An Acknowledgment; foreword
I want to begin by centering both bodily and intellectual presence within the space this text was written. This work took place on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), sq̓əc̓iy̓aɁɬ təməxʷ (Katzie), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), qiqéyt (Qayqayt), Semiahmoo, and sc̓əwaθən (Tsawwassen) nations. As a settler who over the last 3 years has been deeply cared for by this land, who was loved on in times of need by the trees, the mountains, the waters; in ways that leave me at a loss for words, to these nations, to these peoples, I want to express not only my gratitude but my love for you. As defenders of the land indigenous leadership and indigenous youth across turtle island have continued to hold the line against colonial regimes of power, greed and environmental destruction.
We as students, faculty, researchers, staff, of a colonial institution atop stolen land, as purveyors of knowledge and scientific practice; that has been leveraged to justify things like biological racism and sexism, dispossession, residential schools, and segregation, and as occupants of a position of extreme privilege and power: we must become accountable to this violence. We are not absolved from the wrongdoings of these pursuits. Its our job to dismantle the regimes that perpetuate them. We need to show up for the communities we share this space with. We need to show up for future generations and for our collective health.
Land acknowledgements are not an excuse to disengage our bodies from this space, but a call to bring ourselves into it.
To honor it. To become intimate with the ways indigenous sovereignty also means a commitment to indigenous knowledge, indigenous culture and indigenous futures. It means we work the insights of this knowledge, and the responsibility to this colonial inheritance into our practices. It means we no longer relegate black and indigenous knowledge into niches in the academy, segregated under the veil of specialization, distanced and disassociated from the moral center of its praxis. But rather rigorously and honorably engage with the implications of these insights for reality and embodied practice.
Because the thing is, the culture here destroys you. The hierarchal structure of the academy has its reasons, but it comes with a certain dehumanization and violence: a pitting of humans needs against competitive structures of productivity, precarity, and scarcity. The bodily dispositions and postures it fosters are cognitively and emotionally limiting. If we don’t recognize this culture as a by product of its colonial underpinnings even changes to curriculum content won’t fully resolve its violence.
Because you see, this habit inscribes colonial relations upon everything. One of the main experiences that came with graduate school was depression. Was complete and utter mental and emotional depletion. We can explain this away as a symptom of capitalism, but this dismissal, this denial of our experience as students as suffering emotionally, economically, physically and spiritually under the demands of academic culture is just another means of evading responsibility and endorsing coloniality’s formatting of modern education, identity and relations. It is just another means of silencing oppression.
This culture reproduces and extends the estrangement of those most oppressed by this system and teaches us to embody its principles. Its conditioning breathing at the backs of our necks, it renders our peers as competition, and filters our learning through a politics of possession. All around us we recognize the repercussions of colonial logic, and we do everything we can as young people to push back, to not buckle beneath its pressure, to not adopt its practices.
But we are drowning, suffocating in all of the ways we have been forced to swallow it.
Our inheritance: a 400 year daddy fueled massacre; a legacy of violence, destruction, and domination. its original trauma made again and again and again across the world until we've basically destroyed all we hold most in common; till we've destroyed the very humanity within ourselves.
So we must ask ourselves, in all our acknowledgement and paternal gesturing; in all our avoidance of our own internalized colonial ills: how have we come to foreclose, to impose limits on our own capacity for empathy, for love, for knowledge? For giving and caring for each other and ourselves.
The reality is we all need to sit within this moment and allow its ugliness and trauma to stretch us beyond what is comfortable. We have to do things we have been told we cannot do or influenced, coerced, or forced to set aside or neglect. We have to leave behind ways of life, ways of learning that are harm inducing and destructive to our collective health. We have to sit with the discomfort we have trained ourselves to avoid, resist or suppress. Because, a significant amount of the work we need to do as settlers rests on our capacity to become intimate with the harm we do. Because this isn’t some external imposition of force isolated within the power of the state, the colonial habit is deeply personal. This harm is one done to ourselves and at the detriment of our potential. And the truth is in its current organization, the university is in no way shape or form hospitable to processing this shared cultural trauma—and we have centuries worth of work to do.
It won’t happen if we continue to foster environments that are incompatible with the contours of human experience. It won’t happen if we don’t create spaces for working through, not around, this kind if existential grief and pain. to deny the urgency of this need, to insist on suppressing or cementing over it, will only result in the continuation of violence and the extension of patterns of harm. Institutional orthodoxy is premised on whiteness. It is premised on colonialism. Our identities and our society are interfaced by this history at every level. And its privileges are nothing if not violently naïve about the illusion of things like safety or security and destructive in what relations it endorses and upholds by design.
