Becoming Blackfish

“there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt”

(Lorde, 1984, p 39)

Preamble:

if the performativity of interface is organized in in accordance with a cultural myth, where; how do we begin (re)writing it’s stories?

I will not claim to have the answer to this question, but this specific project began with reading the stories of others. This originally began with me exploring the fictive pieces by science and technology scholars like Bruno Latour (1996) and Donna Haraway (2016). And while useful, they weren’t what I was looking for. The stories, the words, the perspectives I needed to encounter to address the problem of interface as a cartesian-colonial habit, needed to come explicitly from the absences, silences, gaps, of invisible nonbeing. But this also became tricky because I cant and wont speak for these subjects or experiences, I can only accountably & responsibly attend to my own position and agency; finding commonality in wounds or dreams where there are ones; to speculate about these concepts, these dynamics, takes care—so how to build a bridge?

Fiction, poetics, or art based practice, offers a methodological entry point into the complex social problems we face as a collective society  not constrained or delimited by normative research conventions, of which, are often sterilized of appeals to intimacy, emotion, and human connection. It allowed me to dive headfirst into subjects sidestepped or silenced by the academy and actively work to fill the gap that often persists between research and reality. In the school of communication at SFU in 2017, none of my required MA coursework engaged concepts of race, gender, or colonialism on their own accord. Criticality was defined, nearly exclusively, through the lens of European whiteness. And when faculty was pressed to weigh in on these issues as pedagogical mentors, they were not prepared to adequately respond, nor did many feel like they ought to. My experience was that senior faculty, when prompted by students about the role of race or colonialism in the history communication theory or gender and race in the philosophy of technology— framed all of these things as outside of the scope of course instruction and discussion. This is what happens when we maintain the gap between research and reality. This is what neoliberal specialization does to “criticality”. It has taken months of uprisings and the mass proliferation of images of violence to even begin conversations about this colonial habit within the academy. And in all honesty, despite solidarity statements, my faith in an organized, tactful, and timely response to the demands of our moment by the administration and leadership is not high.


It was black student activists, for example, whom mobilized and actively held administrations accountable for changing racist varsity athletics team name—then received no recognition for their efforts by SFU president Andrew Petter; or keeping things local, remind ourselves of SFU’s refusal to grant space through the literal eviction of the black student society SOCA from their long term community space on campus in 2018. Likewise, we could point towards the recent resignation of the head of UBC’s board of Governors Michael Korenberg, after public backlash over his liking of “regressive” tweets that likened BLM to Nazi brownshirts. As the work of Black Canadian Studies Scholar Charmaine Nelson has laboured to show, liberal institutions of Canada have been regressive, hostile, and oppressive because they have rendered issues of colonialism (slavery, racism, and sexism) to the periphery if not all together absent. Safely confined in “critical” race, gender or first nation studies coursework, where the mentorship and moral center of the academy can remain distanced and disassociated from the implications of such research for reality and embodied practice.


 Hence, this project never waited for permission to unlearn these habits, it created the space for decolonial critical practice because it was offered none; because the performance of change does not take place solely through the staging of a scene or a conversation, the performance of change requires actors. So in an effort to collapse the master’s house and find the” sustenance to act where there are no charts.”, I do my best to create space for other ways of knowing and contributions to knowledge to take precedent: by breaking the master’s rules and refusing his conventions and standards of practice. There are and were undoubtedly missteps made throughout this process. I invite those mistakes to become a part of my learning, however uncomfortable, and know that this process is both never complete and rife with potholes. thus, this project is not a thesis statement, but an offering, an invitation, a gesture: towards what kinds of practices might be necessary to think deeply about what we need to change in order to truly become accountable to the coloniality of academic spaces and responsibly engage in decolonial research practice. It is partial, at times likely even problematic, in it's attempt.


During the process of developing stories, when I would start to think from within concepts the most expressive and accessible means to engage a subject like diffractive difference or the coloniality of the screen, was initially poetics. Poetics is an embodied form of writing that gets at those sticky ineffable effects of experience that often evade more conventional forms of writing. Every story emerged first from poetic processing. Fictionalizing had multiple stages. It took place on my blog because I could format the stories literally alongside the literature and writers that inspired or informed them. This allowed me to hold the complexity of certain concepts, experiences, and issues together while I processed them. It also allowed me to decenter my own words and trouble the authority of authorship—I am not the authority on these subjects, I am the learner—I am inviting you to join in, to witness my learning process. It is imperfect labour, as all learning truly is.


