by Jonathan van Geuns, September 14, 2024
These days, it is through running I find myself more deeply connected to Edward Said. His words echo amid the quiet folds of the landscape, growing seemingly more dire with each step, on land that has been classified, owned, mapped and controlled. Under dominion so rarely questioned and so often forgotten. Not merely a backdrop for life, this earth beneath our cushioned shoes courses blindly through the vast repository of layered history. The land is imbued with meaning, laden with memory, conflicted with contest, with its scarred shadows barely visible in the lingering remnants of broken promises, and uprooted lives.
While I press onward on my run, I cannot escape the thought that the surface beneath holds stories I may never grasp. With each step, I sense as if I am traversing through a living palimpsest, where new footprints overlay ancient paths, where present moments skim over unresolved pasts. Each stride seems to stir up more dust, while I restlessly probe for a connection with the land, compelled to interrogate my place upon it. I long for my soul's murmur to be felt, to cast my calling upon the mountains and meadows.
Instead, I am reminded of Said’s words, reverberating, steeped in a muted urgency, as if the land itself were listening to his wisdom. Through the echoes of his words, running becomes an act of questioning. I find myself compelled to challenge my relationship with land anew, wishing for a thoughtful understanding. And as these thoughts surface, I ask: Who was pushed aside so I might run here freely? What histories are buried beneath these trails? Could my run be an act of defiance, a reclaiming of land beyond its current constructs, beyond its confines?
Edward Said, a Palestinian-American professor of literature at Columbia University, known for his seminal books Orientalism (1978) and The Question of Palestine (1979), unearthed how colonial powers construct land and geographies to serve their interest. Exposing the ways in which imperial forces inscribe their visions onto foreign lands and people. He illustrated how histories and identities are erased and rewritten, imposing a controlled, racialized narrative under the guise of self-rule. A mirage conjured for the desires of the West, recast as something passive, malleable, consumable. The Orient was invented to justify violence, exploitation, and domination over people and land.
His critique of the politics of land use remains unyieldingly relevant, and two messages strike me most deeply. For one, land is never neutral. Land holds the imprint of every force that thought to tame it, every whisper of defiance. A battleground of loss and revival. I come to understand that land is not a passive playground. Not a feature for my smartwatch to absorb. It is not a mere backdrop to shred a trail, or grind an uphill, and bomb the downhill, or bushwhack my way through. It is a contested memorial in the saga of claiming and reclaiming, deserving of quiet reverence and respect, like any place of remembrance.
Much like the Orient was marketed as an exotic, alluring object for consumption, so too has nature been turned into commodities, where gnarly mountains and rugged deserts are packaged, sanitized and sold for personal glory. Their raw spirit transformed into a stage for a runner’s spectacle. This bargain struck with nature, reshapes our understanding of place, turning wildness into a set-piece for human ambition.
I grapple with this juxtaposition: the purity of nature set against its own commodification. It, too, erodes identities, reshapes communities, rescripts spaces to serve profit over people, rendering us into hollow copies. In this transformation, the land’s authentic stories—its social and ecological heart—are erased, smoothed over in favor of the artificial. We face an unsettling reality. Here we are, runners and wanderers, we choose to engage with a depth of respect for the lives embedded in these spaces or to pass by thoughtlessly, as if these hills and rivers owe us nothing, as if they have no stories of their own.
For Said, land—like identity—is not something to be claimed, or taken for granted; it is woven from struggle, history, and the enduring presence of those who cherish it. Said’s work can not be contained by borders or territories; his work transcends the harsh realities of walls and checkpoints. As a keen observer, he spoke of the intimate, visceral connection Palestinians hold to their land. And how exiles are compelled to invent new ways of seeing and being; as Said said, “we have recreated ourselves as a people out of the destruction of our national existence.”
His reflections offer a meaningful way to view our own relationship with land, freedom and identity. The notion of a widening void—the distance between oneself and a homeland that is both painfully near and irretrievably far, speaks to a truth felt by many. Speaking to the delicate, sometimes painful relationship we each have with the spaces we inhabit. The exile’s existence, resembles a mirror of the estranged reality of modern life, symbolic of the larger alienation many of us feel. The exile is suspended space, betwixt and between a world crumbled and an elusive future, tethered only by the fragile thread of haunted memories casting the everyday in its shadow.
While I run, I imagine what it means to belong to a place, to call it a home, to be connected to the roots of my identity. As an immigrant in every place I’ve called home, I too carry some quiet otherness; always on the edge, never fully arrived, rootless never truly grounded. Especially while I deliberately distanced myself from the place I was born, and unintentionally from the place I grew up. I feel the weight of these questions deepening, pressing against the rhythm of my breath.
And so, in the echo of his writings, I find a journey of my own; one that asks me not just to tread lightly, but to feel deeply, to confront the land’s layered pasts as I move within its ever-shifting present. Running becomes less about the thrill of the path ahead and more about the quiet, contemplative steps that seek to honor what lies beneath. It is a way to remake ourselves, to find a belonging that is not ownership but reverence; a way to run, not in dominion, but in deep, reverent connection.
Some runners find solace in solitude. Perhaps as a retreat from the mundane, or a longing for belonging. A journey inward, searching for a place that feels like home. For me, running also offers a way to unravel and confront my place in the world, and the bond it holds with me. Through running, I am given the chance to connect my body with the land, to trace its contours and meaning. A path to face my place in this world and the threads that tie me to it.
