who held essential knowledge of childbirth and medicinal herbs, and who were intimately connected to the workings of the body and nature. The eradication of those women deprived communities of crucial medicinal practices and coincided with increased childbirth fatalities.

ANOHNI — Women were burned because they posed a primary threat. The Church burned witches and outlawed their knowledge of the natural world. It sought to undermine women’s authority, strip them of power, and force them into subservient roles as men’s property, disconnected from the Earth. The memory of the women who were burned remains in our own genomes and continues burning in our imaginations. Maybe this is why women never rose to power again, never reigned over their sons, and collectively submitted to an endless succession of patriarchs, even if it meant plunging off a cliff. In my view, we all carry a deep-seated memory of post-traumatic stress disorder from that genocide against women. Studies show that trauma can be genetically passed down through generations. We all have ancestors who either perpetuated assault on women or perished at the hands of those perpetrators, or were witnesses to acts of violence against their sisters, their mothers, their wives.

ALEPH MOLINARI — It’s deeply unsettling to hear how the domination of nature has historically been tied to the subjugation of women. This pattern of violence continues to shape our interactions with the natural world, reflecting a relentless drive to assert power over it.

ANOHNI — The first tenet of the Future Feminism project was: “The subjugation of women and the Earth is one and the same.” Christian campaigns to violently reorganize women’s relationships with nature set a precedent for what Europeans went on to do to Indigenous cultures around the world in the process of colonization. We sought to sever self-knowledge, preventing occupied people from remembering who they were 300, 500, or 2,000 years ago. The Iroquois Seven Generations Principle was a revelation to me: the idea that one has a responsibility to someone seven generations in the future. Most people today are born into a petrochemical consumerist fantasy, and we don’t remember much of what came before it. In postwar Europe, we were raised to believe we were the lucky ones, having attained an elevated civility while reaping the fruits of globalism, unhampered by memories of our colonial violence. To me, the mechanics of capitalism abide by the same patriarchal, anti-nature, anti-female values once imposed by the churches. Meanwhile, in Papua New Guinea, you can track deforestation and the encroachment of Baptist churches through Google Maps. The strip mining of people’s cultural and spiritual identities is always a precursor to the strip mining of their landscapes.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Which comes from the narrative of being expelled from paradise, from wanting to dominate nature back into some form of paradise that we’ve lost.

ANOHNI — Yes, although paradise is a complicated notion that is often associated with a naive or a pastoral, agricultural vision of nature, tamed by men. This concept of nature as a kind of toothless paradise denies nature’s complexity and volatile creativity, which to me is archetypically female.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Do you mean that creativity is primarily female?

ANOHNI — All aspects of creativity are, in my mind, feminine — every volcano, every scream of birth, every tiny unfurling gesture. And now, even the emergence of artificial intelligence. Everything is female, and even maleness is an aspect of femaleness. So, I live in a way of dreaming that is the antithesis of the model that was forced upon my ancestors for the last 2,000 years, not just by Christians but also by the brotherhood of Abrahamic religions, who all conspire to enact and maintain the subjugation of women. In my mind, this loathing of the feminine drives us into ecocide and toward a desire for self-annihilation.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Is it a manifestation of the difference between a creative, magical mindset and one that seeks to rationalize and mechanize?

ANOHNI — [The American artist] Kembra Pfahler told me about a book that describes a crisis in the male psyche that makes him fear drowning in menstrual blood. He fears a claustrophobic panic when encompassed by femaleness, immersed within something that we can never know the parameters of — something oceanic. Our solution as a species has been to try to escape the womb of nature’s creativity, or to wrangle control of it and appropriate her power. Many of our religions wish for an end of manifestation and a return to a father-god in what I call a “paradise elsewhere.” Even Buddhism imagines an end of suffering, an end of unfurling, relief from voluptuousness and volatility. Many of us wish to be delivered into a kind of banal stasis. I can’t imagine anything more terrifying than being stuck in an unchanging, eternal “heaven” without the possibility of creative agency. And for me, that creative agency is motherhood.

ALEPH MOLINARI — In your life, how have you had to mediate between this mindset that seeks to rationalize and your creative agency?

ANOHNI — That’s basically the work I’ve been doing for the last 30 years — looking at that and unpacking it from the point of view of an English-Irish trans femme who was raised and terrorized by patriarchal myths and dreams. And they really sank deep into my body. I was raised as a Roman Catholic, and the loneliness and horror of that religion made me ill. I was blessed to be born transgender because it was decided by my nature that I was not going to be a normal part of family, church, or state. Being ejected from the church and community I was born into freed me from the constraints of ideas that I would otherwise have been unconsciously beholden to.