And history is calling on us to know each other differently. To be differently. The colonial interface is not inevitable, we can dismantle it. But in order to understand ourselves as the interface for change, we must first begin to cultivate creative practices for bringing the world and others, into our-self. This means a return to bodies and the human condition. This means becoming intimate with resonances of ego conquiro within ourselves and developing robust practices for reprogramming its postures and dispositions. So, I have very much been looking forward to sharing this with you, as rather than speak about or at this call, this project has sought to be this work, to practice it.
Our orientations toward knowledge and knowledge making, that which interfaces our experience within the world; which “bends time and illusions of self”; the visceral and yet imperceptible; the invisibly visible, but felt—is where and how we begin, to verse, to move, to learn, to do and be differently. This project has concerned itself with the way representational politics bracket away experiences of difference and de-couple epistemology, how we know, from ontology, what we do and practice. It has concerned itself with the relationship between form and content. The space in between processes and people, of enactment.
One of the things I hope this offering provides, is a means of critically and creatively becoming accountable to our colonial inheritance. Our ability to position and understand ourselves, within this system is the first step to healing and discontinuing practices within the institution that extend its violence. We harbor and enact the colonial habit. We live inside its narrative. Its resonances mark our being; our bodies; our minds. it pollutes and delimits who we think we are; and what kinds of world we can see, enact and imagine.
So, this project has walked-asking: what are we resisting? And what limitations are these resistances imposing? What must we confront or let go; what fear, pain and grief must we pass through—in order to become more accountable to our settler-colonial inheritance? How do we begin to interface something like decoloniality? And how might the language for creativity offer us a language for healing, for reconfiguring horizons, for expanding our relations and our imaginations, for rising?
I took a lot of risks with this project. It is my hope that I mediated these risks with enough care, humility, and love throughout. I hold myself open, ready to bear the responsibility of these risks because it is necessary; because change demands risk and growth can be deeply uncomfortable. And, because being a human in the society we live in is complicated. Its unsettling and destabilizing because we have reached this point in our technological development where we can no longer obscure the fallacy of singular historical narratives, we can point and wail and rage over the violences of inequality, greed, and production. But when the infrastructures and imaginaries we are implicated in enforce this logic against our will through obscured automated processes, we hardly recognize ourselves as enacting them.
This was really what drew me to the concept of interface and the notion of performativity or enactment. Because of the ways I could feel interface reaching into myself and reformatting everyday life in ways that were deeply unsettling and discomforting. So, this project began from an interest in how we might design interface, access and translate information; communicate differently. If interface technologies are premised on a colonial imaginary that is polarizing, violent and oppressive—if they format and reproduce this by design, what other imaginaries or aesthetics ought we turn to disrupt or deposition its narrative. More fundamentally, if we are to understand ourselves as implicated by coloniality, as coerced into its performance, what can we learn from the ways of being, the experiences of difference, that coloniality denies or absents.
Disorienting the Threshold, Diffracting Difference
This project became concerned with how we address the harm of the colonial habit as settlers through several concepts that produce relations more hospitable to decolonial relations of difference. My methods for exploring: a theory of disorientation provided by queer phenomenology and the notion of diffracted difference provided by quantum theories of entanglement. So, the work of Sarah Ahmed (2006) and Karen Barad respectively (2007).
Disorientation is super interesting because we tend to be averse to it. It frustrates and rattles us. Shakes and ruptures our routine, sense of direction. Certainly, we can all relate to the ways COVID-19 has had this affect on us. The way it has stripped us of senses of normalcy and produced a sort of gaping unknown that we all have had to contend with. But its also offered us a moment of pause and stillness. To think through what we habitually participate in. the combination of these effects has caused many of us to look down for the first time to realize the ground we thought was there never really existed. I think this is why we’re also seeing this sort of uptick in conspiracy or new religion. Desperate to reground, for meaning, for a story, for something we can attach ourselves to. We have sort of come to this edge of knowing, edge of a world that we were pretty sure was all there was to exist within, and so we reach back out for it out of habit. But safety and security are only an illusion. There was never ground. That was a fiction. Just a habit. Not definitive rules or positions. To live is to change, not remain the same. So, the discomfort we have felt, is disorientation. Is a kind of suspendedness. And as we have seen, disorientation can produce both freedom and madness. Disorientation in this sense also allows us to let go of control and be present. To reject the violence, the impositions of reality that once dictated our presence.