Said lingers, urging me to consider my footsteps as intentional, to feel the pulse of history where I go. He beckons me to move beyond the personal thrill of a runner's high, beyond the sanctity of solitude, and into a wider, more challenging awareness: that every step through forests, over hills, along rivers, intersects with centuries of human experience and memory. Each element speaks, a language I am perhaps only beginning to understand, that of resilience and persistence, of forgotten roots and surviving branches, etched into the landscapes we pass without a second thought.
These memories shape not just our kinship to place, it turns personal into collective stories, and also the place itself. Places that become woven into memories. Memories that can put the pieces of a shattered identity back together. It can mend a fractured sense of the land’s memory too: its scars, stories and forgotten voices. Memories help heal the disconnect between people and place, revive the disconnect wrought by colonization, conflict, or neglect. By listening to the land’s memory, we can start to reassemble a more complete understanding of its identity, and in doing so, we begin to restore our own. Running can become a ritual of remembering, a way of reconnecting the shattered pieces of identity that both we and the land carry.
Said offers us a frame of reference to understand running as more profound than a physical exertion. His “contrapuntal” reading—where multiple voices are held in tension—invites us to move harmoniously through land’s rhythms and stories. Running becomes a dialogue, unfolding through each footfall and breath, a dynamic conversation with the land as an active participant. Rather than imposing our will, we listen, adapt, respond, to its contours, threats, and demands, and find respect and a sense of place. In this sense, running becomes less about conquering, and more about listening, less about domination, and more about reciprocity. The land speaks, in richness, if we are willing to listen.
What we hear evolves with each run, terrain, and weathered experience. Each time we return to familiar paths, we re-enter this communion, carrying with us the memory of past encounters. Over time, the place, soil, smells, all become part of us, and we become part of it. Like memory, running transforms from a personal journey to a shared experience with earth. A connection where both body and land are co-creators in the moment. A relationship built on mutual respect, stride by stride, harmoniously.
As we trace the echoes of ancestral footsteps, traversing histories of those who came before, we become mindful of broader narratives. Said compels us to seek the truths behind these paths: their origins, makers, intended travelers. We know that spaces that appear “natural” or untouched are often marked by painful pasts. These lands are rarely “wild” or a “frontier.” Often these places were shaped by the labor and contributions of marginalized groups. Figures like Charles Young and the Buffalo Soldiers remind us that land stewardship extends beyond dominant narratives.
Running transcends the physical when we recognize what lies hidden. Each step we absorb the weight of history. As runners, we must confront these complexities, reckon with the idea that running on wounded lands requires confronting histories and ongoing struggles. To heal the land and ourselves, it is not enough to move as passive participants; we must witness, engage, question the structures that dictate who benefits from their use, and recognize the ways in which our actions either reinforce or dismantle these narratives.
Here, Said’s second striking message emerges: we have the power to create counter-narratives to reshape our understanding of the land. Running becomes a statement. A way to resist forces that seek to hold us in place. We can reclaim space and redefine freedom, not as it has been handed to us, but as something intentional and profound. We are called to engage with the stories that shaped our world, to honor the land, its people, lifting their memories into the present.
Decolonization rejects the notion that nature is to be conquered and consumed. It is “a choice of peace and human will over steel and sheer force.” We must too escape the lure and dependency of consumer goods, their trapping behaviors, and reclaim our body and land against commodification. Despite all, Palestinians too, continue to assert connection to their land. If they can, why then can we not assert our right to experience nature and land on our own terms? Should we not also fight to define our relationship with earth?
As we praise our running communities, for all their virtues and comradery, we can extend the same respect and care to the land’s historical layers. More than a gesture, I mean, as an act of justice. Supporting Indigenous sovereignty, restoration, and reparative practices; returning land to its rightful stewards and repairing relations between people and place. Decolonization also demands a radical rethinking of our relationship to land, community, and history.
Said wrote as a means to challenge dominant narratives. His emphasis on storytelling—of whose story gets told—guides us to acknowledge that the land holds more than our footprints. The land holds an enduring responsibility: to listen, learn, carry, and tell the stories of those who came before, the untold legacies that shaped the land and trails. So as we lace up, we have an opportunity to defy the harmful narratives of conventional norms. We can turn our runs into radical acts of liberation, to reclaim and reinterpret land, to resist the forces that seek to define and control our shared space. To turn our runs into a testament of remembrance and pursuit for freedom.
What I hope to convey is: land does not exist in isolation. It is always in dialogue with the forces that shape it, the systems that erase, and rewrite its history. The ground beneath us holds within it the echoes of stories never told. This silence, surrounding us, it too is not neutral. To run without honoring the stories carried by the land is to drift in absence. Still, running can be more: each run offers a chance to breathe life into those stories, to defy the silence.
We have a choice, to be passive participants, or to run with awareness. To engage critically. To question the narratives that frame our adventures and landscapes as empty canvases for conquest. Together, we have the power to resist the idea that land must be reduced to a commodity, that control and exploitation are the only ways ahead. Instead, we can honor our space as a living, breathing entity, a symbol with identity.
With this awareness comes a profound truth: the right to tread freely upon Earth holds meaning only when granted to all. Freedom is indivisible. As land is woven into identity, my freedom to run and roam is inextricably bound to the struggles of those denied their own. In this connection, I find a deeper meaning transcending personal fulfillment; a reminder of our shared humanity and our collective right to flourish.
Each run becomes an act of resistance, an assertion of life against the forces of erasure and indifference. As I run, I hold on to Palestine. Not out of guilt for the freedom I have in my running, not because I deserve it, but because Palestinians deserve it too. I run because I can, because no one is truly free until we are all free.
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