For #BlackHistoryMonth 2025—in this case, the month of February, as well as the first week of march, in part because I missed February 1, but mostly because February is the shortest month of the year—I’m writing a post-a-day on the fediverse on Black writers that influenced me, including links to a short piece you can read in one sitting, and download links for at least one of their books.

I’m replicating these posts below as they appeared on my profile, and updating this page as the months unfold. All of the links should work, though some are not properly formatted yet, but will be by the end of this project.

Finally, this project is temporarily on hold as of February 9 but will return on February 16.

---

february 2: Octavia E. Butler

for today, february 2, i'm celebrating Octavia E. Butler, a writer of speculative fiction whose name i see more of each year, as we enter the time periods she wrote of, and discover that our reality parallels the narratives she created in her novels, especially those of the duology of Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).

Butler grew up in the 1950s and 60s in Pasadena, California, at a time when the area was dramatically more segregated than it is today (and it still very much is). she navigated dyslexia early on, and later got her AA in History from Pasadena City College. she often speaks in interviews of a pivotal experience that put her on her path toward writing:

The movie was called Devil Girl from Mars, and I saw it when I was about 12 years old, and it changed my life.... I had a series of revelations. The first was that 'Geez, I can write a better story than that.' And then I thought, 'Gee, anybody can write a better story than that.' And my third thought was the clincher: 'Somebody got paid for writing that awful story.' So I was off and writing, and a year later I was busy submitting terrible pieces of fiction to innocent magazines.

Butler kept copious journals in which she manifested a writerly life for herself, and much of what she wrote in them (all of which is available by appointment to explore at the Huntington Library in Pasadena; many excerpts available online) came true. she was the first science-fiction writer to receive the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Grant, and though none of her books were “bestsellers” in her lifetime, after renewed interest in her work throughout this century, in 2020, Parable of the Sower hit the bestseller list for the first time.

her books explore race, history, alienation, segregation and hierarchy, gender and sexuality, religion and spirituality, and much more. Kindred (1979), the tale of a Black woman writer in the 1970s (much like Butler) who is spontaneously thrust back in time to the early 1800s whenever her white, slave-owning ancestor's life needs saving, is still probably the best novel i've ever read, even as it is deeply disturbing and as much horror as sci-fi.

below, i've linked to what i believe is one of the last short stories she wrote, “The Book of Martha,” in which a Black woman writer (much like Butler) confronts an ever-changing manifestation of God with questions about life and purpose. it reveals a writer wrestling with extremely difficult questions about the role of creative work, and is a story i return to often.

read “The Book of Martha”

download PDF of Kindred (1979)

february 3: Stuart Hall

for today, february 3, i'm celebrating Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-British writer of academic works focusing on cultural analysis, sociology, race, power, colonialism, semiotics, representation, Marxist thought, and many other topics, and whose work i believe is more important today than ever in our increasingly media-saturated world. (also today is his birthday!)

we usually think of the ability to understand the many (and subtextual) meanings of the media we consume as “media literacy.” as a young person learning to be media literate, i'd begun to wonder why so much of the media i'd been exposed to was (sometimes openly, sometimes covertly) pro-imperial, pro-capitalist, white supremacist, cisheterosexist, ableist, etc., etc. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997)—edited by Hall and including a chapter by him called “The Work of Representation”—was the first book that gave me the answers i'd been looking for.

much of what you'll find it might seem obvious today: that there is a language of symbols, signs, and images that can be wielded in order to represent ideas, objects, or peoples, in ways that may or may not be accurate, and in ways that are necessarily structured by power. but to a young me, this was groundbreaking, and gave me the language i needed to challenge these expressions of (racist, capitalist, colonial, imperialist) power and thus better understand the world around me.

Hall's work in this area (semiotics) is only the tip of the iceberg of his vast and sprawling oeuvre, but it's the part i'm most familiar with, so below i'm linking to the “The Work of Representation” chapter from Representation, as well as 45-minute video lecture by Hall (along with transcript) that gives a broad overview of his approach.

watch “Representation and the Media”

download transcript of “Representation and the Media”

download PDF of “The Work of Representation”

february 4: June Jordan

for february 4, i'm celebrating June Jordan, a poet, writer, teacher, and all-around real one who lived her values as loudly as possible. a bisexual woman who dropped out of college after being asked to read not a single Black author, nor woman author, she is often thought of as an activist, though i would say the word does not do justice to her impact and legacy.

as has made the rounds online lately, Jordan was an outspoken champion of Palestinian liberation throughout her life, and was openly willing to confront amerikkkan imperialism and its genocidal proxy, israel, in her work. the famous line from “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” goes:

Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that paid for the bombs and the planes and the tanks that they used to massacre your family

i do think these lines are best read in context, and of course, this was only one of many of her poems on this topic. her staunch anti-zionism predictably limited her professional success, in ways recently charted—and contrasted against the trajectory of fellow writer Audre Lorde—in this long essay about the correspondence between them.

it's obvious in her work how much love she had and attention she gave to the Black people around her, even (or especially) those who didn't necessarily share Jordan's interests; “A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters” catches the speaker of the poem twirling difficult questions in their mind about the nature of genius, in the context of albert einstein and his supposedly endearing quirks, then unloads some of this onto an unsuspecting neighbor whose concerns are somewhere else entirely and whose stance on the matter ends up being as (or more) pithy and honest than Jordan's.

my favorite of her works, however, is a long piece titled “Poem about My Rights,” which i listened to her read for the first time last year via the audio recording available at the link below. it's a sprawling, kitchen-sink of a poem that seems to draw all of history (Jordan's and the world's) into itself, and more than that, it taught me how meaningful it can be to hear a poet read their work aloud, and has moved me to take the way in which i read my work aloud more seriously.

read and listen to “Poem about My Rights” here (audio recording available by clicking the speaker icon at top)

download PDF of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2012) [16 MB]

download PDF of her memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood (2000) [11 MB]

february 5: Tongo Eisen-Martin

for today, february 5, i'm celebrating Tongo Eisen-Martin, who describes himself as “an absolute product of every nook and cranny of San Francisco.” thus, it should be no surprise that he's currently the city's poet laureate. he's also an educator, known for creating the “We Charge Genocide Again!” curriculum (downloadable link at bottom) while teaching at Columbia, based on his mother Arlene Eisen's report on the police/state violence against/murder of Black Americans.

i wrote yesterday about how hearing June Jordan read her work aloud taught me about the critical role of the auditory in poetry; in my opinion, Tongo Eisen-Martin embodies this and then some. some describe his work as jazzy; to me his work really epitomizes “rhythm.” every single one of his lines is sharp, heavy, intimate, gripping, and often darkly comical, brilliantly insightful, or just plain surprising—or all three at the same time. he also does this wonderful thing with what i think of as mini-anaphoras: just two or three lines that start with the same word or clause, to wonderful, powerful effect.

i had the great pleasure of hearing him read through a livestream of Beyond Baroque's Southern California Poetry Festival (starts at 42:34), and what stunned me was that he didn't just read one or a handful of poems; he performed a mashup of what must have been a dozen different poems, collaging excerpts together into a 15-minute tour de force of explosive lines of inimitable profundity (and all while holding a baby in one hand lol).

because of this, it's hard for me to point to one favorite poem; i could isolate any one of his lines and spend as much time with it as i might spend with a single poem by another writer. i'd definitely recommend Blood on the Fog (2021), his entry into the legendary Pocket Poets series from City Lights Books; the final lines from “A Good Earth,” the first poem in the collection, comprise a mantra i return to over and over:

It's a simple matter this revolution thing To really lie to no one To keep nothing godlike

To write a poem for God

read that over and over again, in or out of the context of the rest of the poem (linked below). if poetry can be used to discover truths beyond the reach of other forms or mediums, i don't think there's anything more truthful in this world than those four lines.

listen to “M'ap Pale / A Good Earth (feat. Tongo Eisen-Martin)” by Zeke Nealy

read “A Good Earth” [note: it's spaced differently here than it is in Blood on the Fog]

download PDF of Blood on the Fog [1.1 MB]

download PDF of “We Charge Genocide Again!” [5.5 MB]

february 6: Saidiya Hartman

for today, february 6, i'm celebrating Saidiya Hartman, a Black woman writer and academic who grew up in New York, and, like Tongo Eisen-Martin, attended and teaches at Columbia University, and, like Octavia E. Butler, is also a recipient of the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Grant. but what i love about her work most may be that it betrays none of these things.

Hartman twists and breaks the academic mode/register so elegantly, it's easy to forget (and i think it's intended to be this way) that she is a product of the ivory tower and technically works from inside it. there are many other academics who bring influences from outside academia into their work, but to me, Hartman's work stands apart: it is diligent, rigorous, critical; raw, vulnerable, confessional; inventive, speculative, novelistic; never self-serving; somehow also anarchistic; demanding as hell; and, as far as i know, still inimitable.

i just started reading Scenes of Subjection (1997), where she confronts the limitations of the tools we (the West, academia) have at our disposal for understanding and historicizing slavery; and i had the brief pleasure of quasi-auditing some lectures on Lose Your Mother (2007), a memoiristic exploration of her family history—or lack thereof (her work often revolves around this gap between the violences and erasures that shape what can and cannot be known about the past).

but it's “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), a coda to Lose Your Mother in which she tries and intentionally fails to tie up a loose end from the book, and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) that exemplify the power of her approach (though her work constantly and beautifully builds on itself). the former work explores a Black female figure called “Venus,” omnipresent in the archives of slavery, and yet who turns out to be wholly unknowable, revealing the problem at the heart of archival work: whose archives are these really? (short answer: white people's.)

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments picks up on this question with another kind of answer: here is the speculative archive that she can and dares to create, from a deeply engaged counter-reading of archival materials about Black women and girls whose supposed errantry, Hartman shows, was a gesture towards liberation, and she peppers in critical reflections on her own role as archivist/academic/witness to both tender and explosive effect. in short, Hartman's work is potentially life-changing for those seeking a methodology for understanding the past that is attentive to one's present and insistent on a liberatory future.

download PDF of “Venus in Two Acts” (2008) [706 KB]

download PDF of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) [33 MB]

february 7: Fred Moten

for february 7, i'm celebrating Fred Moten, another academic and writer. born and raised in Las Vegas, Moten attended Harvard intending to study economics, but was suspended for a year after failing academically (he was apparently more focused on reading Chomsky and living his politics), during which time he worked as a janitor and read and wrote poetry, then returned to Harvard, where he met his future collaborator Stefano Harney—and the rest is history.

like so many of the writers in this series, Moten crosses genre lines with aplomb. he's as prolific a poet as he is a scholar, and like Hartman and Octavia E. Butler, he's also a recipient of the coveted MacArthur “Genius” award, though i think that, of the three, he might be most critical of the award's status and purpose.

i say this because of how i read The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), a lyrical treatise/manifesto co-written with Harney on a variety of topics, though the parts i remember best are about the corporatization of academia, the politics that facilitate this, and, most importantly, the reason the state is so deeply invested in it: the lure and vortex of academia may be the state's most successful strategy for defanging radicals and rebels and reconstituting them into something of a counterrevolutionary class of bureaucrats (i am very loosely paraphrasing lol).

beyond critique, however, Moten and Harney encourage the reader to—if they have or want to—attend anyways, but to, in the process, forge and foster an underground (the titular “undercommons”) diametrically opposed to the ivory tower—what it represents and produces—and to live in this underground, use it to rob academia of what it's worth, and redistribute that hoarded wealth of knowledge freely. it should be no surprise, then, that The Undercommons was immediately released for free upon publication.

but maybe none of this speaks to these ideas as well as Moten's poetry does, and so i leave off with this excerpt from “Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally”:

2.

and tear shit up. always a pleasure the banned deep brown of faces in the otherwise whack. the cruel disposed won’t stand

still. apparatus tear shit up and

always. you see they can’t get off when

they get off. some stateless folks spurn the pleasure they are driven

to be and strive against. man, hit me again.

read “Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally”

download PDF of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) [1.4 MB]

february 8: Lucille Clifton

for february 8, i'm celebrating Lucille Clifton, a poet and educator born and raised in New York, who lived out the end of her life in Baltimore, having been poet laureate of Maryland for six years in the early 1980s. she was also born with a genetic mutation that ran in her family called polydactyly, giving her an extra finger on each hand that were surgically removed during her childhood. i bring this up because of how this kind of absence—or, as i think she conceived of it, the ghostly presence of what seems absent—influenced her work.

i hesitate to call her poetry humble or straightforward even though it can appear that way in comparison to the showy or dense work of others, but she is simply not a kitchen-sink poet: her lines (often two or three words) and stanzas tend towards the short-and-sweet, and her poems (of which there are bajillions) are focused and are already spiraling to a close from the first line. (i deeply admire this, as someone who tends to bloviate, lol.)