What this work showed me, was that disorientation when interfaced through creative practices, is a perspective shift that invites curiosity and allows us to not only see reality differently, but enact upon it in ways we wouldn’t otherwise, to ask questions; fumble into the darker more obscure corners of our minds, stretching our hands along the walls of our consciousness. It teaches us to hold ourselves open to sensation, positive and negative. It fine tunes our senses. Disorientation when didactively engaged and sustained through something like fictionalized performance or writing practice, helps us pick up on the resonances we miss when we are habituated into “normative” currents of colonial inertia.
And diffraction? Diffraction is about affectedness.
We can conceptualize this through a sense of the body as containing an infinite and every-changing degree of difference. This difference is connected to your inherited position or orientation within social reality but is also enacted through your everyday behaviors and daily exchanges and habits. We affect upon the world from the second we wake up every day. This can be understood in one sense from things like our consumer choices, but more pointedly and profoundly I like to position this as how we move through, encounter, and enact upon the world everyday. So, whether we smile at our bus driver or rush into the office meeting breathless; whether we shared a laugh with the barista who made our coffee or remained immersed, during the transaction, in our own thoughts and head. How we choose to greet or not greet strangers we pass during our commute, how we receive or don’t receive others as we move through space are all quantum levels of affection that shape and dictate how we experience the world.
As you move through space your difference, diffracts upon the world. You affect everything and likewise all else affects upon you differentially. So, diffraction is about the entangled and relational patterns of difference, it is about interconnected affectedness. It figures the self as a multiplicity. It positions us as actors within a shared ecosystem as already shot through with each other through our necessary interdependence. When we understand subjectivity, ourselves, being human, as being necessarily accountable to the entangled materializations in the world we are apart of this helps us begin to unlearn and reconfigure out position within colonial systems. As well as, understand the implications of whether we do or don’t do in-difference. Its about reciprocity and accountability in ever changing contexts and conditions.
The colonial matrix of power is only able to understand large scale differences, to reduce complexity. But we are so much more than this. Infinitely more. When we find concerted kinds of affectedness we facilitate form, habit[1]. So, diffraction is our own bodily performance as we move through space and the ways it resonates or imposes, opens or delimits space for ourselves and others. It is always reciprocal; the fundamental act of giving to one another we are perpetually implicated in. How we orient ourselves to each other and the world dictates our individual and collective identity formation; as we mark the world, the world marks us.
I applied diffraction and disorientation through fiction.
One of the things fiction allowed me to do was to make the link between what interface systems do and what kinds of logic and values are embedded within them. But also, it brought a means of bringing the world, the experiences of difference, into myself. A means of enacting diffractedness. As a settler and a white person, I do not and will not ever have a full understanding of the depths of coloniality’s violence and harm because my body does not carry those memories or encounter the world through that experience of difference. So, I cannot and will not speak from or for that experience.
But reading and writing literature and story that puts us in the position of those most oppressed and affected by colonial systems de-orients us from reality in way that is educatively valuable: it takes us up out of our habituated positions and privilege to help us develop adequate understandings of the social world we live in; it better equips us to relate to, work with, and support one another; to become accountable to the marks we leave upon matter and each other. It helps us develop plural ways of being and relating within the world that can expand our capacity to feel; to imagine; to understand our-self and the ways our liberation and future worlds, is tied up and within each other.
I chose autofiction due to the way interface of the 21st century proliferate and manipulate the self through emotionally 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 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. 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.
Additionally, everything about life systems on earth tells us that we demand a set of relations much more complex than what is offered by current colonial or imperial fictions. So, in this sense, for this project, fiction is only as good as the worlds it opens up, not reproduces. It because of this that, the narrative aesthetic I chose to work through for this is:
Gloria Anzaldúa’s reading of the Aztec myth Coyolxāuhqui.
Anzaldúa’s work begins from the position that writing is a transformative process. It changes you. It grapples directly with space and identity. Anzaldúa meant for her work to provide as means for other women of color to give story to who they are within political structures and how they affect their bodies. Importantly, I draw on this model not to align my struggle with or appropriate Anzaldúa’s nor anyone else’s. But specifically, due to the way her frameworks and pedagogy also offer a means for me to contend with the resonances of ego conquiro within me, a means of contending with both individual and collective shadows as they present in my experience of difference. It allowed me to speak story; to touch others with the reality I was encountering which was, intimate, unsettling, disorienting and deeply didactive.
Anzaldúa’s reading of Coyolxāuhqui, is ultimately about identity formation and transformation, about embracing change and creativity as fundamental. It performs diffraction, as ongoing stage of positioning and depositioning the self. This process is demanding, difficult, and never fully accomplished. So, I took these two concepts of disorientation and diffraction. and read them through an Anzaldúan autofiction, through the Coyolxāuhqui imperative or path of conocimiento Anzaldúa describes in her work in Light in the Dark.