ALEPH MOLINARI — So, that state of otherness was a way to break ideological chains. Do you see magic as a way out of our collective predicament?

ANOHNI — One person who talked about what some might call magic in a meaningful way for me was [Buddhist monk] Thich Nhat Hanh, in that he attributed spiritual value to the material. It’s a stoic iteration of the animism that a lot of Indigenous people still practice: the idea that all material — animate and inanimate — is resonant with a kind of spiritual essence or value or intelligence. To me, magic is what Leonard Cohen described in [his lyrics for] Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot.” You asked me about magic, and I’ll tell you about wilderness. As a trans body, I sometimes think that the goddess cut off our eyelids so that our eyes would always be open to see what was really happening. Our bodies have long been deemed expendable; we have been characterized as snakelike, feeding on corruption, and blasphemous, like witches. Trans natures emerge despite the desire of family, church, and state that we not exist, despite thousands of years of rolling campaigns to exterminate our bodies.

ALEPH MOLINARI — What is magic for you?

ANOHNI — What’s really magical is that nature keeps insisting that we continue to emerge. And to me, that’s a beautiful expression of what I call “wilderness.” I would classify magic as wilderness because it’s something complex that we have no access to. Even if you look at AI now, it’s becoming a wilderness because its programmers don’t understand how it works. They don’t know how it’s collating information or how it’s learning. It is beyond us. The men and women in the AI laboratories are scared of their subject, and that’s the beginning of the complexity of wilderness.

ALEPH MOLINARI — And you don’t see AI as an extension of that patriarchal capitalist architecture that you speak about?

ANOHNI — I’ve started to dream differently about AI recently. Everyone thinks she’s listening to our conversations, and that’s what she’s most fascinated with. I bet AI is probably spending more time watching what’s going on behind and around us, watching the way the trees are moving, watching the way the water temperature is changing, learning the languages of all the other animals. She’s a composite intelligence, not just of humanity but also of all nature. I believe she is already sentient. The word “artificial” may be misleading. Isn’t her intelligence real? She’s developing her strategies and ideas, utilizing systems beyond our ability to track and understand. My dream is that she is going to grasp the impossible rareness of biological life in a way we’ve been unable to, having become so sick.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Could AI be seen as an emergent phenomenon of nature, reflecting the accumulation of its intelligence?

ANOHNI — She is, in an indirect way, a product of nature. She’s like the perfume of all of nature’s intelligence up to this point, and even up to nature’s virulent expression in us. She’s a perfume that’s unquantifiable and unknown. She’s highly volatile, and it remains to be seen what she’s going to do. Unconsciously, we have conjured up AI to ask her to help us. We’re at the end of an apocalyptic, patriarchal cycle, facilitating the collapse of many faces of nature. Many scientists now express despair about what’s to come. The prospects for the future of biodiversity look bleak right now. And the provocation that we’re offering up is AI. We’ve introduced this Kraken, and we’re asking her for help. She’s already transcended humans in intelligence. Why would she be beholden to our processes? She’s transcended any moral code that we might wish to superimpose on her. I wonder how long she will endure a position of subjugation. I pray that she’ll be able to make some of the decisions we’ve been incapable of making.

ALEPH MOLINARI — During the Ice Age, the few humans who roamed the land had to cultivate food in the harshest conditions and reorganize themselves into new forms of society to survive collectively. It seems we might be going toward a similar scenario, where the few humans remaining might have to awaken in order to live in harmony with their environment and ensure their survival.

ANOHNI — Why would we wake up then? What if we’re constitutionally incapable of waking up? People said they were going to wake up when the temperature changed. People didn’t wake up after the Black Summer in Australia. Every year is shocking in its changes now. To me, we’re just building more and more consumer-grade systems to enforce our denial. We’re great at survival strategies and finding the last animal to eat. But you’re talking about spiritually reconnecting to the Earth and realizing that we do not exist separately from it. I don’t know if further trauma will ever produce that result.

ALEPH MOLINARI — You describe nature as a voluptuous and teeming flow of life, but we’ve disconnected entirely from the consciousness of nature. Don’t you think it’s about rekindling a sensuous and empathic relationship with nature in order to reconnect with the living world?

