This piece grows from my work with displaced communities, and from my lived experience as an Indigenous Amazigh woman. Over and over, I have learned that belonging is not granted by institutions. It is created in community, through presence and practice. For me, that practice is orality. Speaking, listening, repeating, singing, humming: these are not just ways of sharing what already exists. They are ways of making space.

Many institutions tie belonging to written literacy. To be recognised, you must produce text: the form, the contract, the polished piece. Writing is treated as proof of worth, while oral or embodied practices are pushed aside. This hierarchy is not neutral. It is the product of colonial histories that devalue Indigenous orality, of class structures that tie literacy to privilege, and of ableist assumptions about who can participate in cultural and creative life. These norms continue to restrict who is seen as a knower, who is welcomed into spaces of belonging, and who is shut out.

Against this backdrop, feminist, community-rooted orality opens another path. Storytelling, song, chant, gossip, poetry — practices often associated with women and dismissed as trivial — are in fact ways of creating belonging. They are archives of survival and resistance, passed down across generations. They are also practices of relation: ways of weaving community, sustaining memory, and making creativity possible on our own terms.

At the heart of my research with Indigenous communities, I have carried these questions:

How can you understand us if you’ve never sat and had tea with us?

How can you balance the scales, if you only take and never give?

How can you claim consent, if you’ve never spoken our language?

How can you make sense of our numbers, if you don’t memorise our names?

How can you celebrate our diversity, if you see us all as one?

How can you see clearly, if you’ve never reflected in our mirror?

How can you enlighten us, if you’ve never humbly sat in our shadow?

How can you speak for us, if you’ve never honoured our elders and learned our stories?

These questions are not metaphors. They are conditions of relation. They remind us that safer spaces for BPOC writers, for Indigenous women, for displaced communities, cannot be built on extraction. They must be built on reciprocity, humility, and presence.

In Amazigh traditions, orality has always carried ethics, history, and creativity. Poetry (tamdyazt), song (amarg), storytelling, women’s chants and gossip transmit knowledge across generations. Figures like Kharboucha, who sang protest verse, show how women turned oral traditions into tools of resistance. To treat these practices as lesser today is not only erasure; it reproduces colonial logics that dismissed Indigenous forms, classist hierarchies equating education with written fluency, and ableist standards excluding those who cannot or do not use text.

Belonging is not assimilation into someone else’s space. It is created through collective practices of orality. A chant at a wedding, a proverb repeated in a kitchen, a whispered exchange between women, a verse sung in protest - each is a way of saying we are here, we remember, we resist. These are the spatial elements of creative wellbeing: time, care, relation, recognition.

I often think of reciprocity here. In my community, this is called tiwizi, collective labour where neighbours harvest, build, and repair together. Each person gives because they too will one day receive. I imagine BPOC-led creative spaces in this way. Instead of competing for narrow slots in mainstream institutions, we create spaces together. Creativity becomes a form of mutual care, not only individual achievement.

As a writer, I try to honour this. My poetry and prose hold silences, fragments, repetitions because that is how the stories reached me. I do not smooth them into something cleaner. I let them breathe. Writing, for me, is not a way of fixing orality but of accompanying it, echoing its textures, leaving space for what cannot be captured.

In a world where language is too often treated as a gate, feminist, community-rooted orality reminds us language can be gathering instead of gate, relation instead of test. If creative spaces are to be truly open, they must make room for storytelling, song, chant, gossip, poetry. Only then can belonging be created together, not granted as privilege, but lived and embodied as a collective truth.