Anzaldúa asserts that the seven stages on the path of conocimiento are never fully completed but perpetually enacted. They also overlap and are often occur simultaneously. It is not a resolution but an iteratively unfolding space for healing and transforming. A process by which a dismembered body becomes re-membered. It is the rupture that destroys us, splinters reality and leaves us suspended above the pieces, but its also the act of creatively and intentionally putting those pieces back together.
The Blackfish Rising fictions that accompany this text are reflections of the various stages of this Coyolxāuhqui imperative, this path to conocimiento.
This journey in the text is guided by what I’ve called the Blackfish rising.
Because this process is not linear, stages of conocimiento are messy and overlapping back and forths of confronting shadows and imaginatively rewriting. The ability to stay open, to listen deeply, to move between forms and states, requires a certain acceptance of complexity and contradiction. An acceptance of change as both death and creation. Nepantlera’s understand that only by accepting ourselves as interface for change, as entangled relational movement and creative inertia, only then can we come into our power.
Holding space in this transition, this threshold is difficult. Its rattling. Its uncomfortable. But accepting the complexity, understanding the necessity of companions, of support, of a sense of connectedness that helps us travel through these stages helps us to embrace the multiplicities we contain within ourselves. Blackfish in this text are just such threshold beings and spirits. They are the nepantlera’s or walkers between worlds ruptured and splayed out before us in stages one and two of the path to conocimiento.
Stage One is the rupture or arrebato, what depositions us out our habitual orientations in the world, jerks us out of the habit, explodes the template. Stage Two is la nepantla, the libidinal space where we are in-between who we were before we encountered this perspective, and what comes after. It’s the point with which we are staring down at our fractured bodies and culture, our splintered reality, but not yet called into action. Nepantla is an iterative state experienced in-between all stages, it is the most recurring state on the path of conocimiento.
This is what I describe in Manic millennials: 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.
In Stage Three or Bullethead I move from nepantla to desconocimiento. The consciousness of darkness, the underworld, the depression, if nepantla is disorientation, desconocimientos is the regressive and self-preserving impulse to reground. It is the shadow beast within ourselves that lures or lulls us into isolatory feelings of guilt, shame, depression or despair, in order to avoid responsibility. But, shadows have things to teach us, discomfort is a message: poetics, creative enactment, teaches us how to be receptive.
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 myth both frees us and cages us. Subtext in this section unfolds contemplations on race, gender, and diffracted difference (where history= past/present/future). I weave stories of Mexican ancestors and friendships through the hardening of the Mexico/US border and US Imperialism through my experiences of the privileges and assimilatory demands of colonial whiteness.
Stage Four and Five take place in Flight of the Portuguese Sparrow. This stage is the call to action; the experience the catalyzes transformation. Its also the stage where we start putting coyolxaughqui together. We don’t necessarily reconcile so much as reconfigure our relationality to knowledge. Here too, FPS is about deep, dark pain. The kind that makes us avoid eye contact. That’s hard for us to look at. That kind that is a result of complete annihilation of humanity, of giving. So deep it triggers our defense and fight or flight responses. We hide from this pain we see in others because to do so would also bear witness to the resonances of this pain within ourselves.
FPS is also a meditation on the experience of change brought about by love in this context; and 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.
Not a Woman but a Shaman is about becoming the bridge, healing, and developing languages for cultural regeneration and social change through returning to natural systems. 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.
Stage 6 and 7 is this final story but also this entire work and the conversation and insights it offers those who encounter and engage with it. One of the outcomes of this project is how it has provided me a liberating relationship to language that is vitally necessary for both dismantling oppressive orientations and reviving and reconfiguring affectedness. It created the space for me to engage discomfort and better understand its resistances; and suggests we find equilibrium through motion, through enactment, through stepping into unknowns and embracing discomfort as a fundamental to relations of diffraction.
This project suggests a literacy we are desperately in need of is one that returns us to the human condition; a radical pedagogy centered on critical intimacy and emotional intelligence; one that provides us a means of attending to existential poverty; to the rupture and to the transition. An offering, it was meant to be an experience with and through others:
So, I hope you consider this an invitation, to step into the shadows; stay with the trouble; to reach through the wound to connect; to completely rupture and reconfigure your senses; May this offering help you too, identify ego conquiro’s resonances.
[1] What I describe in not a woman but a shaman as a wave or historical conditions.