whether it's because i'm not familiar enough with her ouevre or because she comes at politics slant, what i've read of her work feels to me intimate and personal—still political, but the politics of a loving correspondence rather than of a stirring speech or manifesto. “wishes for sons” indicts patriarchal masculinities by casting a spell of pain at those who perpetuate them; “sisters” cherishes the shared Black womanhood of Clifton and her sister and ends with the killer lines, “only where you sing / i poet.”; and “my dream about being white” pithily, elegantly rejects the idea of assimilation:

and i’m wearing white history but there’s no future in those clothes

the other part of her work i'm interested in wasn't really celebrated in her time, or else remains unpublished, according to this article about Clifton's spirit writing. Clifton was a “two-headed woman”—someone with access to another plane of existence, specifically that of ghosts, spirits, and the dead (hence the reference at the start to ghostly presences/absences). she, like me, relished automatic writing, and used it to tap into her past selves, to understand her corporeality not as fixed in her body, its color, its shape, its racialization, its gendering, but rather simply as one incarnation of many, inextricably entangled across space-time. a relevant excerpt from the article:

the once and future dead who learn they will be white men weep for their history. we call it rain.

read “far memory”

listen to “homage to my hips”

download PDF of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965 – 2010 (2012) [13.2 MB]

Independent publishing and archival

Drawing on forking practices in software development, sampling practices in audio production, my work with collage art, and the speculative archival work of Saidiya Hartman, I've been trying to develop new artistic forms more sensitive to the networked nature of our histories and futures. Enter incarnations: a literary form in which you rewrite a historical text and set it in a far future, and write it from the perspective of your future self. The form also functions as a strategy for intervening in processes of “copyright”-making by challenging traditional conventions of authorship and (self-)publishing. Finally, incarnations also fall under a new, umbrella genre of speculative writing I call autofabulation, conceived as an explicitly anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-oppressive artform intended to allow its practitioner to actively work towards liberation. This event will also include generative prompts that encourage participants to engage in their own forms of speculative archival work, including—but not limited to—writing their own incarnations.

Content/trigger warnings: Discussions of colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, capitalism, anthropological dehumanization, mental health (depression), death, and transitioning; brief references to parental abuse, parental death, illness (cancer), economic apartheid, torture, lynching, amputation, medically transitioning, and transphobia; oblique references to current U.S./world politics

---

Dear [REDACTED],

A week ago, I was certain what I would offer you in this space.

I've had the honor of teaching others about incarnations and autofabulation three times now: last summer, to creative nonfiction writers at a seminar hosted by Tin House, a small press and esteemed literary institution; and twice in the last few months during two virtual workshop series hosted by Relatively Queer, a small community of queer and trans creatives that I was invited to join as a co-facilitator after meeting one of the other co-facilitators in the Tin House seminar. They listened to me read an incarnation aloud during the seminar, and were compelled to correspond with me via e-mail about archival work, speculative writing, and the mechanisms of (neo)colonialism (among other topics), and soon I was formalizing what I'd developed around autofabulation into a workshop curriculum and presentation slides.

My original intention was simply present you with a slightly modified, more “tech-oriented” version of the materials I'd previously created, but a series of strange and unpredictable events this week has pushed me off this path and onto another one.

Bear with me, if you will.

More background: I was admitted to the Tin House seminar after submitting an unfinished draft of the second chapter of a book project written as a series of a letters to my younger self. I wrote the first chapter, and had the idea to turn it into a book project, after a publication reached out to solicit a piece from me, the first and only time this has happened to me since I began taking the work of writing professionally seriously. The editor who solicited the piece reached out because she had read an early draft of my forthcoming essay collection as a reader for one of the small presses to which I had submitted it; they didn't accept it, but another of their readers was the one who connected me to the small press that eventually did accept it for publication. The essay collection only came together in the first place because I took all of the writing I did in 2023, during the first year of my medical transition, and then assembled it into a little book, the idea being to use the sales from the book to fund mutual aid projects like the one I started in January 2023, Art, Strike!, which was essentially the catalyst for everything I wrote that year.

This is a lineage.

The connective tissue here (the line of this lineage) is one of tiny interactions. My publisher, tRaum Books, noted recently that they've never held an open submission period. Every book they've ever published has found them through one connection here or elsewhere in the vast and sprawling network of small connections people make online. My book is no exception. The correspondence I've had with tRaum's founder, Rysz, has produced some of the most impactful writing I've ever read and/or written; as is the case with my correspondence with alks, my former Art, Strike! co-editor, whom I met in a comment thread on a now-defunct, short-lived, and little-known microblogging platform; as is the case with some new correspondence that began this week on precisely the topics of this session with a relative stranger on the fediverse; as is the case with my connections to and with the Relatively Queer community; as is the unidirectional correspondence I've had with my younger self in the aforementioned epistolary essays.

As is, perhaps, the correspondence we are embarking on right now.

Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (2023 to 2025). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: Art, Strike! (mutual aid project); The Ecology of Art, Strike! (essay collection); Split/Lip Press tiered rejection (connects me to my publisher, tRaum Books); Under the Sun reaches out (essay solicitation); The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey's Anatomy, chapter two (unfinished draft); Tin House seminar; Relatively Queer (virtual workshop series); FluConf 2025.

---

exhortation

Draw a straight line across a blank page. What series of events brought you to this moment? What tiny interactions, online or otherwise, facilitated your ability to be present here? Who is part of your lineage? What else is that lineage comprised of? Mark these on the line with labeled dots. Go as far into your history as necessary to get as clear a sense as possible of how you got here. Honor momentous occasions. Honor mundane ones equally. How integral have small connections been to your journey through this life? How integral are they certain to be moving forward?

---

As a child and teenager, in order to escape a household rife with violence and abuse, I spent a tremendous amount of time in libraries. My favorite sections were those where books were for sale, usually for pennies, and often books you'd never find available for checking out (books that were out of print, wholly unpopular, self-published, or otherwise perceived to be relatively valueless). One of these was a writing textbook published sometime in the latter half of the 20th-century; I took it home with me and didn't crack it open for many years after, and only did when I was in my early 20's and facing a stubborn case of writer's block.

One of the chapters was about style; in order to get the writer thinking about what comprises style, it exhorted the reader of the textbook to take a passage written by another writer, and replace all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in it with nouns, verbs, and adjectives of their own. Everything else was to remain the same: the pronouns, the conjunctions, the structures of the sentences. The idea was to wear another writer's rhythm like a glove, to try it on for the length of a paragraph and see what it felt like. The author's style (their essence), the textbook argued, was not in the content of their writing, but in the unique ways in which they chose to present that content to the reader.

I tried it out for myself with a passage from a short story from my big blue The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (even then, a decade before admitting to myself I was a trans woman, I was always drawn to writing by women, and the main characters of my stories were always women, too).

Immediately, the writer's block vanished. Abandoning the passage I'd tried on like a glove, but remaining deeply inspired by it, I wrote and completed a short story for the first time in years. It was terrible, and I wouldn't show it to anyone even if you paid me, but I did finish it. And the exercise stayed with me.

Many years later, I began taking computer science classes at my local community college with the intention of minoring in the discipline once I transferred to a four-year university. I'd been playing with code since childhood, when my parents enrolled me in a small, free summer program at my elementary school that included curriculum on HTML programming; it was then that I built my first website, which sported nothing more than a menu for an imagined restaurant. I'd taken computer science classes in high school, part of the school's requirements for graduation, being a public science and technology magnet high to which I'd had to apply in a process not dissimilar in intensity to the process I'd go through again four years later, and then again many years after that, in order to make my way into higher ed. But it wasn't until the community college classes that I learned of Git, and version control systems, and the forking of a codebase that can occur during a solo project as you take it in a slightly new direction, or a collaborative project when one or more decide to spin it off into their own.

Many years after that, in Pasadena, California (a city which I like to call Robledo, after the fictionalized version in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower), I found myself in the midst of a profoundly disabling depressive episode, catalyzed by the diagnosis of my stepfather with stage four colon cancer, the assurance of his imminent death, and my brewing awareness that I was trans and that I needed, more than anything, to muster the courage to tell him before he passed. Trusting a whim whipped up by a long-ago learned strategy for combatting depression—taking on a silly art project—I sat before some blank canvasses I'd bought years before and began cutting up the copious political flyers residents of a city receive in the mail promoting this or that local candidate, or local resolution. I taped the words onto the canvas to form a cheeky critique of the economic apartheid my city, like all others, was deeply invested in maintaining: eliminating rent control, protecting the rights of landlords and property owners, criminalizing homelessness, and so on, and so forth. This was my first collage—the first of what would soon be many.

Less than a year after that, after my stepfather's death—after my failure to come out to him in time, after coming out to my partner and then the world, after starting my medical transition—I wrote a hermit crab essay, a genre-agnostic literary form in which the author takes an otherwise “unartistic” format (like a recipe, product review, or job application) and uses it as the shell for a piece of writing that subverts and/or transcends the format. A tiny excerpt from a pages-long run-on sentence in the piece, titled “Job Application”:

...I am trying to learn to trust my whims more instead of talk myself out of them (I can talk myself out of—or into—anything, which I learned far too late is a very, very bad thing)...

This approach to trusting my whims had drawn me that day into a downtown Pasadena bookstore, where the employees' kindness in trying not to misgender me at a stage in my transition when I felt extremely self-conscious about my gender presentation had made me want to apply to work there (“Job Application” hermit crabs the application I would have filled out had it not been for the fact that the bookstore was apparently very anti-stealing, and asked multiple questions on the form about what you would do in the case of witnessing theft, and, given my staunch belief in the necessity of abolishing the concept of property, plus the fact that a few Reddit threads noted the bookstore's extremely hostile attitude towards its employees, all this made me turn the application into a hermit crab essay instead of actually applying).

Inside the bookstore, though, and before the interaction with the kind employees, trusting my whims made me pick up, for no articulable reason, a book on Martin Luther, about whom I knew little save for his most well-known act: nailing 95 theses to a church door in 1517 and subsequently ushering in the Protestant Reformation. I took the book home with me and began to read it, and all I could see was myself.

The book begins:

In Spring 2017 I was asked to speak from Luther's pulpit. I knew that this would be an emotional experience, because I had spent the last twelve years writing a biography of the reformer. Few biographers get so close to where their protagonist lived and worked, and others who had spoken from the Wittenberg pulpit had told me of its effect on their lives. I knew too that the event would bring back strong memories of my father, who had died just ten months before, and who had been a minister of religion when I was growing up in Melbourne, Australia.

Moments after reading it, I began to type:

In Spring 2117 I was asked to speak in Rivera’s apartment. I knew that this would be an emotional experience, because I had spent the last twelve years of my life writing a biography of the abolitionist. Few writers get so close to where their protagonist lived and worked, and others who had spoken from the Robledo apartment had told me of its effect on their lives. I knew too that the event would bring back strong memories of my stepfather, who had died just two months before, and who had been an organizer around abolitionism when I was growing up in a U.S. American colony.

The Rivera in the second excerpt is me.

This was the first incarnation.

Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (1991 to 2023). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: turbulent household/obssession with libraries; first exposure to programming; purchase of writing textbook; first short story completed in years; first exposure to version control systems; diagnosis and death of stepfather; first collage; purchase of book on Martin Luther; first incarnation.

---

exhortation

Consider a project of yours that you care about. What events pocked your journey towards it? What texts did you need to access in order to begin? How did you use them? When and why? Who wrote them? What whims did you need to trust in order to begin this journey? What traumas did you needlessly endure theretofore? What coping mechanisms did you develop in response? What have all of these prevented you from doing? Enabled you to do? What firsts did you need to hurdle over in order to get there? How did these coalesce, over time, into this particular project? How have they endlessly shaped it? Draw another straight line across a second blank page. Mark your answers with labeled dots. Go as far back as birth, if needed. Recognize the unceasing current of happenstance. Locate it in all that seems predictable, assured.

---

I have a standard definition of incarnations and autofabulation that is included in the abstract for this presentation, but I think the best way to define these terms is to quote directly from my work.

First, an excerpt from the source text for the first incarnation I wrote that explicitly defined the terms:

In 2001, everything changed. Cercas exploded onto the literary scene with his novel Soldiers of Salamis, which sold more than a million copies worldwide, won numerous awards, and was quickly turned into a major film. The novel, which tells the story of how a journalist named Javier Cercas finds an anonymous Republican soldier who spared the life of the fascist ideologue during the Spanish Civil War, swapped the university campus for the reporting trip. But the metafiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved Escheresque circularity but rather something much more directly self-referential. Cercas had inserted himself—name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.

Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called autofiction, and it can be found everywhere in contemporary fiction. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest names in literature today: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson. The list of practitioners is long. Autofiction describes fictional writing in which the author, narrator, and protagonist share a name, many biographical details, or, most often, both. It is frequently seen as the fictional corollary to memoir, and thus as a genre of “life writing” that prioritizes introspection.

This can come in different flavors: some prefer Knausgaardian novella-length digressions that give rhythm to the mundane chores of daily life, others favor the vibes of the Nelsonian graduate school theory classroom, replete with sex, gender, and philosophy. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the self.

Not so for Cercas. His autofictional novels deal with a different kind of intimacy: the intimacy of how to report a newspaper opinion column. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair op-ed writer, opinion journalism, like its newsroom corollary, relies a great deal on facts and, often, on first-hand reporting. Opinion writers might report on the history of feminism or the history of their own family. But the best report all the same. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in a newsroom write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which opinion journalists avow the persuasive techniques they use in their own writing. Op-ed writing, after all, doesn’t just identify a problem, it proposes a solution.

And now, an excerpt from my incarnation of it:

In 2041, everything changed. Rivera exploded onto the abolitionist scene with her Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, which was distributed to more than a million readers worldwide, sparked numerous burnings, and was quickly banned by several major nation-states. The book, which tells the story of how an abolitionist named Erica Rivera discovers an anonymously written text that accurately prophecies the end of the U.S. empire, swapped the nefarious corporation for the colonial project writ large. But the autofiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved funhouse-mirror reflexivity but rather something much more prescient and incisive. Rivera had inserted the near-future—in name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.

Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called autofabulation, and it can be found everywhere abolitionists and anarchists are. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest name in anticolonial agitation today: Aro Nusar, Hi Hi, E.R.E.R., Cheus, I-El. The list of practitioners is long. Autofabulation describes fictional writing in which the author draws on historical knowledge to prefigure a future for themselves that has yet to become. It is frequently seen as the artistic corollary to clairvoyance, and thus as a genre of “prophetic writing” that prioritizes introspection.

This can come in different flavors: some prefer Riveran essay-length incarnations that give new life to the mundane nonfictional writing of the past, others favor the I-Elian community-based antitheory, replete with handwritten annotations, generative exercises, and iterative collaborations. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the future.

For Rivera, her autofabulist work deals with a particular kind of intimacy: the intimacy necessary for understanding one’s place in history and trajectory through time. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair activist, autofabulation, like its spiritual corollary, relies a great deal on a deep and strategic entanglement with space-time and, often, on first-hand experience building community. Autofabulists might report on the future of feminism by excavating a “speculative archive” of their potential path through it, based on the real experiences they’ve already had within it. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in traditional literature write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which autofabulists avow the prophetic techniques they use in their own writing. Autofabulation, after all, doesn’t just identify the conditions of an immediate present, it proposes a shape for the foreseeable future.

Autofabulation—and in particular, this manifestation of it, the incarnation—weaves together all the threads I described in the previous section. It is as much influenced by version control systems and collage art, as it is by the humble writing textbook I stumbled upon as a teenager, as it is by the (speculative) archival work of Saidiya Hartman.

To both explain and tell the story of how I learned of her work, here follows an excerpt from the source text for the incarnation I presented to the people in my Tin House seminar:

In 1910, Dr. Kleiweg de Zwaan went to Sumatra to take facial casts of Nias Islanders. He covered their faces with plaster and brought the masks home. Now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam you can see a wall lined with the plaster casts of these men’s faces, eyes squinted, mouths shut against the intrusion. This is one kind of research. De Zwaan lacked the imagination to see that Nias Islanders were also people, just like him.

At its worst, heavily researched nonfiction risks becoming not only anti-feminist, but also inherently western and White, in privileging disembodied intellect—the clinical voice, the pretext of objectivity, as well as outside authority—over one’s own lived experience, body, and imagination (though as Toni Morrison has pointed out, imagination itself can be conscripted or constrained by the same biases that drive such clinical research). 

In contrast, one of the powers of autotheory is its push toward embodiment and invention. It refuses the objective voice, the pretense of neutrality, the fabrication that we can be all brain and no body, with body’s accompanying pleasures, embarrassments, and disappointments. It brings in the vulnerable elements of personal narrative and of one’s own body.

One reason Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts has been so popular, and that other works of autotheory including Cvetkovich’s book Depression: A Public Feeling have been so powerful, is that they are vulnerable books, divulging very personal details in ways that are neither confessional nor egoistic, but are instead an offering to readers: here is mine. In this way, they have the power of giving voice to experiences and lives that are more often sidelined, discounted, silenced, marginalized. 

And here follows an excerpt from my incarnation of it, which was eventually published by queer/trans indie publishing pillar fifth wheel press's GARLAND:

Almost sixty years ago, at a moment of great upheaval in the imperial core, I had yet to understand what was ahead of me. I was attempting to squeeze some sliver of economic survival out of a writing practice, and had hastily cobbled together an experimental hybrid novella titled EUPHORIUM. At the time, a service called QueryTracker allowed me to seek out literary agents, a relic of a profession, from a time when art was still largely mediated by capitalist exchange. I found an agent who I believed would understand the work I was trying to undertake and did my due diligence in researching her. She kept a list of the books she was reading on a pre-collapse networked database called Goodreads, and there I spotted a book I’d never heard of: Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. At the time, I couldn’t afford to buy the book and I didn’t have a library card, but I did find a free-to-access scholarly journal article discussing the book and its central conceit: critical fabulation.

Critical fabulation is one kind of research attuned to the fact that the archive is necessarily lacking. Archives regularly draw on what history leaves a record of, and what history leaves a record of is defined and delimited by settler colonialism, white supremacy, cisheterosexism, and biases along all sorts of lines of apartheid that allow the details of one person’s life to be easily excavatable, and the details of another’s to be completely erased. At its worst, archival work is a patchwork quilt filled with gaping holes. It risks telling a narrative that is not only wholly false, but also carelessly upholds what the archivist’s milieu already believes about the subject of the archive. In privileging what is available—the clinical record, the objective document, the authoritative report—over what one senses, intuits, and imagines both about what is and what cannot be available, the archive becomes as fictional a tale as any novel or short story.

Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, as I understand it, was to foreground this idea, to lean into it, to push through it—and to draw attention to the impossibility built into this ambition. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman explores a Black female figure both omnipresent in the archive of Atlantic slavery, and yet whose story or history, or stories or histories, cannot be told, cannot be excavated. She writes: “The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified… It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive… I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.”

One reason that Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments has been so popular, and that other works of critical fabulation have been so powerful, is that they are vulnerable texts, divulging the very personal experience of doing archival work in ways that connect one’s present to the past, offering readers a methodology for doing the same: here I am, here we are. In this way, readers have the power not of giving voice to experiences and lives that have been silenced or marginalized, but rather understanding the silencing and marginalizing more deeply, and to do so through an active process of participation, through a terrifyingly incomplete process of connection, reconnection, and disconnection, as a fragmented collage of past, present and future.

Hartman writes: “As I understand it, a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing.”

So, yes, I can write to you to tell you that incarnations are the practice of forking a historical text, setting it in the far future, and centering yourself in this new narrative (for example, by narrating it from the perspective of your future self, as I do in the second incarnation in this section, or by narrating it from the perspective of some other future figure who is writing about you, as I do in the other incarnations I've shared so far), a narrative explicitly defined by its certainty in the triumph of anti-colonial and anti-imperial forces (for example, as is the case for all my incarnations, a storyworld in which the U.S. American empire collapses in the year 2089). And I can tell you that autofabulation is an umbrella term for an emerging genre of work that combines introspective, critical, historical, and speculative writing in order to giving the writer (at least a few of) the tools necessary to determine how they can participate in ensuring such a narrative/storyworld becomes reality.

But these simple, textbook definitions cannot do justice to the magic of writing, or reading, incarnations. As someone who has written and published a handful, and worked on but left unpublished several others, and as someone who returns to read these incarnations over and over again, enough to have memorized entire chunks of them, I can tell you: every incarnation is utterly exhausting to write (and sometimes to read). As I write, I have to hold in my head, all at once: the history being traced by the source text; the future being written by someone far away in time and space as though it is their present, looking back on what will be my history; my own present, as well as the present of the person who will read this today or tomorrow; and everything that will unfold in between these present and that future, which I will eventually traverse, and throughout which others will read this in their own time. It's dizzying. It's mesmerizing. It's terrifying.

The category under which this talk is filed is “Independent publishing and archival,” and as someone who has been doing a lot of both over the last two years, dizzying, mesmerizing, and terrifying are exactly how I would describe this work. I've found that last term, “terrifying,” especially useful as a framework for understanding archival work as it relates to trans and nonbinary peoples, Black and Indigenous peoples, and people of color. There is so much horror to be found and to experience in these archives, so much that is frightening and chilling and appalling, if only because there is a direct throughline between what is there, what isn't (and cannot) be there, and what is and has been unfolding around us right now.

From the transcript of a Relatively Queer session where I talk more about Saidiya Hartman:

Saidiya Hartman is a Black woman writer and academic, whose work has been really influential, for I think all of us [transcriber's note: this is in reference to the three co-facilitators for Relatively Queer, which includes me], especially because it goes beyond reparative archiving. And I’m not super familiar with all of her books, but I had the pleasure of like, sort of, kind of, auditing a course at the Brooklyn Institute around her 2007 book Lose Your Mother, which is about how the slave trade and its associated destructions of archival materials, not just in the form of tangible objects, but also familial connections, how this causes slaves and their descendants to “lose their mothers,” their histories, their countries, their kin and their past.

So she develops this methodology for addressing this that she calls critical fabulation. And it comes out of her own understanding of her own archival or historical work as being a bridge between theory and narrative. In an interview, she says, “I work intuitively, and will follow a trail of documents or my instincts until the project emerges. When writing, I will ask what are some of the key terms that I’m thinking with or that I'm writing against.” For her, archival work is always extremely personal. She writes that “narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom,” and that “this writing is personal, because this history has engendered me.”

So that last quote, and this one, come from an essay of hers, called “Venus in Two Acts,” in which she reflects on her attempts to confront the limits of the archive while writing Lose Your Mother. And she’s reflecting on writing that book and feeling like she’s failed in some way in addressing one particular Black female figure that appears over and over again in the archives relating to the slave trade. In that essay, she goes over the fact that, actually, the archive is almost excessive, in that there is such a meticulous documentation of the violence perpetrated by slave owners against slaves. And she writes: “Scandal and excess inundate the archive: the incantatory stories of shocking violence penned by abolitionists, the fascinated eyewitness, reports of mercenary soldiers eager to divulge what decency forbids them to disclose, and the rituals of torture, the beatings, hangings, and amputations enshrined as law.”

And this quote really doesn’t do justice to just how explicit and graphic the archival materials she's working with are, and she describes some of that in the essay. But because she’s relying on archival materials being produced by oppressors—white lawyers, white surgeons, captains, etc.—she writes that her own writing “falters before the archive’s silence and reproduces its own omissions. The irreparable violence of the Atlantic slave trade resides precisely in all the stories that we cannot know, and that will never be recovered. This formidable obstacle or constitutive impossibility defines the parameters of my work.”

So by the end of “Venus in Two Acts,” what Hartman essentially does is create a non-story or an archival fiction about the Black female figure called Venus. And this story, or non-story, it explores her own wishes for the story she wants to tell. It explores the ways in which the archive both supports and contradicts that story; the ways in which the archive can neither support nor contradict it; and what are the limits of even trying to write that non-story. And she acknowledges it’s totally possible that she hasn’t really succeeded at anything except just drawing attention to the impossibilities built into archival work.

There’s really no sense of closure or a solution to the problem she's describing in “Venus in Two Acts,” but she notes that that’s important. She writes: “Narrative restraint to the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure is a requirement of this method. The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death, social and corporeal death, and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.”

So, in contrast to reparative archiving— Oh, excuse me.

[transcriber's note: brief silence]

Sorry! I just needed to cough.

In contrast to reparative archiving [transcriber's note: this is in reference to an earlier part of the presentation that explores Lae'l Hughes-Watkins's work with reparative archiving], which seems to take a more material approach to reparations, Saidiya Hartman’s work highlights the utility of imagining, speculating, and negotiating with the limits of archival materials, and trying to exceed the limits of the archive oneself, as well as reckoning with the limits of archival materials, and contesting those limits in a variety of ways.

And this is the kind of the most difficult part of all of this for me to sit with, hence the dizzy emoji [transcriber's note: a large dizzy emoji appeared on the presentation slide during this part of the session]. She also advocates for methodologies that include things that feel like antithetical to academic work or archival work, which includes things like: refusing to provide or refusing to even seek out a sense of closure; denying that closure for the reader; and maybe even also being open to failing, which I think can be its own kind of success.

