The Liberation of Black Earth: What Indigenous and Black Agricultural Movements Can Teach Us About Solon

This paper considers the position of the natural world in the poetry of Solon (F 4, 34, and 36). These texts display a deep connection between justice for the land itself and for people who have been dispossessed, enslaved, exiled, or otherwise oppressed. The Solonian reforms and Seisachtheia show many parallels with Biblical and other Near Eastern documents proclaiming land reform (Blok and Krul). This connection between land, people, and justice also resembles contemporary grassroots movements in the United States that advocate for the return of farmland and establishment of food sovereignty for Black and Indigenous communities (e.g. Agrarian Trust, Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, Soul Fire Farm). These movements are distinct from contemporary movements for wealth redistribution, which widely ignore the relationship of humans to the land, replicating the orientation toward the natural world of the colonizer (Newman 2020). The Earth and its capacity to sustain human and nonhuman life are critical to repairing the existential violence of colonization and slavery and its contemporary manifestations, including food apartheid, mass extinction, and the climate crisis. One purpose of this paper is to use these ancient texts to raise consciousness about the ecological crisis of racism and colonization in the United States, and to encourage a rethinking of settlers’ relationship to land. The second purpose is to suggest that these activists can help scholars understand these ancient texts better by inviting us to see the importance of land not merely as a form of capital for the production and transmission of wealth, nor as a metaphor for human experience, but as a concerned party in its own right, and the core of lifeways and foodways, which are central to communities and identities (Kimmerer 2013, Newman 2020, Twitty 2017). Thus, passages in Solon’s poetry can be read as voicing a view of the natural world that runs as a counter-current to the extraction-based contemporary political structures which categorize people by the productive capacity of their lands. The personified Earth has value in her own right.