All of this, chaotic and disorienting, is intended to allow additional layers of meaning to circulate by allowing readers to recognize and determine their own textual resonances. It is also very much an attempt at capturing the messy, contradictory, interiority of experiential processing, unlearning habits, and transformative processes: the threaded fiction, literature, theory, and poetics speaks to the layers of story that perforate our identities and influence how we make sense of our world. Rather than telling or trying to explicate this, I invite readers to experience it for themselves .


The subtext or “autocontext” of the stories offer additional contemplations or layers of meaning to the primary threads. All of which were added after primary story development. They are a means of reaching through the wound to connect: coming to understand myself and the world through the experience of others. These texts are, then, necessarily, unfinished and likely rife with potential stumbles. These texts are flawed, incomplete, and messy. Though I have organized each bloc of text in ways I hope produce salience, remember reader: disorientation guided this process and you will no doubt have questions--this text was always meant to be an offering for additional discussion.

On Anzaldua, Coyolxuahqui, and Supernaturalism

This project takes concepts of queer disorientation, diffracted difference, and reads and writes them through an Anzalduan Autofiction. Each section of Blackfish Rising is a stage of Anzaldua’s ‘path of conocimiento’, though Anzaldua presents her aesthetic through 7 stages, I have blurred several of her phases and presented them here as four diffracted narratives with a situating README.TXT document and hyperlinked subtext. I explore these concepts from within my own position within the diffraction pattern. This means I do not avoid or erase my experience but foreground it as a means of better understanding the ways ego conquiro operates through my identity and filters my encounters with the world. It also means I read narratives of experience by those marginalized, disenabled, or un-visible within the diffraction pattern through my own to better understand and learn from the resonances and affordances, absence and presence, of epistemic difference. Or, put another way: some things in order to be taught, need to be felt. For me this mean contending with the shadow of difference in my life. Contending with whiteness, with gender, with ancestors, with difference meant I walk asking[2]: how did I get here? How will I bear witness, yield responsibility to my inheritance? How will I interface something like change within myself?

I chose Anzaldua’s reading of Coyolxuahqui as a narrative model with which to nest this fiction for several reasons: 1) Ultimately writing within a science fiction frame (Stephenson, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K Dick, Gibson) proved quite a struggle because most SF cannot engage the aforementioned gaps and ineffables because they still work within the Cartesian-Colonial habit. This is a point of which Wendy Chun gestures in Control and Freedom—in her chapter on Cyberpunk and Orienting the Future, illustrating the relationship between the rise of the internet and cyberpunk, where the internet as racial utopia attempts to eradicate conflict and antagonism by reconfiguring it so that domination stems from one’s very body, to produce cyberspace an othering space (2006, 158). Hence, fictionalizing from this framework only serves to extend the narrative of cyberspace as a new colonial frontier and has very little to offer decolonial relations to difference[3]. I grappled with this for awhile trying to develop something that worked. I spent an entire summer writing stories, but I found that the writing I was doing was very hard to work into an SF narrative. What’s more I began to feel like I was just rearticulating the problem with similar tropes. Mirroring instead of depositioning the binary. Which is why I turned to Gloria Anzaldua, supernaturalism and “magical realism” as these provided my creative process a whole new set of compositional frameworks and tools, and more pointedly to the aims of this project, began from the place that really engages writing as a process that transforms, and deals directly with space and identity.

2) Anchoring this creative process within a reading of an Aztec mythology allowed me to theorize about identity and transformation through an epistemology that challenges coloniality—it allowed me to disavow the authority of the imperial shutter. The form of cognitive relationality brought about by this epistemology created a liminal space hospitable to theories of transformation or change, regeneration, healing, and decolonial embodiment—hence, Coyolxuahqui’s grappling with the life and death of identity, with the nepantla rupturing of reality and disillusion of cultural center, offers not only a timely metaphor for contending with our current moment, but speaks to the ways precolonial, Indigenous, or other historically marginalized ways of knowing harbour crucial insights for dealing with implications of the colonial plunder. It teaches us to understand that life emerges from death, that disorientation can offer us new means of understanding, taking back, and accountably rewriting embodiment. But only if we move, we do, we create, we practice. This requires we rewire our notions of change to understand it will always require conflict. The idea is not to shy away from what lingers in shadows or what is complicated or messy to process: but step into the lessons it offers. There is no duality, no binarism, in a Coyolxuahqui transformative process.

On Autofiction

I chose autofiction due to the way interface of the 21st century proliferate and manipulate the self through affectively charged and deeply personal network and data practices. Social media requires us, willingly and unknowingly, to write-ourselves into these digital spaces, this expression or gesture of life-writing, is predetermined and formatted for us. We accept the terms of service, with little other option and limited language for articulating objections. We subject ourselves, against our better interests, to the embodied effects of “living” within these digital spaces. Formatted as human capital within interface, we are measured, modulated, segregated, enraged, captured, “normalized” and “cleaned”, sold, and redistributed once again; Fed back to ourselves for additional hedging and fitting, sharpening the edges of sameness. This process habituates our bodies to act in accordance with the screen’s demands, to think in accordance with its hierarchy of principles. Autofiction allows me to both grapple with the internalized effects of this interface process, as well as, take back authorship, reformat and reconfigure—rewrite, this experience.