*Black and white illustration of the incarnatory forking of Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's Life and Legacy by Lyndal Roper. A straight line just off of the left edge of the page begins with a dot labeled with this source text. Diagonal lines branch off of the dot and off the page in forward directions. Further down the straight line is another dot, labelled “there is no writing without editing, there are no futures without presence, and there is no such thing as predestination”. Diagonal lines also branch off of this dot and off the page in forward directions.*

---

exhortation

Consider a project you care about, yours or someone else's. Reflect on what it means to offer it freely to others: to allow them to remix, adapt, fork, and incarnate it as they please, to treat it as an open source. What are the potential risks therein (to you, to them, to the project, to your communities)? What are the potential benefits? What kind of world does this approach to a project leave behind? What kind of world might it inaugurate? For the last time, draw a straight line on yet another blank page, but start the line somewhere off of the page's left edge. Label the left edge of this line with a dot and the name of your project. Who would you want to incarnate your work? How would you hope for them to do so? How would you have to treat your own project in order to court these future developments? Draw diagonal lines that begin at the dot at differently angled forward directions. Somewhere along one of those lines, place a single dot. Can you see the future ahead of you yet? Can the future ahead see you?

---

I told you at the start that, “A week ago, I was certain what I would offer you in this space,” the epistolary greeting and the you of this quoted sentence implying a singular correspondent.

I alluded near the end of this correspondence to the importance of “refusing to provide or refusing to even seek out a sense of closure; denying that closure for the reader; and maybe even also being open to failing, which I think can be its own kind of success.”

This letter may have ended somewhat abruptly, without providing clear or concrete answers to many implied and unasked questions, including what incarnations mean for conceptions of “copyright” and “intellectual property”; how they may come to transform (self-)publishing; and what kinds of technologies might be best suited (or need to be invented) for an incarnated, autofabulated world.

Additionally, this letter may appear in a public setting, and it may even benefit those who read it but for whom it is not meant, but ultimately, this letter is intended for you, and only for you—whoever you are, whenever you are.

But you know already what this world is. You already know what is happening. You know what you and I must do.

We may not yet know exactly how, but we've always been quick studies.

To quote myself once more:

there's a girl out there watching and now probably laughing, saying, “girl, i literally laid the roadmap out for you.” and she did. and she has.

Black and white illustration of the incarnatory forking of this letter. A straight line just off of the left edge of the page begins with a dot labeled “Forking the historical text: Incarnations, autofabulation, and beyond”. Diagonal lines branch off of the dot and off the page in forward directions. Further down the straight line is another dot, labelled with a question mark. Diagonal lines also branch off of this dot and off the page in forward directions.

---

exhortation

Incarnate some or all of this letter. Send it to someone you (want to) know and care about.

---

Relevant resources

Relatively Queer, a virtual workshop series and community space for queer and trans folks seeking to recover lost queer and trans traces in their families of origin, broadly defined

Art, Strike!, an online art/literary publication founded on the principles of mutual aid

tRaum Books, a trans-led micropress that will publish The Ecology of Art, Strike!, an essay collection by me, in late 2025

“Job Application,” hermit crab essay

“The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey's Anatomy,” epistolary essay written to my younger self

“Venus in Two Acts,” by Saidiya Hartman, PDF download (131 KB)

“Reparative Acts and the Caste of Archival Erasure,” hour-long presentation given by Lae'l Hughes-Watkins, YouTube link

“Ted Nelson in Herzog's 'Lo and Behold',” three-minute clip from Werner Herzog's documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, YouTube link

“there is no writing without editing, there are no futures without presence, and there is no such thing as predestination (incarnation of the preface to Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy by Lyndal Roper)”

“there is no self without reflection, there is no mirror without light, and there is no such thing as fabulation (incarnation of an excerpt from The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain by Bécquer Seguín)”

“there is no intuition without revolt, there is no movement without a turn, and there is no such thing as speculation (incarnation of Arianne Zwartjes’s “Autotheory as Rebellion: On Research, Embodiment, and Imagination in Creative Nonfiction”),” available to read by downloading Issue 2 of fifth wheel press's GARLAND for any price, including $0, on Ko-fi

“ends,” prose poem

content/trigger warnings: discussions of political violence, imperialism, and colonialism; references to police/state violence and delusional thinking; brief depictions of political assassinations; use of ableist language

---

This week is what I call Parable of the Sower week: the seven days leading up to July 20, 2024. This is the day that inaugurates the narrative in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, as well as the 15th birthday of its protagonist.

I'm what you might call superstitious about things like this, though I don't know if superstitious is the right word, since I consider myself and claim to be something of a clairvoyant.

I have feared for a very long time that something of great import would occur on the 20th, though I try to approach phenomena like clairvoyance, superstition, and serendipity soberly: things of great import occur every day, at every hour, at every moment. At the same time, things of great import don't really “occur” at all; they unfold, over much longer periods of time than a day, and in tandem with all other things, of import or no, in ways that are inextricable from each other.

Nevertheless, because of my particular vantage, I feel and understand the world in moments, hours, days. It's hard for me to not assign importance to the day at the end of this week, or even to the week itself (despite neither “day” nor “week” being particularly coherent temporal groupings anyways).

I often describe my writing as an attempt to intervene in the thorny political economy of art production, but you could just as well describe it as an attempt to democratize clairvoyance. If pressed, I would admit that I consider these projects to be one and the same. In my essay titled “Inca(r)n(t)ation,” I write:

The truth is that everyone is clairvoyant. Those who already know this know also that its source is trauma; trauma is the catalyst for clairvoyance. This is because clairvoyance is the same as hyperempathy; a better word for it may be hypersensitivity. Clairvoyants are sensitive to everything: the tiniest twitches, the most invisible winds. If you allow yourself to feel enough, you will have visions too.

My visions come to me mostly in my dreams, but also in my writing. Earlier this year, I dreamt a long dream—had a long vision—in which I shot a politician. I transcribed what I remembered of the dream after waking, and then turned it into a short story originally titled “Letters,” and later retitled “Los Anaranjados.” The short story follows three economically precarious siblings as they navigate the chaos initiated by a series of disturbing letters, sent out to seemingly random groups of residents of their unnamed metropolis. Each letter urges its recipient to commit a specific act of murder.

The original title was a nod to the power of language, that a city could be thrust into turmoil by a few handwritten words on paper. The change in title came from the speculative conceit that helped me give narrative coherence to my strange and violent vision.

From the story:

The mayor is holding a press conference, where he announces that he’s the one who’s been writing the letters. I push my way to the front of the crowd because I need to hear him speak. I want to understand.

The mayor says his office commissioned a novel law enforcement program, an artificial intelligence that can determine a person’s propensity for murder. It sorted residents into groups coded by color: fresa red, piña yellow, limón green. Of our populace of millions, eleven percent comprised the first group: extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person. He says the program was defunded but his conscience remained ablaze. He says he illegally obtained the addresses of those flagged as killers—mailed letters to their residences, to goad them into doing what he thought they’d do anyways, what he’d be powerless to stop unless he got them to do it sooner, got them all off the streets and behind bars in one elegant swoop.

He corrects himself. Six elegant swoops.

Doing it all at once would have overwhelmed the postal service, he explains dispassionately. He says he’s sorry for the trouble and the trauma he’s caused. He says he sees now the error of his ways, and he says nothing else because I shoot him in the chest.

I buy a gun after the third letter because I know it will come in handy. I kill him as a matter of self-defense. As the city protecting itself, acting through me.

“Los Anaranjados” is Spanish for “the orange ones.” It's an oblique reference to the idea that, if there are groups of people “extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person” (the red ones), and groups of people less likely to do so (the yellow and the green ones), there must also be the orange ones: those only extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person under very specific circumstances.

For example, as a matter of self-defense.

And in a world riven by colonialism, the vast majority of us are in the business of defending ourselves.

As I wrote this part of the story, I left out a small detail: while the mayor talks about the artificial intelligence and its color-coded groupings, he gestures to a screen behind him. On it, a slide from a presentation depicts the three colors the narrator describes: “...fresa red, piña yellow, limón green.” In my mind, it was a pie chart with big, brightly colored slices, but I couldn't think of a good way to write this into the story, for two reasons. The first was that, earlier in the story, I referenced a “colorful infographic” that ran in the city paper, and I simply didn't think it artful to repeat such a detail. The second, more substantive reason was that I felt it took away from the explanation for the letters, which—at this point in the story—is essentially the story's climax. The city and the characters have been shaken up over the course of six rounds of letters, and the mayor's press conference is the big reveal that purportedly explains what they were all about. (Shortly thereafter, this is revealed to be a charade; the press conference was all lies, for reasons not relevant enough to this essay to explain here.)

I worried that cramming too much detail about the presentation into this moment would take away from the climax: the politician's speech, and the narrator's violent reaction.

***

I've followed the national news this week at something of a distance; I always do. I like to know the broad strokes, not because I think that it can tell me much about reality directly, but because what small fraction of information it has chosen to become the quote-unquote “broad strokes”—and how that fraction of information is depicted—can. Sometimes on social media I'll read a post that says people who watch reality TV are preternaturally intelligent because they are avid scholars of human behavior, but the problem with this thesis is that you are never really seeing human behavior on television, reality or otherwise. Reality TV provides insight into the psyches of reality TV producers, whom I definitely consider an interesting bunch to psychoanalyze, but are certainly not a representative slice of humanity writ large.

In the same way, keeping abreast of what most people refer to as quote-unquote “the news” does not provide any insight into what is actually unfolding in the world, but rather gives one insight into the psyches of news producers. And since news producers are beholden to all kinds of mechanisms of colonial power, watching the news is an excellent way to keep tabs on how empire is seeing itself. How it understands itself. How intensely it is rationalizing its contradictions. How close it is to its inevitable implosion.

***

A presidential assassination attempt inaugurated Parable of the Sower week. The assassination target in question wasn't the president at the time of the shooting, though he will likely soon be again, and he wasn't badly injured, nor is there much evidence that the whole affair wasn't staged, which—as is the case with all violence—is more or less irrelevant.

I don't bother to watch the footage save for the highlights that appear on my TikTok feed against my will—I try to engage with quote-unquote “political content” on TikTok as little as possible—and then the short clip posted on the front page of every major U.S. news website. In only one of those clips—one which I see days after the shooting, and the one which catalyzes the bulk of this essay—can you clearly see what was behind the assassination target at the moment of impact.

Photo of the 45th president of the so-called United States emoting at a podium while pointing during one of his political rallies on July 13, 2024, moments before he is shot. He, like the crowd behind him, is white, and dons a red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat. Behind him is a large screen with a white background on which is displayed a compound line graph titled ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION INTO THE US. The bottom layer of the compound line graph is the largest, and is filled in with orange. The graph looks almost like the flame of a fire.

I am a bit taken aback by this, but only insomuch as any clairvoyant can be surprised by the accuracy of their visions. I quickly process the mechanism by which I came to see this before it happened: it is not uncommon for politicians to be framed during political rallies by a screen, or for that screen to display informational graphics like charts. It is not implausible for politicians to be shot during political rallies; in fact, it is more likely for them to be shot there than anywhere else. If you asked a million people to describe in detail what they saw if they carefully imagined a future presidential assassination attempt, the majority would likely include somewhere in their description a screen like the one in the photo and a chart like the one in my dream.

None of this contradicts my understanding of clairvoyance. It only reinforces it.

The thing I am actually taken aback by is how superstitious the assassination target turns out to be. Multiple times after the shooting, he publicly credits the chart for “saving his life,” most recently just yesterday, in a 90-minute speech on the closing night of the Republican National Convention. In the story he tells of his supposed near-death experience—a story he will tell and retell until the day on which death fails to elude him—the chart is the climax.

From his speech:

Behind me, and to the right, was a large screen that was displaying a chart of border crossings under my leadership. The numbers were absolutely amazing. In order to see the chart, I started to, like this, turn to my right, and was ready to begin a little bit further turn, which I’m very lucky I didn’t do, when I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard. On my right ear. I said to myself, “Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet.”

Photo of the 45th president of the so-called United States speaking at the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2024. He looks tiny behind a small metal podium on a large stage packed with nine differently sized screens that form an arc over him. Behind him is a facsimile of the White House. American flags bookend the stage. All nine screens display the chart depicted in the previous photo.

And again, later in the speech:

But you can see [the] chart that saved my life. That was the chart that saved my life. I said, “Look at, I’m so proud of it.” I think it’s one of the greatest — it was done by the Border Patrol — one of the greatest charts I’ve ever seen. It showed everything, just like that. You know the chart.

Oh, there it is. That’s pretty good. Wow.

