20: MAYA DAVIS ON INVASIVE SPECIES: SELF-QUESTIONNAIRE BY MARWA HELAL
Helal's Invasive Species: Self-Questionnaire illuminates the question of who and what has a right to nativeness. I have been sitting with the language of invasive species, thinking about its proximity to xenophobia and what the designation of non-native is meant to evoke. The poem suggests that neither plants nor people arrive in a vacuum and that both are entangled within histories of movement, displacement, survival, and empire.
The poem adopts the form of a self-questionnaire, a taxonomy that continually fails under the weight of lived experience:
weed or beautiful flower?
oppressed or oppressor?
terrorist or freedom fighter?
The questionnaire promises clarity and instead, every answer produces another contradiction. Helal weaponizes the language of forms and bureaucratic classification, revealing their inability to contain migration, memory, or inheritance. The poem does not merely critique taxonomy, it performs its collapse.
Again and again, Helal refuses the categories offered to her, asking not simply what is native, but who authored the terms through which nativeness itself is understood:
Who made this taxonomy?
unmake it.
The poem's central intervention is to reveal that the category of the invasive species is inseparable from the colonial histories that first produced displacement and then criminalized movement. The question is never simply who arrived, but who acquired the power to name arrival as invasion.
This brought me to the ecological concept of spontaneous flora: plants that are not intentionally introduced or cultivated by humans. As researcher Mark Linquist writes in The Rustbelt Herbarium Research Study:
“As species ranges begin to shift due to climate change, there’s a chance to re-evaluate both the biodiversity contribution of spontaneous vegetation, but also the fact that what we think of as a native plant is changing.”
Helal's work asks for a similar reconsideration. If ecosystems are dynamic and migration is constant, then nativeness is not a stable category but a political one. Fauna, flora, and people alike exist within the long afterlives of colonial reverbs.
We are continually confronting the butterfly effects of empire.
What an arrogance to claim space on a land you had no right to and then undertake eradication efforts.
What a contradiction to build over a swamp and be upset by the water.
We rarely describe the enduring architectures of colonial settlement as invasive. Instead, they become heritage, tradition, or culture, while newer forms of movement remain suspect.
The line that lingers for me is:
what happens when the colonizer's blood runs through yours?
I am writing this review while driving through the Mashonaland countryside, looking at indigenous generations of farmland outside my window and being offered tea and scones as we discuss the land wars. Reading Helal here, among landscapes whose agricultural forms were themselves shaped by colonial extraction, the language of invasion becomes impossible to separate from history. Some invasions find themselves memorialized as tradition while others remain permanently marked as foreign.
america can't even get the slur right.
The refusal to perform legibility on anyone else's terms becomes a refusal of the taxonomy itself. The poem is a performance of humanity, but also a rejection of the systems demanding that performance. Bureaucratic language, identity categories, and nationalist narratives all become inadequate containers for lived experience.
We have naturalized so many remnants of colonial movements that we rarely recognize them as forms of invasion at all. French road signs in Detroit and Portuguese restaurants in Mozambique are treated as cultural texture rather than evidence of historical displacement. Meanwhile, the contemporary movement of people continues to provoke fear and exclusion across the world. The brilliance of Invasive Species lies in its refusal to offer resolution. Instead, Helal turns the language of classification back upon itself until the categories collapse, leaving us with a more difficult truth: nativeness is less a biological fact than a story nations tell about who belongs.
And thus Helal's final lines ask and answer simultaneously:
what is native?
not here.
(i am, i am, and everywhere.)
– Maya, August 2026
Maya Davis is a Detroit-based artist working on Anishinaabe land whose practice explores care, preservation, and resilience through diverse materials and processes. Their work examines care as both an intimate act and a collective responsibility, drawing parallels between human experience and natural systems. Through research-based approaches, Davis cultivates and transforms organic materials to create works that reflect the impacts and archives of colonization, tracing where its scars remain on the land.
Interweaving biological and anthropological narratives, their practice considers how colonization, immigration, and invasive species are transported and take root, shaping both communities and ecosystems today. Their work tracks how invasive species have followed the pathways and modalities of industry and colonial expansion.
Davis is a 2022 BFA graduate of the College for Creative Studies and has participated in residencies and fellowships with organizations including Kresge Arts in Detroit, Sidewalk Detroit, Modern Ancient Brown, and Independent Curators International. Their work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries such as Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), Good Weather (Chicago, IL), Reyes Finn (Detroit, MI), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, MI). They have received support from CultureSource, Red Bull Arts Detroit, the MdW Coalition, and Petty Propolis.