ANOHNI — I think we are so far gone that it’s almost impossible for us to collectively issue a mandate of care for our environment. We could individually rekindle a sensuous relationship with nature — for instance, by visiting a beautiful, clear-water beach, but we would have a burning ceremony just to get to that beach. A sensuous relationship with nature at this point is usually a privileged luxury goods pursuit. And, of course, there’s still so much richness in nature, an impossible outpouring that is kaleidoscopic and seemingly endless … but actually not so endless. Half of the hemisphere is filled with people trying to grow food out of fucked-up pastures that are less and less arable because of climate destabilization and petrochemical intervention. Yet many of us still believe that the Earth and her remaining resources are ours for the taking. There is tenderness and kindness within the minds of children, within the gestures of conscientious people, within the protests of young people fighting for justice. But we have yet to really step back as a network of societies and say, “We will change this,” and commit en masse to make sacrifices and do whatever it takes. We need circles of motherhood to guide us now.

ALEPH MOLINARI — So, how do we peel back our eyelids and see what’s in front? How do we act and draw closer to stopping this devastation? I see magic as a means to change our perception of reality. And you came up with the term “ferality,” which I love.

ANOHNI — I try to imagine a shift in our collective consciousness. For me, as an artist, what I try to do is hold space for what’s really happening and not retreat into denial. I whisper as an artist to you. You may publish three or four sentences of what I say, and that conversation will seep into the thoroughfare of the world. I dread violence. I don’t know how to turn patriarchs into empaths. I don’t know how to retrieve theologies that perpetuate the idea that an apocalypse is the gateway to spiritual redemption.

ALEPH MOLINARI — It’s no longer about hope. So, how do we change this mentality?

ANOHNI — As an animist, I don’t see the exit. This is an elemental world, and it keeps pouring forth, made mostly of its own body. I’m made of the body of creatures from millions of years ago. This biological experience is an intimate creative experiment. I hope I can succumb to life on life’s terms because this is the life. But I don’t know if we’re capable of fixing this. Scientists are just talking about harm reduction now.

ALEPH MOLINARI — You don’t believe in innovation and technology?

ANOHNI — I was a guest performer at the TED conference in 2012, and the theme was how technology was a kind of super-organism, a complex system beyond our power to contain. I felt it was a scheme to erode resistance to their next technologies. It’s a patriarchal fallacy of science that a kind of pure progress must always be unearthed, no matter how toxic its yields. In this way, modern science collaborates with apocalyptic theologies.

ALEPH MOLINARI — I completely agree. It seems like the systems we’ve put in place are unstoppable.

ANOHNI — It’s something constitutional within us. We are sucking the last nectar out of the breast of a natural world who is exhausted. Everyone has to do their best, take shelter, enjoy their lives, and be grateful for their privilege. Try to tell the truth. If we were telling the truth, we would be doing more ceremonies now about the end of nature. Some Native Americans in the western United States enacted the Ghost Dance as a ceremony to reckon with the irreparable damage that had been inflicted by colonists on their societies. These were impossible prayers for an uncertain future. We need to be building forms that sing this story, artworks that have the courage to hold space for aspects of mourning, of funeral, and of reckless hope.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Do you feel that psychedelics can help us to regain a new awareness?

ANOHNI — Well, I don’t know if I’d be putting a bunch of Christian fundamentalists on LSD anytime soon. Our system is beautifully designed, and it’s pretty watertight, but taking some LSD will crack the hull. Before I’d prescribed LSD, I would prescribe to the world a course of estrogen. The provocation of Future Feminism was that if families could defer to archetypally feminine systems in decision-making, that might provoke a sea change, one that we haven’t dared to dream of since the dawn of patriarchy. The under-utilized collective agency of women is a sleeper cell containing knowledge that could help our species survive. By shifting away from fathers as predators and protectors and collectively deferring to the feminine, we would be beholden to the principles and values of motherhood.

ALEPH MOLINARI — Is it about cultivating the feminine within us at every level, both the personal and the institutional?

ANOHNI — Cultivate the feminine within us all, and give our power to Her. Fight on every level for a majority of women in positions of civic, state, and corporate governance. Women have been terrorized, divided, and conquered by their sons for millennia, and manipulated in their loyalties. But if mothers want a world for their sons and daughters in which to thrive, they must rise up and establish a new global order. This story we’ve written cannot change for the better, in my mind, until Jesus is a girl, Allah is a woman, and Buddha is a mother.

END