***

In April, I receive an $75 scholarship to attend a short seminar on writing. The scholarship is randomly assigned via a lottery, so it is completely by chance that I receive it and attend (though I hope you have come to understand by now that there is no such thing as quote-unquote “chance”).

During the seminar, we undertake a far more practical writing exercise than most: putting together an artist's statement that argues why we deserve this or that share of a pool of funding. For many artists, these statements are what receiving meaningful funding hinges upon. We are constantly asked to explain and justify ourselves. I am no exception, in this regard and every other.

The seminar leader frames the exercise uniquely, and for this, I feel grateful. We are asked to take the strangest and most unpackageable part of our work and to package it up into a tidy, compelling artist's statement, strangeness be damned. At first, I resist my instinct to write about the topics in this essay—most of my time is spent worrying about whether or not I am using my clairvoyance appropriately—until finally I determine an interesting way into the exercise. How do you write about clairvoyance without sounding mad? How do you pitch delusional thinking as an asset?

In the few minutes we are given to produce a draft, I write the following:

As a prophetic writer, I conjure predictive fiction and nonfiction that traces the trajectory of the near-present and far future. The value of this work is its prescience; my readers can learn about the future the way they might learn about history from a textbook. Prophetic work is not uncommon or particularly esoteric in the age of big data: corporations, institutions, and governments regularly use data analysis, a tool of prophetic writing, to make weighty decisions about resource allocation.

Projection and prophecy, after all, are one and the same—equally flawed and equally potent.

***

Time, as it is commonly perceived, is hardly stable. I begin writing this essay on July 14, 2024, at 6:50 PM PST. I write this sentence on July 19, 2024, at 3:30 PM PST. If you read this essay, you will likely experience it in a single sitting, which will of course not correlate at all with the rhythm of the temporal arc over which the essay was written. And if you read it in pieces—or revisit it over and again as weeks, months, or years pass—that experience will not correlate with mine either. Time, as it is commonly conceived of, is inherently disjointed.

In most of the rest of the world, it is already July 20, 2024.

And it will be over 37 hours before July 20, 2024, has officially come to a close.

Looking outwards from so-called “American politics,” the news reports this morning are of a global tech outage across airlines, hospitals, emergency hotlines, retail stores, and more. One outlet refers to it as the most widespread information technology failure in history. I have been preparing for a cyberattack of these proportions—or larger—for some time, forgetting perhaps that the cyberattack already took place, over the course of many decades, carried out by countless attackers: the construction of a way of life in which critical biosocial functions are so reliant on fragile, interconnected digital networks that a bug in an otherwise banal software update can rewrite the trajectories of millions. It rerouted mine. I wouldn't have spent the last five minutes writing this paragraph if the outage had not made its way into the broad strokes of today's English-language news reports. There is no way to know what this paragraph—or the rest of this essay—would have said if it had not occurred.

There is also no way to know what this part of the essay would have said if I knew more about the countless processes that have proceeded, piecemeal, around the world since the start of July 20. Since the start of this week.

The present, as it is commonly perceived, is hardly complete. Reality, as it is commonly conceived of, is inherently disjointed. There is no way to know what today or tomorrow will hold.

I mean, of course, I have some ideas.

I am certain you do too.

length: 5,540 words

content/trigger warnings: discussions of mental health, the medical industrial complex, psychiatric incarceration, suicidal ideation, death, grief, ableism, substance abuse, the biomedicalization of transness, transphobia, hormone therapy, neurodivergence, sterility, settler colonialism, patriarchy, misogyny, cisheterosexism, white supremacy, violence, abuse, and intersexness, written from the perspective of someone who is not intersex; brief references to blood, gore, illness (cancer, dementia), surgery, bombings, murder, and gender dysphoria

---

1

Still of Ellen Pompeo as Meredith Grey, a young brown-haired white woman, in the pilot episode of Grey’s Anatomy, in a brightly lit OR. The show’s subtitle reads, “I’m screwed.”

You’ll start watching Grey’s Anatomy because—four years into puberty, at 13—you’re already familiar with imminent death. The blood, the guts, the gore of injury and trauma: it fascinates you more than it upsets you. In a way, you feel at home. A scalpel making its way through someone’s body is the perfect metaphor for how you feel inside.

Plus, you’ve just been accepted into the country’s top-ranked high school. Dr. Webber’s speech in the pilot episode is repeated many times throughout the series, and will repeat in your mind as you navigate a world of incomparable wunderkinds. “Look around you. Say hello to your competition. Eight of you will switch to an easier specialty. Five will crack under the pressure. Two of you will be asked to leave.” This ratio is about right, both at your high school and at the prestigious institutions you’ll all spend four years working to gain entry into. Mostly things like depression and substance abuse will take your peers out. What you accurately diagnose as your alcoholism, and what professionals separately misdiagnose as bipolar disorder, will be the culprits for you.

But then this isn’t House, M.D.; your journey has little to do with the puzzle of diagnosis, or even with the process of treatment.

What matters on Grey’s is emotional interplay—between doctor and patient, doctor and doctor, medical case and personal life, personal life and the desire for so much more.

Desire, ambition, metaphor, melodrama: this is the lifeblood of Grey’s Anatomy.

You’re a brilliant young trans girl.

Of course you eat this up.

Don’t worry if none of this makes sense. At your age, your jumbled trans girl brain—not yet on hormones, but not by choice—can’t comprehend your gender, nor your sexuality, let alone why you, an aspiring creative writer, are so drawn to a show about cutthroat surgical interns. At your age, you mostly just like that the soundtrack is all cute indie music, and that there’s a member of the ensemble cast who’s a sensitive, effeminate buffoon.

Also, that the main character is sad.

Unlike the other main characters of the other shows you watch (the only possible exception here being Courage the Cowardly Dog), the main character of this show looks like she’s always on the verge of tears and is always being forced by her circumstances to hide them. This is new to you, and appealing: it is a joy to see someone on TV who’s as perpetually devastated as you.

8

Still from episode 8 of Grey’s Anatomy: a young white female doctor is telling a concerned-looking white male patient, “I brought the consent forms again.”

When you’re 14 years old is when you’ll start talking to yourself. When you’re 14 is when it’ll become a habit, a survival mechanism. Technically, it’ll keep you away from the thing you need most—a good talk therapist—but then that’s the paradox built into every survival mechanism.

At first, it is a rehearsal. Sitting on the floor of your bedroom closet, rocking back and forth, you’re preparing yourself to meet with a professional, one who will ask you all sorts of questions—hard questions. Abuse is neither simple to endure nor to share, and you can hardly do either. You’re certain your unedited answers would get you uprooted from your life; you need to be able to give the answers the professionals would prefer. You want care, you do—but only the kind you believe you’re capable of surviving.

Your imagination is so vivid that this imagined therapy, undertaken in stolen moments of utter privacy, satisfies your need to be heard. The only person hearing you is you, but you in someone else’s skin: alone in the closet, you don the costume of a caretaker, nodding at yourself with kindness, genuinely invested in your own suffering.

You’ll return to school to take your seat beside future Fulbright scholars, tech giants, Ivy League professors; you’ll watch them ingest the science and engineering curricula that will take them where they want—or have been told to want—to go. Lost in your thoughts at school as often as at home, you’re learning instead the value of roleplay, of acting—of benefiting from a semblance when you lack access to the real thing.

In the penultimate episode of Grey’s Anatomy’s inaugural season, a stubborn patient believes he’s clairvoyant, and is told this is an illness. The show is young, so it employs a silly trope: the patient mysteriously knows things he absolutely shouldn’t, with no logical explanation. It’s a suspension of believability the show won’t pull again without cues clearly indicating, for example, a tumor-induced hallucination.

The so-called clairvoyant does not have a tumor, but he does have an arteriovenous malformation. He puts off surgery partly for fear of death, but his bigger fear is losing his supposed gift.

You’ll put off therapy partly for fear of Child Protective Services, but your bigger fear is losing your supposed gifts. You’ve been marked since age five as “gifted and talented,” and even at 14, you already suspect this refers to something like clairvoyance—an invisible external force dictating the future to you from afar. You’ll contextualize this psychosis with logical explanations, like the vivid imagination of an aspiring writer. Whatever it is that makes you “special” (and you feel so different from everyone else, you build your identity around the idea that you, in fact, are), you don’t want to lose it to the medical industrial complex; to diagnosis and treatment; to talk therapy.

In the show, after much cajoling, the man is talked into having surgery. He wakes up to find his gift survives too.

As will soon become another habit, you’ll refuse to learn the lesson provided.

22

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. George O’Malley, a young white male doctor with scraggly hair, is saying, “What, am I just supposed to lie to her?”

The ninth episode of the show leans on another silly trope. Dr. Burke’s supposedly virile friend turns out to be sterile and (surprise!) intersex. Literature has a long tradition of treating so-called sex/gender variation as a plot twist—for the person who’s the supposed variant, for the people around them, or else for the unsuspecting audience. The patient rages the rage of indignation and disgust pioneered and perfected by trans people, but mostly because his sterility indicates that his pregnant wife has had a secret affair.

The 22nd episode does trans rage a bit more justice: the patient is a kid with the killer name of Bex, who looks to the doctors (and presumably the audience) like a moody, tomboyish girl. Bex turns out to be intersex too. Their parents take up too much space for Bex to get to rage; instead, Bex quietly stews, pouring themselves into their comic art. The sensitive, effeminate buffoon’s arc also takes a twist when he defies his superior, refusing to conceal Bex’s diagnosis because, as he empathetically proclaims, Bex just wants to know why they’ve always felt so different. The episode never uses the word “trans,” but it’s implied at the end that Bex will transition, the first thing to happen during their storyline that makes the character smile. (At 32 years old, you’ll rewatch the series for the first time since beginning to transition, and this will be one of many scenes that will make you cry nonstop.)

But if the show’s going to go any further than surprise intersex diagnoses, it’s going to need a reason. (Remember, these episodes are premiering in 2005 and 2006—a veritable century ago in terms of “progressive representation.”) The answer is the most stereotypical plastic surgeon Grey’s Anatomy creator and showrunner Shonda Rhimes can muster: a self-described “man-whore” whom the characters call “McSteamy,” who’s defined by his abs, his jawline, and his propensity for sexually harassing his subordinates. He’s so distasteful, his character’s unforeseeable twist is that, when an out trans person arrives in episode 43 (played by an out trans person, the splendid Alexandra Billings), it’s shocking how kindly he treats her, chastising his colleagues for misgendering her, and respecting all of her demands, even when they run the risk of killing her. This melodramatic plotline leans on one more silly trope: the character turns out to have breast cancer. The episode’s formulation is that what makes her a woman will kill her. Her trans rage is that she’d rather die than stop taking hormones or be forced to put off indefinitely her impending vaginoplasty.

I’m sorry to say that this scenario will someday be more relatable than anyone could possibly bear.

27

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. Bex, a white teenager wearing a beanie, looks out at their parents through the gridded rectangle of an exam room window.

“Intersex” is one of many diagnostic categories the medical industrial complex simply cannot handle. “Neurodivergence,” another. Youth, writ large—yet another.

You can replace “the medical industrial complex” here and elsewhere with “Western medicine,” “settler colonial conceptions of health and wellness,” or any number of equally pejorative but accurate phrases.

Your first dealings with the medical industrial complex revolve around your asthma. You’re hospitalized for it for the first time when you’re age 5, or 7, or maybe 8 years old, all of which would be good times for the doctors to ask you about your mental, social, and familial health.

They don’t.

Instead of meeting with a social worker or child psychologist (either of whom would make your life tremendously better or tremendously worse, with no possible in-between), you’ll be sent home with inhalers and a cool little rubberized tube, clear in the middle, cerulean at the ends. You might imagine a pinkish equivalent given to cis girls, but you’d only assume this because the rest of your dealings with the medical industrial complex will be so fucking gendered.

You’ll start seeing mental health professionals when you’re age 19, or 20, or maybe 22 years old (you’ll spend those years so intoxicated, you’ll remember too little, though the uglier truth is it’s maybe psychosomatic—a word/concept you’ll come to consider hopelessly out of touch). For over a decade, you’ll see more therapists than you can count, and almost every single one will be a straight, cisgender white woman. To them, you’ll be something of a sensitive, effeminate buffoon—well, that’s the gender you’ll be performing at the time. (Buffoon can be a gender, though the medical industrial complex has no place on its forms where that could possibly be noted.)

Because they’re cishet white women, and because the stories you’re drawn to up until that age are written by white gay men who portray cishet women as both enviable and irreparably damaged, or else by women of color who portray white women as both malevolent and sympathetic, you’ll simultaneously envy, distrust, pity, and want to heal them—these women who are supposed to be helping you heal (heal your mind, heal your brain, heal your heart; the medical industrial complex doesn’t have a decent metaphor for this; you’ll eventually prefer something like “soul”). You’ll always feel this way when you meet white, or cis, or straight people, which is why you’ll need to avoid them at all costs.

