Where the Earth Bleeds: Fractures Across Four Lands
Silence is being presented so loud that it can be heard. To speak even when silenced is to remain human. To remember is to resist. To witness is to honor.
There are lands that bleed quietly until the silence itself becomes thunder. Four lands, some are spoken of while some are not addressed at all. Throughout history the media has spoken of them only in crisis, yet they are rich with history, spirit, and resistance. Congo, Sudan, Haiti, and Palestine are nations burdened by history, extraction, and abandonment. These are not just places on a map. They are living, breathing bodies that are both sacred and unyielding. Justice has long delayed its arrival, peace has long been withheld, and yet, they never fail to rise. They pulse with a resilience so ancient and powerful that the ground itself must respond. These lands will no longer be ignored. They will speak, shake, and summon a reckoning.
With my recent body of work What Reamins, What Rises , on view now at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery (7 Franklin Pl, New York, NY 10013) through May 10th, 2025, I’ve only touched on a few of the themes I’m exploring here. I felt compelled to expand on these monumental countries—whose histories and contributions span the globe—because too often their stories are reduced or overlooked. While I can’t address every struggle or triumph in a single post, my goal is to cast as much accurate, affirmative light on their narratives as they deserve. Their calls for recognition have traveled thousands of miles to reach me; it is my hope they will reach you here, stirring your hands and your heart to bear witness alongside me.
The Unseen Engine
Ryan Cosbert 'Peace Talks' An Ode to DR Congo, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
40×36 inches
Cobalt and coltan are two minerals that most people have never seen, yet have held in some form and solely rely on every single day. They are the silent engines powering our phones, laptops, electric cars, and countless other technologies that define modern life. But have you ever paused to wonder where these minerals come from? Or more urgently who is extracting them?
Over 60% of the world’s cobalt and significant portions of the world’s coltan come from one place: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). But the DRC is not just a country. It is a pulse— a vital artery feeding the digital age. Yet, this nation rich in natural resources remains one of the poorest in the world, plagued by conflict, exploitation, and silence.
Rather than being celebrated and protected, the Congolese people—especially children—are often the ones forced into dangerous, unregulated mining labor. They work with their bare hands, exposed to both toxic dust and chemicals, with little to no compensation. Many of them will suffer long-term health complications, while some will never make it past childhood. While being subjected to these health complications, they will also be subjected to the negative effects of Epigenetics. This is not history. This is today’s story, every second, under our global gaze.
I reflected deeply on this in my recent work for What Remains, What Rises. The work I created was textured, layered, and scarred—echoing and embodying the land itself. It was about what’s buried and what refuses to be buried. What remains, despite centuries of colonization, war, and resource theft. While what still rises, stubbornly, beautifully against all odds.
There’s a kind of violence in invisibility, and there’s a kind of power in both seeing and in knowing. This post is a call to see. To understand that your phone, your car, your laptop—all carry traces of a land that is being drained for its brilliance, while its people are kept in the shadows.
The DRC deserves justice. Its children deserve futures. It’s land deserves rest.
What remains is the truth and what rises is our responsibility to it.
The Ongoing Nightmare- Between Fasting and Famine
Sudan plunged into open warfare on April 15, 2023. This occurred during the month of Ramadan— a month meant for fasting, communal prayer, and reflection—when Sudan woke to the first artillery shells. Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, is usually a time of solidarity and peace; for Sudan, it marked the opening chapter of a nightmare that has yet to end. After long-simmering tensions between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) exploded into street fighting in Khartoum. What started in the capital soon consumed the entire country, with battles raging from Darfur to the Nuba Mountains.
By mid-April 2025:
Death toll: At least 20,000 people have been killed, though the real number is certainly much higher.
Displacement: Some 14 million Sudanese have been forced from their homes—nearly one-third of the population.
Hunger crisis: Almost 25 million people—about half the country—face acute food insecurity, with famine confirmed in ten localities and many more at risk.
Humanitarian aid has struggled to keep pace. Funding shortfalls at the World Food Programme have already forced cuts to rations just as Sudan enters its rainy season, when roads become impassable and malnutrition typically spikes . Meanwhile, warring parties frequently block or divert aid convoys, trapping civilians between front lines and famine.
This is not a crisis in waiting—it is here, in every collapsed hospital ward, every empty market stall, and every makeshift camp on Khartoum’s outskirts. Yet, even amid siege and starvation, Sudanese communities keep resisting: sharing food in neighborhoods under bombardment, nursing the wounded in secret clinics, and documenting atrocities so the world cannot look away.
Sudan has contributed it’s ancient history, gold, oil, peanuts, cotton, and countless others which has shaped its role on a global scale and has contributed to the worlds economy. With many catastrophic occurrences why hasn’t this been widespread across the media? Why is there such little media coverage? Why are we turning a blind eye to Sudan and its people who have such rich ancient history?
The Fire That Dared to Speak
“We dared to be free, dare to be free by ourselves and for ourselves.”
Haiti today finds itself immersed in violence, hunger, and profound political instability. Though the world remembers Haiti’s revolutionary triumph as the first Black republic forged against colonial tyranny many forget the crushing indemnity imposed by France in 1825, a debt so punitive that it shackled Haiti’s economy for generations. In 2023, France finally acknowledged that demanding repayment was unjust; yet true reparations still remain off the table. Haiti is being punished for being first.