On epistemic location:

I have a fairly hybrid, dime-a-dozen north American background, which is to say I grew up working-class/working-poor in the United States. I am the daughter of an Irish-Swedish-English mother and a Mexican-American father—which left me somewhere in between but never fully apart of American whiteness and Mexican-American/Mexican culture. It can be tempting to label this as outside of typical “American” identity except I think this greyness is increasingly more commonplace, or complex—depending on how you choose to observe it—and revealing, nonetheless, of the indeterminate center of American statistics and cultural complacency.

In some senses somewhat residual, indeterminate or contradictory: I am white but Mexican; assigned female at birth but not a woman; both my gender and sexuality are fluid, multiple. As a westerner and a white person, my position yields definite ignorance’s, privileges, violences, and biases that inherently oppress Black, Brown, and Indigenous persons globally and demands accountability. I am certain that there are those who will read this and think I have utterly failed at this, rolling their eyes in frustration with this entire project and perspective. There are others who will read this and claim with belligerent confidence that I have. These contradictions and points of contention mark the moment in history we find ourselves and I do not seek to resolve them nor am I beyond paradox, complicity, or harm.

Additionally, I grew up millennial: my generational development was marked by the cognitive and imaginative expansion offered by the internet; watching interface become an ever more invasive and determining force in my social encounters and experience. At once, none of these things define my identity, and yet, all of them do. So I try my best to hold all of these things together-apart as a I write from the subject position of a graduate student in North America, studying the affects of interface and difference in the shifting cultural relations of a post-digital society.

In preparation for fictionalizing I read the science fiction of: Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Neil Stephenson, Stanislaw Lem, and Philip K Dick. I also read the words of Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Rita Wong, Fred Wah, Leanne Betasomasake Simpson, Alicia Elliot, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tanya Talaga, Toni Morrison, Malcolm X and Ocean Vuong. Additionally, I read and learned about the life of trees and fungi, hallucinogenics, Buddhism, quantum field theory, Tsawalk, and love; as well as the ethnographic accounts of Jacqui Alexander and Nancy Sheper Hughes. I drew on higher education suggestions and tool kits provided by the Decolonial Futures Collective[5], and two brilliant fiction based workshops led by Alexandra Juhasz and Gillian Russell at the Digital Democracies Conference in 2019. This fiction owes a great deal to Karen Barad and Vanessa Andreotti specifically, with regards to discussion they provided at Karen’s seminar at UBC March of 2018—without which I would have never become undone. Lastly, it centers the experience of Indigenous led resistance at Standing Rock—whom changed everything.

Blackfish Rising,

is the spirit guiding my creative writing; the spirit of the story. My naguala but also, like Anzaldua, an embodiment of nepantlera, of a threshold spirit that manifests pathways for change. Blackfish Rising is about transformation, personal and collective knowledge and growth; Blackfish is about bearing witness and becoming the bridge for change as we dive deep into what is unknown, murky, disorienting about both. Blackfish is about embracing complexity, contradiction, dark and light, and coming to understand the depths of being within the world. I alternate hailing for Blackfish and Nepantlera interchangeably throughout the stories, and in the final stage of conocimiento a connection between spirit, chamaneria, blackfish, and our natural relation to the world makes itself known.

Manic Millennial(Z): the nepantla generation,

articulates the experience of coming of age in an era of interface; the experience of seeing and being within a nepantla. This story is more precisely addressing North American’s roughly between the ages of 20-40, with emphasis on the disillusion and disorientation brought about by growing up amidst the contradiction of a globalized promise and threat, as nepantla youth. In particular it attempts to highlight the dynamics of a cognitive development marked by the emergence of the world wide web and internet mediated communication: the explosion of social relations and societal shifts interface ripped across the world; but also the ways we internalize the struggle against the invasion of our private worlds and reification of experience. It draws attention to how these changes stimulated a wave of global civil uprisings (led by youth and students) that indicate a persistent wailing, an intuitive yearning and reaching for a different kind of world.