You’re trans. I.e.: you have too much empathy, and yet you have no choice but to conserve it.

Still, these women won’t be the reason you’ll be unable to tell your story.

They simply will not know any better.

Nor, at that point, will you.

By the time you get to therapy, you will have had more access to educational resources than most adults whom you encounter. You’ll have been given the opportunity to familiarize yourself with more theories, more histories, more information and analytical tools than most people on Earth. (This is not an asset: the well-known graph showing that personal happiness plateaus—and, in fact, decreases—beyond a certain threshold of income probably maps one-to-one to formal schooling. Trust your intuition here; people with/earning PhDs do not, on the whole, seem particularly thrilled to be alive.) What this means is that the people who are supposed to help you do not have the capacity, as you do, to detect invisibility—to know the future, to manipulate time and space as a storyteller can.

Heterosexuality is a perceptual cage from which you’ll have already escaped, but it is a cage enclosed by another cage (cisness) enclosed by another cage (whiteness). It will take you decades to escape these and other cages, and still, one foot will remain entangled in the bars—the price of making it out alive at all. When you do finally make it out, you will understand what it is to be gifted and talented. It is to know better, and for this to be a hindrance. Self-awareness, as the Book of Genesis implies, is the original, ultimate prison.

43

Still from episode 43 of Grey's Anatomy. A white male doctor seated across from Donna, a white trans woman, looks down as she tells him, “I've wanted this since I can remember. I've waited forever. I'm not stopping now.”

At 31 years old, you’ll thank God that the parking area for UCLA Beverly Hills Medical Center is underground. It means you’ll only be visible to the public for a short half-block walk, dressed awkwardly in a tight, purple V-neck sweater; a fluttery, ankle-length skirt; your favorite pink New Balance sneakers; your cherry red Ray-Ban eyeglasses, your fingernails painted to match; your face and arms shaved; your lips colored pomegranate by a makeup brand called Fenty (you haven’t heard of Rihanna yet, but you will, later in life, refer to her as our lord and savior), though your lips won’t even be visible under your N95 (you haven’t thought much about pandemics yet, but you will, later in life, whether you want to or not).

Your breasts will be small, your hair short, so to you, you’ll still look like a cis man in dress-up, and not in a good way, despite the string of cis celebrities who are now awarded brand deals and public praise for what would get you pilloried and pariahed in elementary school and junior high. Really, you’ll just look like a crossdresser (or, in your more self-deprecating moments, a brick), but crossdressers (and bricks) still fall under the trans-with-an-asterisk umbrella, and besides, there’s no one way to be trans. Forget this at your peril. Coming out as trans-with-an-asterisk will, thankfully, be the last time you’ll deal with feeling not [insert identity marker here] enough. But this is not yet your concern.

Outside UCLA Beverly Hills Medical Center, your concern will be safety. This is a fucking joke. There are few places safer than the journey to the Center’s esteemed Gender Health Program, cradled by the shell of your partner’s Mazda, your meals at this time in your life assured, your care at this particular place certain to be excellent. There’s a paradox to this, too. Your suicidality will always be entangled with survivor’s guilt. You’ll feel less suicidal, for example, when you start hoarding some of your estradiol, to give to any stranger who wants it, and you’ll feel more suicidal when you realize this isn’t particularly helpful unless you hoard your testosterone blockers too—which you can’t because your body’s not supposed to contain high levels of both hormones at once, and which you won’t because testosterone is what you’re most afraid of (the thing around which, completely irrationally, you feel least safe). As has already become another habit, you fear the things inside you more than anything outside.

This fear is misplaced, of course: there is nothing inherently wrong with testosterone, nor anything especially holy about estrogen either. The fear you will identify is the fear of ill-gotten gains, of the bargain you have made in order to transition.

You will be forced to tell a story, as many trans people must, in order to earn the medical designation of transgender. That story will have needed to include a neatly legible tale of persistent gender dysphoria and, wherever possible, indications that you exhibited signs of the diagnostic criterion at as early an age as possible (you’ll share with your doctors a childhood affinity for American Girl books, and how, when your mother unhelpfully used stickers to relabel them as American Boy books, you understood even then that she wanted you to paper over your idiosyncrasies, when what you wanted instead was affirmation that you were, indeed, an American girl). That story will not have room for facts like that, at my age, you like the look and feel of your beard, particularly the centimeter-length it stays at once you commence your hormone therapy; that you like to wear your old boy clothes sometimes, in an Avril Lavigne, tomboy punk, intersex Bex kind of way, which means you sometimes pass as male (and which is why you cannot wait for your breast augmentation, the clearest sign to any onlooker that they’re not dealing with someone cis); and that you don’t feel particularly strongly about any pronouns and only choose she/her upon transitioning because it seems powerful politically. In truth, if pressed, you’d identify as an imp, the way trans-with-an-asterisk legal scholar and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray did at the end of her/his/their/imp’s life.

The version of your story that omits these things, the version of the story you initially tell: it’s dangerous because it is compelling. Narratives always run the risk of ossifying upon their telling. We don’t yet have adequate technologies for presenting texts as malleable, ever-changing fluids. Whiteness, for example, cannot function without the rigid persistence of stories of superiority; cisheterosexism cannot succeed without the deceptively timeless fable of the nuclear family; colonialism cannot conquer without the infrastructure for disseminating narratives that justify dispossession at all costs.

You, like so many before you, will be tempted to offer up counter-narratives in response, to write the same old stories replacing the people at the center with people like yourself. You will feel the pressure to claim that representation matters, because it will feel good to finally be at the center of things. When you make this awful bargain, you will in the process justify the utility of story as a weapon, as a means for positioning yourself as superior to those whose lives and experiences cannot fit the mold of a story that’s neatly legible—to anyone, but particularly to our proliferation of industrial complexes, medical and otherwise.

You will someday suspect that if every art form were valued equally—if they all offered the same amount of pay—most people would not choose storytelling. Maybe no one would choose it at all. Language is a tool of communication, of interaction. When transmuted into an art performed in silence and solitude, it runs the risk of calcifying, and even the least capable doctor among us knows that calcification, in the wrong place at the wrong time, will lead to certain death.

52

Still from episode 53 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey lies on a gurney, intubated and surrounded by medical equipment, pale and presumably dead.

Whenever you visit a doctor, there is risk.

Your doctor may fail to diagnose you, may misdiagnose you. They may prescribe the wrong medication, or the incorrect dosage. They will likely ask the wrong questions, fail to consider the appropriate conditions. They are nearly guaranteed to fail to ask you about your home life, about the meaningful parts of your family history that have nothing to do with your internal organs. Even the doctors who are supposed to ask about these things will do it wrong (and you can replace the word “doctors” here with several equally pejorative but accurate phrases).

It is sensible, then, to be afraid. To feel unsafe. Watch enough episodes of Grey’s Anatomyand you will understand how often small amounts of wrong decisions can lead to certain death.

In episodes 25 and 26, Meredith Grey, the show’s titular character, nearly dies while helping surgically remove unexploded ammunition from a patient’s body cavity. Seconds after the explosive device is removed and transferred out of the operating room, it goes off—just a few yards in front of her, launching her in slow motion away from the member of the bomb squad who has become a cloud of pink mist. The ultradramatic two-parter during which this plotline unfolds is responsible for turning the show into a primetime juggernaut, and is bookended by oblique references to Meredith’s suicidality, which lie just beneath the surface of the show. They’re hidden under what looks like, to the casual viewer, the stress of having your abusive mother succumb to Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. (You, suicidal to varying degrees from ages 9 through 31, are not the casual viewer.)

Meredith states, at the beginning of episode 25, that she doesn’t want to go to work because she feels like she’s going to die today, her premonition prompting concerned looks from her friends, all surgeons. These are the kinds of looks you’ll become inured to after receiving them enough times; clairvoyance, since at least the time of Salem, has always been dreadfully suspect.

Still from episode 27 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey is looking disdainfully at someone off-screen, her eyes flooded with tears.

In the section labelled “27,” you’ll write about your excessive educational privileges, and the resulting curses this lays at your feet. You’ll skip over what actually happens in episode 27 of Grey’s Anatomy: how Meredith’s near-death experience compels her to visit her estranged father, who is at least partially at fault for the abuse Meredith experiences throughout her life at the hands of her emotionally tortured mother, and whom she visits in order to make this clear. In both 27's, someone is being centered at the expense of another—a practice for which there is always an unbearable price.

In episode 52 of Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith is unwell in every sense of the word. Her mother is in the hospital, suddenly lucid and desperate to inflict abuse on anyone who enters her vicinity—particularly Meredith, with whom she is disgusted and disappointed, in part for not having simply let her die and thus sparing her the indignities of dementia. Meredith—distracted and morose, attempting to save a man’s life at the scene of a chaotic mass casualty incident—accidentally falls into the sea. Shonda Rhimes, the show’s creator and the episode’s writer, gives Meredith the opportunity to drown. Meredith elects to take it.

Technically, Meredith dies; her doctors take extreme, extraordinary measures; ultimately, she is miraculously revived. The episode never uses the word “suicidality,” but many characters, including Meredith, finally recognize that it would be appropriate.

Still from episode 53 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey, in blue scrubs, is looking down and despondent, crying while saying, “I stopped fighting.”

Over the next several episodes, Meredith’s father and his new wife will use the newly clarified depths of her depression as a reasonable excuse to grow closer to her. Their daughter and newborn grandchild were, after all, successfully operated on by Meredith’s friends in episodes 46, 47, and 48. Meredith’s second near-death experience finally grants her a more positive outlook on life, and a chance at building a healthy relationship with her father and his family.

Because of this silly chain of events set in motion seasons prior, when Meredith’s father’s wife can’t stop hiccuping in episode 58, they will opt to visit Meredith’s hospital, where—in episode 59, after some rare but plausible complications—Meredith’s father’s wife will die.

Neither Meredith nor her father will ever be the same.

Over the course of the rest of the series, at the rate of about one episode per season, Meredith’s father will succumb to the bodily toll of alcoholism, of trauma that has ultimately been accumulated over the course of an entire lifetime.

It is possible, perhaps likely, that the preceding does not happen if Meredith does not visit and accost him in episode 27, making their estrangement about her and her alone (forgetting that a parent who abuses a child is just as likely to abuse a spouse). It is possible, perhaps likely, that the preceding does not happen if, in episodes 46 through 48, Meredith does not take the neonatal surgery needed by her father’s child as an opportunity to reconnect, rather than recusing herself as a doctor, or distancing herself as a relative stranger, as would have been ethical and appropriate (but then Meredith does not see things in black and white, hence her surname, and the title/premise of the show). It is possible, perhaps likely, that some or all of the preceding is Meredith’s fault. At least this is how Meredith’s father sees it, giving him a supposedly good reason to drink himself to death.

These kinds of plot arcs make for what we consider a good story. The trajectories of the new century’s most well-received TV shows embody this kind of seamlessness, like a puzzle that can only be put together one way. Every decision affects everything that comes after. Sometimes these shows are called “TV novels.” They employ the literary technique of making every plot point matter, a departure from a time when continuity on TV was an afterthought rather than the norm. On TV, as in novels, it effectively clarifies for the audience characters’ development over time. It’s effective because it’s how we perceive our lives.

Still from episode 52 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey is drowning, barely able to keep her head above water.

When you write this, you’ll be in episode 52 yourself. The metaphor you’ll use to describe your transition is the murder of your body’s prior occupant and his replacement with the woman you’ll become. You’ll give that man the opportunity to drown, then you’ll make him take it.

Other things will be out of order.

You’ll reconnect with your father before the quasi-death you’ll think of your gender transition as, in which you kill your father’s son and birth him a daughter.

You will, upon reconnection, make your estrangement all about you, thinking him at least partially at fault for the abuse you experience throughout your life at the hands of your emotionally tortured mother, but forgetting that a parent who abuses a child is just as likely to abuse a spouse.

Your mother will, at this point in your life, have become estranged too, so she will not yet have succumbed to dementia, at least as far as you will be aware of.

As for your father’s wife, she will not be dead; nor will he have blamed you for her death; nor will he have subsequently spiraled into alcoholism.

But if or when these things do happen (because they are possible, perhaps even likely), you will have remained at such a frustrating emotional distance that you will blame yourself—for being incapable of imparting whatever it is you possess, for being unwilling to listen to them tell their own stories, for failing to recognize that the trauma they’ve accumulated over their lifetimes has taken a lethal toll on their bodies. There are no doctors they would be willing to see capable of alleviating or addressing their pain. Sometimes what stands between injury and health is the decision-making of a relative stranger.

Still from episode 52 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey, mid-drowning, looks resigned. The show's subtitle reads, “There's more I have to say.”