This historical burden set the stage for a lineage of crises stretching into the present. In July 2021, the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse plunged Haiti into a power vacuum, with an unelected prime minister by the people, Ariel Henry, struggling to govern amid rampant gang violence, systemic corruption, and collapsing public services. Haiti has been exploited by armed gangs that now control roughly 85% of Port-au-Prince and have spread violence into the central regions. These groups and among them the Viv Ansanm coalition and Gran Grif are responsible for mass kidnappings, extortion, and scorched-earth attacks that have killed over 1,600 people and injured more than 580 just in the first quarter of 2025, displacing over a million residents. In a historic escalation, the United States officially designated Viv Ansanm and Gran Grif as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists under Executive Order 13224 on May 2, 2025. This marks the first time Haitian gangs have been labeled as terrorist entities, a move intended to disrupt their financial networks and apply sanctions to anyone supporting them. While this designation may hamper gangs’ ability to operate, humanitarian organizations warn it could also complicate aid delivery in a country where negotiating with armed groups is often the only way to reach those in dire need.
Food insecurity has reached beyond catastrophic levels, with nearly half the population facing acute hunger, while thousands are displaced due to armed groups/gangs. Solutions are scarce, and hope feels dangerously fleeting—but the Haitian people’s resilience endures, even as they navigate these intersecting injustices.
Alongside these numerous issues currently going on in Haiti, I must also shed light on Haitians abroad. Since 2021, the U.S. has accelerated the forced return of Haitian migrants—using pandemic-era Title 42 expulsions and the sudden rollback of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and “humanitarian parole” pathways. Over 20,000 Haitians have been deported home under these policies since President Biden took office. In January 2025, the administration abruptly ended the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) parole program thus closing a legal route for roughly 214,000 Haitians and leaving them vulnerable to removal. Meanwhile, DHS plans to strip TPS from over 500,000 Haitian nationals by August 2025, a move that will force people back into the very violence and instability they fled. These deportations compound Haiti’s crises, shattering families, deepening trauma, and echoing the extraction and abandonment that have defined its history.
Memory, Inheritance, and Resistance
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” We are witnessing genocide in real time. Bodies are buried in rubble before they’re even given names. Children become statistics before they’re allowed to dream. Yet still, we scroll, repost, argue, or say nothing at all. As Americans, our administration’s complicity stains the very ground we walk on. It seeps into the soles of our feet, and staining our hands with blood.
We’ve seen artists, students, journalists, and everyday people silenced. Their tongues caught by the cat we never agreed to feed. Even within the face of censorship, surveillance, and suppression, we’ve also seen something greater: resilience. We’ve seen truth carried through chants, protests, poetry, and witness. Together, we have moved mountains before. We will do it again.
In both Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, children have become sacrificial lambs in a world built on resource extraction, militarization, and greed. Bombs drop in Gaza as casually as minerals are mined in the Congo. The violence may differ in form, but not in impact. In both places, the future is being targeted through its youngest.
In a world that benefits from our forgetting, we must choose to remember.
To remember is to resist. To witness is to honor. To speak even when silenced is to remain human.
Trauma of Transgression
Ryan Cosbert 'Epigenetics No.7' Anguish and Distress, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
Diptych; 36×100 inches (36 x 50 inches each)
Here is where Epigenetics enters the conversation—not as metaphor, but as scientific and spiritual truth. Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression that occur without alterations to the DNA sequence itself. It involves modifications to DNA and associated proteins that can influence how genes are turned on or off, affecting traits and even diseases. These changes are often influenced by environmental factors and can be passed down through generations. The trauma witnessed by these children, men, and women are not theirs alone. It embeds itself into the body, into the DNA. It reshapes the nervous system, heightens the senses, prepares them for a world that as of now offers no peace. These experiences of grief, of fear, and of loss do not end with the generation that suffers them. They are inherited. Passed down in the blood like memory.
Of the four places I’ve named Congo, Sudan, Haiti, and Palestine—Palestine has held the world’s attention in a way the others have not. Images of its destruction, voices of its people, and waves of global protest have reached timelines, campuses, and streets across the globe. I feel a responsibility to lift up the cries that have not yet reverberated as widely alongside the one that has. There are lands just as bloodied, just as resilient, whose stories remain buried beneath silence. We must ask why. Why is the suffering of some met with global outrage, while the devastation in places like Congo, Sudan, and Haiti slips by unnoticed? Why are Black lives in these regions not amplified with the same urgency?
This is not to diminish the pain of one people, but to interrogate the systems that decide whose pain is visible and whose is forgotten. Anti-Blackness is global. It is embedded in the legacy of colonization, in the media’s gaze, in the economic structures that continue to extract from Black and Indigenous lands while ignoring the bodies left behind.
To remember is not enough: we must interrogate why some lives command our outrage while others fade into the margins, why anti-Blackness still dictates whose pain we honor. My hope—in both this writing and in What Remains, What Rises—is to turn that gaze, to elevate buried stories, and to transform witness into responsibility. True solidarity demands that our remembrance be louder than our indifference, and our collective action deeper than our silence.
Thank you for reading. Until next time.
With much love,
Ryan Cosbert