Bullethead: Or La Guera of the Mexican Dogs,

is a stage of desconocimiento. In this section I am working through my relationship to my ancestors, difference, the effects of colonization and my relationship to race within my family, and thus subsequently, white privilege. The thread regarding Maternal Solutions is a fictionalization of my relationship to whiteness. The 1/4th of a Person subtext is a meditation on navigating the greyness of racial hybridity, and the plot line of a drug induced hallucination is a play on the role of ego and disorientation in rendering these experiences legible. More profoundly, Bullethead is about contending with ignorance, shadows, fear, and the coloniality of selfhood and difference—in it’s close it is a highlighting of how fiction, story both frees and cages us.

Flight of the Portuguese Sparrow,

is about coming to terms with colonial trauma (or memory) and decolonizing relations (or love). It is the shedding of a previous selfhood to make room for the first stage of becoming Blackfish: a meditation on the experience of change brought about by love. FPS is also about contending with the way coloniality impedes on all of our most intimate relationships and experiences, polluting and delimiting our capacity to care for and give to one another and ourselves. It centers the idea that coloniality perverts one of the most fundamental relations to being within and of the world: giving. Coloniality is about taking, is about possession, and because of this it has taught us to hate and hence, empty us, of ourselves. Consider when reading that the entire left hand column, though written as if speaking to both a partner and my mother, I am simultaneously and explicitly writing to and dialoguing with myself.

Not a Woman but a Shaman,

is about becoming the bridge, healing, and languages for cultural regeneration and social change.. It works to solidify a loose understanding of “our-self” or collective-identity through narratives that speak of trees, water, and waves. It is a meditation on recognizing ourselves as water, not the wave; or, understanding our natural capacity for love and transformation. Most importantly, it ties this state to our ability to recognize the significance of our own performances in the world and dreaming as a collective task we must engage in order to change.

NOTES:

[1] Interactive iterations of such methods might also allow readers to contribute and make their own additions.

[2] Walsh write about how in order to move and think within; open up and extend, fissures and cracks requires considerations and reflections of our own explicit locations (our cognizance and participation) with which, we “act and move within, from, and with respect to the cracks” (83); it means lessons, “in humility, displacing, and decentering what I thought I knew, how I thought I knew it” and confronting assumptions. To walk asking, writes Walsh, is a part of the decolonial and pedagogical weave, of a decolonial pedagogy rising: “making itself and becoming, opening and extending cracks and fissures in the dominant world and, at the same time, contributing to the building of a world—of worlds-muy otro(s)” (IBID 88). It is an engaged pedagogy, that emphasizes well-being, and healing and is “constructed in, resistance and opposition, as well as in insurgence, affirmation, and re-existence (as re-humanization), in imagining and building a different world” (ibid).

[3] I think it is important to note a few things here: writers such as Octavia Butler and Ted Chiang challenge and breathe new life into the SF genre, and this work is deeply marked by their uniquely resonating capacity to express shared human conditions and their potentialities with loving, critical curiosity. However, often indigenous and black and other POC science fiction writers are categorized as slipstream, “magical realism”, or indigenous- afro-futurism writers. This transgression of genre is telling and timely. Because the focus for this stage of the project was understanding epistemic difference, I needed to begin with reading about the effects of coloniality, within myself and those rendered un-visible by the cartesian-colonial habit. Further stages of this research would more rigorously engage the aforementioned bodies of work by black and indigenous writers in the area of slipstream, and indigenous- or afro futurisms, as such epistemologies open up our capacity to imagine and dream about the world from a de- or pre-colonial perspective, and perhaps most crucially, offer transformative speculative, future oriented lenses with which to render something like justice in a shared world. Put another way, it will engage with these perspectives beyond the wound, to as it were, other potential worlds.

[4] E Richard Atleo’s reading of the theory of Tsawalk “ Nuu-chah-nulth origin stories and traditional Nuu-chah-nulth life ways and experience indicate that the basic character of creation is a unity expressed as heshook-ish tsawalk (everything is one). This unity of existence does not mean that individuals are denied a separate existence; on the contrary, individualism is a very strong value. Heshook-ish tsawalk is a matter of the first principles laid out in the original design of creation. The creator and creation are one.” (2004 p117); Tsawalk, Atleo writes: “ assumes the unity of creation irrespective of any of contemporary society’s contradictions…They came to understand the value of the individual without necessarily undermining the value of the group. They understood the value in life and the value in death, the value in love and the value in pain.” (2004, p133)

[5] the HEADS UP Checklist (Andreotti 2012), but was also emboldened by social cartographies (Andreotti 2016) and pedagogical experiments featured here: https://decolonialfutures.net/project-type/pedagogical-experiments/, like pedagogy of attunement and Hummingbird. (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, n. d.) Future iterations of this project would include deeper readings of Decolonial Futures Collective projects (and their associative educational paradigm) through the critical design practices and approach offered by these workshops and scholars. Both speak directly to the aims and curiosities of this offering.

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