It is always easy to talk about how you were failed. It is much harder to talk about how you failed others. There is no amount of pain large enough to make self-reflection a desirable alternative. You will hurt people, harm them, fail them, wrong them. You will too many times prioritize the inert, immature ideas in your writing over the living, breathing organisms in your orbit who need more than to simply watch you work. You will condemn those who care about you to emotional destitution because you will think your gifts so critical to your species’ survival, you will fail to realize this is one of the most inhuman things a person can possibly do.

You are a star, but you are not the star. At your age, you may be told you are the best and the brightest, but everyone around you is as good and bright as you. You’re a kid. I’m sorry everyone around you will fail you so many times. I’m sorry you will go on to fail everyone around you so many times. There’s no such thing, in real life, as a subplot; as a side character; as a filler episode. There are few things more dangerous than what your contemporaries call “main character energy.” I know why we draw on it as a power source. People like us have been denied at every turn everything we deserve: life, love, respect, dignity. For a queer and trans woman of color to center herself in a white supremacist, cisheterosexist world is a form of resistance.

A form. A semblance.

An acting-out. A roleplay.

Practice. Rehearsal.

Not necessarily the real thing. Not necessarily the thing you need.

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. A doctor uses scissors to cut Bex's long hair short, as Bex looks into a handheld mirror with a hesitant, careful satisfaction.

Jules Gill-Peterson proclaims, in Histories of the Transgender Child, that no human being on Earth has earned the responsibility for the trans children in their care. You will read this and immediately concur, though it would take you at least as many words as contained in her book to argue this idea successfully to anyone outside your immediate vicinity, anyone who has not lived the childhood of a trans kid. You must find a way to bridge this unbridgeable gap. Transness, like queerness, can lurk in anyone’s future, and thus in anyone’s past. A childhood can become a trans childhood at any moment, the moment a trans adult comes out to themselves and/or those around them. Your story does not belong to you alone. It belongs to everyone whose story might become yours. Your story, after all, is only mine because you will become me. The right to care for a trans child is earned in the aftermath. It is forged in the making.

Right now, your father is likely sitting uncomfortably at a table too small for his liking, on the first floor of the last home he may ever inhabit. He will someday die but may beforehand undergo some kind of quasi-death too. He may become, for you, another mother, or a parent of some new and indeterminate gender.

Right now, his wife is likely thinking of and troubled by the uneven trajectories of her children, distracting herself with another novel, downloaded onto the e-reader you will gift her on one memorable, abundant Christmas. She will someday die, but may also someday undergo the same kind of quasi-death too.

Still from episode 43 of Grey's Anatomy. Donna, a white trans woman patient in a flowery, monochromatic robe, is saying, “My name is Donna.”

Their stories are not to be dismissed as footnotes in the story of a younger, nimbler, more formally educated relative/stranger. Their stories may be no different than your own. They may only be able to become themselves if you are willing to share your story—to contextualize it with care, as you will someday do for yourself with the story of Meredith Grey. This is the only value of knowledge and experience; this is self-awareness minus the self; this is the reason you exist at all.

If the people you care about are to be trans, they will have also been trans children. If you will someday become me and reach back through time to who you are right now, then reach across time towards the people around you when you get here—in other words, now, before the moment has passed.

You are, for better or worse, as much doctor as patient.

Look around you.

Say hello.

53

Still from episode 53 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey is sitting cross-legged in blue scrubs on a hospital floor. Her head is down, and she's surrounded by a growing pool of water.

There is an arrogance to the writer’s life mirrored in the attitudes of the surgeons on Grey’s Anatomy—of cutthroat flesh-cutters, hungry to rearrange muscle and bone so their patients might survive the special maladies that afflict them.

The person you will someday love—yes, even you, a brilliant, beautiful, broken trans girl, will get to be loved before it’s all over—calls writing a weapon of mass destruction. He is right, though when we refer to destruction en masse, we miss that a bomb is just an accumulation of scalpels. Open up the bodies of the bombed and you’ll see the same kinds of cuts a doctor might make.

This means that you—yes, even you, a brilliant, beautiful, broken trans girl—are dangerous. Your gift—the ability to know and change time and space as only a storyteller can—is and will always be dangerous.

Sometimes women—white women, cis women, women of all kinds who’ve amassed their little share of power and choose to wield it unquestioningly—will look back five, ten, or twenty years later, and see how much they’ve healed. They will count the ways in which oppression wounded them; they will touch the scars and wonder how it’s possible for such soft, fading marks to metaphorize what was once life-threatening damage. Really, the amount that they’ve healed equates to how much they leaned into the winnings of apartheid, of a world order that will give anyone who wants it a reasonable excuse to believe themselves superior. Sometimes what looks like healing is a compromising of the soul.

Young girl who is me, you would do well to acknowledge the danger you pose. Every choice you make matters. Your suicidality—the thing that draws you to Meredith Grey, the thing that draws you and me together through time—may yet be a glory.

Learn from what’s happened. What will happen. If you’re to survive the special maladies that afflict you, it is your duty to review. To be reviewed. Your show. Your story. Give it—sacrifice it, share it—freely.

If you do it with care, it may even someday serve as your guide.

---

This essay is part of an in-progress book project tentatively titled The Trans Girl's Guide to Modern Television. A version of this essay was published by Under the Sun in May 2024.

contenido: 3 poemas

notas sobre el contenido: discusión de la muerte

---

otro manifiesto

todo lo que existe

es una colaboración

entre los que quedan

y los que ya no están.
esto quiere decir que

todos los que han vivido

(todo lo que ha existido,

todo lo que podría existir,

todo lo que hubiera podido existir)

esta aquí,

con nosotros,

siempre.

una oración

¿usted escribe desde adentro de un lugar?
usted escribe desde adentro de un lugar.
usted escribe

desde adentro

de un lugar.
usted escribe.
desde adentro de un lugar

usted,

escribe.

reviento

una diente de león dejando caer sus pétalos

hasta que solamente queda

su corazón.
un girasol dando vueltas tan rápido

que sus pétalos ascienden y caen

como nieve.
un bosque lleno de viento,

un tornado hecho de

pinas.
un planeta siempre gira:

volteando, sin

regresando.
una canción que se repite.
una canción

que se repite.

length: 2 days

Palestinian writer and professor Refaat Alareer was murdered by the settler colonial state of so-called Israel on December 6, 2023. Forty days later, on January 15, 2024, people around the world partook in “Read for Refaat,” a day of action that kicks off a week of solidarity events focused on reading out loud and in public Alareer's work, the works of other Palestinian writers, and works about Palestine. You can learn more about “Read for Refaat” on Publishers for Palestine's website, and you can read, download, and listen to what I read aloud that week here.

On April 26, 2024, 142 days after Refaat's murder, his eldest daughter Shymaa, her husband Muhammad, and their newborn baby Abd al-Rahman were also murdered by so-called Israel. This news comes just as yet another potentially pivotal moment for anticolonial organizing in the imperial core unfolds, with thousands shutting down and occupying college campuses across the settler colonial state of the so-called U.S., as well as abroad, in solidarity with Palestinians.

On April 27 and 28, I will be posting recordings of myself reading selections from the texts listed below, which include those on Verso Books's “In Solidarity with the Students” page, available to download freely there and below. If you record yourself reading from these texts and want to make those recordings available on this page, please contact me at Work AT RiveraErica DOT com.

Note: Some of the audio files may be temporarily unavailable while I finish migrating this site from Ghost to WriteFreely. I'll remove this note once all the files are re-linked.

---

Source materials

In order to download the free books from Verso's website, you need to provide an e-mail and contact information; you can provide false information, but in case you're uncomfortable with that process, I've made them available for download them here.

Please note that I'm unsure why the first file is labelled as a ZIP file, but it should open up as an EPUB file. Also, for the selections from Verso, I apologize that I couldn't offer PDF files (though I may add them later on), as well as for the fact that these EPUB files are stamped with my name at the front. Finally, Ghost caps my downloadable files at 5 MB, and one of the books (Springtime, edited by Tania Palmieri and Clare Solomon) is 6.1 MB, so I'm not able to offer it for download here (yet).

From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, edited by Sai Englert, Michal Schatz, and Rosie Warren

Download EPUB of From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine (866 KB)

Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind

Download EPUB of Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind (560 KB)

Human Capital by Laura Robson

Download EPUB of Human Capital by Laura Robson (399 KB)

The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, edited by Audrea Lim

[Download EPUB of The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, edited by Audrea Lim (449 KB)]() [Temporarily unavailable]

The Verso Book of Dissent, edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim

Download EPUB of The Verso Book of Dissent, edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim (678 KB)

Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America, edited by Carla Blumenkranz, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Sarah Leonard, Sarah Resnick, Nikil Saval, Eli Schmitt and Astra Taylor

Download EPUB of Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America (2 MB)

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

Download PDF of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (1 MB)

TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS: ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION by Within Our Lifetime

Download PDF of TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS: ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION (2 MB)

April 27, 2024

content/trigger warnings: discussion and depiction of someone's home being destroyed by bombs

---

“I couldn’t bid my apartment farewell” by Tawfiq Abu Shomer, from From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine

“I couldnt bid my apartment farewell” by Tawfiq Abu Shomer

0:00/214.29405895691611×

“I couldn’t bid my apartment farewell” by Tawfiq Abu Shomer

“I couldn’t bid my apartment farewell” by Tawfiq Abu Shomer.m4a

3 MB

This article was first published in Arabic on the website of the Palestine News Network. It was translated by Meriam Mabrouk, first published in English by the Institute for Palestine Studies on their blog and republished in From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine with permission.

I apologize to my library, filled with the memories of many years, because the Apache pilot only gave me a few minutes’ warning to save myself before they sentenced my small apartment to death. My heart aches for my apartment, which I built brick by brick with my own hands. I painstakingly selected each material, each tile, treating them as companions that would accompany me through life. I carried the packages of tiles with tenderness, just as I carried my firstborn child in his cradle. The joy I felt as each tile was laid and dried was immeasurable. I even distributed sweets around Gaza when I completed the row of tiles! Yet, the pilot decided to unleash their hatred upon my cherished tiles, dimming their brightness that I loved so deeply.

I had thought my son’s apartment next door would be a refuge when mine was destroyed. I had built it too, and another for my daughter. I reveled in the thought of having three independent apartments, all adjacent to each other. But a single bomb from a murderous occupier stole this happiness in mere seconds. The bomb obliterated the memories of choosing my bedroom furniture, which I had bought in installments. I regret not bidding it a final farewell.

I yearned to stand in the middle of the living room, filled with stories and memories, and salute this sanctuary of memories one last time. But all that remained were torn pieces after the bomb’s destruction.

Stepping on the fragments of my kitchen brings me immense pain. The pilot of the warplane took away my taste for traditional food, leaving me longing for my favorite flavors. How do I regain the flavor of my ceramic coffee cup, which had been a close friend to my writing projects? This cup was with me when I published four books, drops of bitter coffee seeping onto my pages. Now, I leave my traditional kitchen without seeing this cup because a bomb covered it in ashes and scattered its fragments among the rubble. My hands trembled as I collected its broken pieces.

Can I ever rid my two favorite plates of the smell of gunpowder? One plate was adorned by an image of a small black rose in the middle of white marble, the second was made out of polished metal. How can I get used to tasting food in my new shelter and forget the taste of these plates?

What caused my loss of appetite? At first, I thought it was due to losing everything and becoming homeless. But then I realized it was the absence of my two favorite plates. I can’t imagine ever adjusting to life without them. I never anticipated that the destruction of my apartment, and those of my son and daughter, would resurrect memories of my first cradle, seized by the Israeli occupier. Today, I feel closer to that first cradle than ever before.

Despite everything, I will continue to echo the words of renowned poet Pablo Neruda: “You can cut all the flowers, you can kill all the birds, but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”

---

content/trigger warnings: graphic discussions and depictions of genocide

---

“The end of colonial government” by Samera Esmeir, from From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine

“The end of colonial government” by Samera Esmeir, Part 1

0:00/286.25269841269841×

“The end of colonial government” by Samera Esmeir, Part 1

“The end of colonial government” by Samera Esmeir Part 1.m4a

4 MB

“The end of colonial government” by Samera Esmeir, Part 2

0:00/291.523628117913861×

“The end of colonial government” by Samera Esmeir, Part 2

“The end of colonial government” by Samera Esmeir Part 2.m4a

4 MB

Danger looms heavy over Palestine. Israel’s production of the end times in Gaza is an enactment and a rehearsal, an attempted prefiguration of another end to come. If it is to be resisted, this danger must be diagnosed and named. What to say of this settler-colonial drive to incessantly start from scratch, to repeatedly empty the land of its Palestinian inhabitants, to insistently wish them out of existence, to tenaciously preempt the revolts of the colonized, nay, to prevent the thought of the thought of revolt? What does this relentless destruction disclose about the present and the future danger facing Palestinians from the river to the sea? And how does one mark this danger without reproducing its terms, affirming its destruction, indeed, taking on the position of the genocided?

The news media designation “the Israel-Gaza war” does not allow for comprehending this danger, but neither do the more critical formulations pointing to state violence, apartheid, and even genocide. These are all attempts, laudable and significant, at describing and opposing Israel’s subjugating and exterminating drive unleashed against the Palestinians. But even these formulations fall short of diagnosing the repetitive violation of an already violated land and people, the ongoing destruction of a life fashioned “from the ruins of earlier colonial desolations, the reprise of military raids in the hospitals that house the wounded from the same raids, and the insistence on transforming the largest open-air prison in the world into an open-air death camp. By centering the colonial mass killing of civilians and the apartheid-based government of the remaining living, these formulations do not catch up with the repetitive, cyclical rhythm of Israel’s obliteration machinery. Attention to this rhythm reveals Israel’s desire to wish Palestinians out of political and historical existence, to eradicate their historically cultivated way of life, to render them soulless bodies, to obliterate the conditions of the Palestinian inhabitation of the land—in short, the desire not to govern Palestinians.

To diagnose the looming danger, a sense, however intricate, of the details of the catastrophe in Gaza is necessary. These details fade when the images and reports from Gaza have become indistinguishable, even consistent and totalizing. But this totalization is not the outcome of the catastrophe as much as its modus operandi: catastrophizing totalizes to paralyze. Against this totalization, we may wish to find political instruction not in the hallowed ideals of an international order but in the details of the catastrophe: children who have no surviving family members, mothers who have lost their children, men who have ceased to be reliable witnesses and victims, elders reliving past forced displacements, injured girls dying from pain, bodies wrapped in bags, schools turned shelters and then death quarters, mass graves, dismembered limbs, disintegrated buildings, emptied neighborhoods, leveled streets, wrecked schools, fallen trees, squashed (infra)structures, flattened surfaces, banished shades, ubiquitous debris, blood that springs from the dust—land and limbs saturated with the two primary colors of destruction, gray and red. There are also the 1.7 million uprooted. Forced to move south to a yet smaller territorial stretch, many of them are murdered along routes of supposed safety while others are forced to leave behind loved ones unburied. Then there are the teachers, doctors, bakers, cooks, journalists, nurses, morticians, civil servants, volunteers, workers, and so many others; in their steadfastness and commitment to others, they have an intimate knowledge of the disaster in its collective, yet detailed, manifestations. These details tell of a danger not restricted to the killing of civilians but to the colonial desire to obliterate a place and its history, to evacuate the souls of the living, and to diminish the number of the governed. They also tell of formations of anticolonial steadfastness and resistance from the rubble.

Distinguished legal experts call the obliteration in Gaza genocide, which is the gravest of all crimes under international law. They note that Israeli officials stated their genocidal intentions and acted upon them. If technologies of artificial intelligence have availed civilians, en masse, of the means for collective obliterations, advanced weaponry and military systems provided by Western“states have executed the genocide of the Palestinian hostage population in Gaza.

As a legal category, the crime of genocide names actions calculated to bring about the destruction of a group as a whole or in part. It refers to the killing of members of a group, causing an injury to them, and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Acts of genocide target the physical life of group members in the present. But the crime also describes attempts at exterminating or minimizing the biological future of the targeted group. Genocide includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Understood legally, then, acts of genocide target the life of the group in the present as well as in the future. The child is the figure extending the extermination in the present into the future. Eliminate children in the targeted group now, and you eliminate the future of this group.

Genocide is a clarifying frame for the unfolding Israeli extermination of the Palestinians. But what genocide in a restricted, legal meaning cannot fully frame are all those colonial obliterating acts that target not only the biological and physical life of a people but also houses, neighborhoods, mosques, churches, schools, streets, and finally, land—all those spaces that are not only the infrastructure of life in the present, but also the sites in which memory dwells, in which one can tell a story about her life, in which one inherits a collective life and can participate in it, in which one can perceive herself as a part of a more extended history, a past that exceeds her, and a struggle that marks her. Put differently, in centering the targeting of physical and biological life, present and future, genocide cannot frame the other target of the Israeli obliterating machine: the collective expansive existence of a resistant, resisting people, in short, its way of life, as it has been cultivated in struggle over time. Genocide as a frame is not sufficient to capture how Israel has been forcing Palestinians in Gaza, time and again, to start over and again, as though they did not exist before. The crime of genocide, despite its attention to physical, not only biological destruction, does not frame the destruction of the historicity of the Palestinians. This latter cruelty exceeds the gravest of all crimes under international law. It is what animates the repetitive, cyclical rhythm of Israel’s machinery of obliteration.

Israel seeks to eradicate a political collective existence cultivated historically through a bond with the land. This desire is expressed through the manifold efforts to terminate whatever protections the land offers Palestinians. Lacking a state to affirm their peoplehood, and in an international order that does not recognize non-peoples and whose constitutive unit is the state, the Palestinians have cultivated their sense of collective being, including their peoplehood, through their bond to the land they inhabit and from which Israel, through military and legal means, has repeatedly expelled them. The land has provided Palestinians with a collective existence in the world. As it maintains them in the world, the land protects them from vanishing into anonymity and endows them with historicity. The danger of vanishment was confronted in 1948 when the Zionist forces conquered most of Palestine and uprooted the Palestinians to make space for Israel. In Arabic, this vanishment from the land was named the Nakba, the Catastrophe. It indexes a double loss: of the land of Palestine and, consequently, of Palestinians. This is why the Nakba, or the severing from the land, was never accepted. Acquiescing to it would have been equivalent to consenting to self-destruction. Hence, the dual position of the Palestinian subject: she is at once marked by the catastrophe and cannot but struggle against it.

---

content/trigger warnings: discussions and depictions of genocide, scholasticide, and epistemicide

---

Selection from Chapter 6, “Academia Against Liberation,” from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind

Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind, Part 1

0:00/255.67199546485261×

Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind, Part 1

Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind Part 1.m4a

3 MB

Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya, Wind Part 2

0:00/253.628662131519261×

Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind, Part 2

Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind Part 2.m4a

3 MB

Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind, Part 3

0:00/244.154920634920641×

Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind, Part 3

Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind Part 3.m4a

3 MB

Before the mass expulsion of Palestinians in the Nakba and the founding of Israel, Palestinians pursued higher education at leading universities in Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo. After 1948, Palestinians displaced from their homes and lands—whether to the Gaza Strip, under Egyptian governance, or to the West Bank, under Jordanian authority—continued to travel for study at universities across the Middle East as well as in the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States. Yet with the 1967 military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israel immediately escalated its war on Palestinian education. Palestinians were severed from neighboring Arab states and their travel severely restricted, closing off their opportunities to pursue higher education abroad. “Forcibly isolated from the intellectual and political life offered at universities across the Middle East and beyond, Palestinians in the OPT were compelled to establish their own system of higher education under the Israeli military government and despite its many obstacles.

The first comprehensive Palestinian institution of higher education was Birzeit University, on the outskirts of Ramallah. First opening its doors in 1924, the school of Birzeit later became one of several Palestinian institutions to offer associate’s degrees. But with Israel’s occupation, the institution’s administration began preparations to offer full four-year degree programs. Several years later, after waging a struggle against Israel’s military government to overcome its restrictive orders and demands for permit applications, the institution began enrolling students for bachelor’s degrees in 1972. Birzeit University became the first Palestinian university and has been a major center of Palestinian intellectual and political life for generations of Palestinian students.

From its early years, the Birzeit University campus was a site of Palestinian protest and a symbol of youthful civic resistance to Israeli military occupation. A hub of student activists advocating for Palestinian self-determination and articulating revolutionary anticolonial politics, the university was immediately regarded by Israel as a threat to its rule. The Israeli state was also particularly concerned about the university enrolling and potentially radicalizing Palestinian citizens of Israel and thereby fueling a broader Palestinian mobilization and liberatory politics. Almost immediately after Birzeit University opened its doors to enroll bachelor’s degree students, Israel began deploying the military to destabilize its educational programming. In 1973, the Israeli military closed the Birzeit University campus for two weeks, the first of fifteen such closures. Upon its reopening, the Israeli military governor of the occupied West Bank routinely invaded the campus to inspect classes, demanding copies of all assigned reading lists and textbooks for review and Israeli authorization. This campaign of harassment and suppression of academic freedom escalated with the Israeli military and Shin Bet arresting and interrogating senior Palestinian faculty and administrators and ousting and deporting the university’s president, Hanna Nasir, to Lebanon in 1974. Birzeit University and other institutions of higher education across the OPT have since become sites of continued struggle: the Israeli government has waged persistent campaigns to limit Palestinian education and repress resistance to its military rule, while Palestinian students and faculty have repeatedly defied Israeli military orders and continue to insist on their inalienable rights to education and to academic freedom.

Israel escalated its repression of Palestinian universities, then, in tandem with Palestinian popular uprisings. When the First Intifada erupted in 1987, Israel immediately targeted universities, labeling them sites of rebellion. Between 1988 and 1992, the Israeli military ordered the closure of Birzeit University, along with all Palestinian institutions of higher education, forcing faculty and students into underground study groups operating entirely off campus. The Israeli military surveilled and raided these study groups, terming them “cells of illegal education.” Students and faculty were arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to military prison for “public order” offenses for their participation in study groups, or even just for possession of a textbook. Nevertheless, Palestinian students and faculty continued to hold classes in defiance of Israeli military orders and kept the university alive. Sustained resistance across the OPT and the Palestinian Academic Freedom Network campaign in the United States that generated Congressional pressure ultimately forced Israel to permit Palestinians to return to their campuses.

With the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, Israel tightened its control over Palestinian movement and further limited opportunities for students to travel within and outside the OPT to pursue higher education. The Israeli government severed ties between academic institutions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, preventing joint research, teaching, and collaboration across Palestinian universities. In the occupied Gaza Strip, the Israeli military issued a blanket travel ban, preventing students from studying at West Bank universities or at institutions abroad. In the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military constructed a checkpoint on the main road to Birzeit University to hinder student access to campus, limiting their window for learning and using their commute to class as an opportunity to surveil and interrogate them. While Birzeit University was most frequently targeted throughout the Second Intifada, the Israeli military routinely invaded all Palestinian universities to intimidate and arrest both faculty and students.

Israeli military invasions of Palestinian campuses remain routine, including the use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. In 2014, the Israeli military raided the campuses of Birzeit University, the Arab American University in Jenin, and the Palestine Polytechnic University in Hebron, confiscating computers, banners, and student union materials. In 2016 and 2017, the Israeli military raided student union offices and other buildings at Birzeit University and Al-Quds University, damaging property and confiscating computers, flags, banners, and political materials. Following repeated raids on the Palestine Technical University in Tulkarm, in 2015 the Israeli military formed a temporary base and shooting range for military training on campus.

Throughout its use of the base, the Israeli military injured at least 138 faculty and students with live ammunition, and the campus became a site of regular student protest met with violent repression by the Israeli military. In 2018, the Israeli military regularly stationed soldiers outside the Palestine Technical University campus in the Al-Arroub refugee camp, where they surveilled, interrogated, and injured students. The Israeli military raided the Al-Quds University campus in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis every year between 2015 and 2019, confiscating political materials and injuring students. At Al-Quds University’s Hind al-Husseini women’s college in Sheikh Jarrah, Israel banned an academic conference in 2018, detaining conference participants and temporarily shutting down the campus as punishment. In offensives on the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military has repeatedly targeted Palestinian universities and colleges in aerial and land strikes, killing and injuring students, faculty, and staff. The strikes continually destroy campus infrastructure, which is rebuilt and then again devastated. In the 2008–9 offensive, fourteen of the fifteen institutions of higher education in Gaza were damaged by Israeli military fire, with six of them directly targeted. Three colleges and six campus buildings were entirely destroyed. In the 2012 bombardment, seven universities were damaged by Israeli airstrikes. In the 2014 offensive, Israel targeted Gaza from the land, sea, and air over the course of fifty-one days, destroying or severely damaging over 18,000 homes and vital infrastructure, including 148 schools and eleven higher education facilities of three universities. Israeli missiles struck the campus of Al-Quds University in the Gaza Strip, killing twenty-two Palestinian students. A missile fired at the campus of the Islamic University in Gaza left its facilities in ruins. The University College of Applied Sciences was also targeted by missiles, destroying its administration building, conference hall, computer laboratories, and many classrooms. These aerial strikes inflicted millions of dollars of damage on these universities, plunging them into an even deeper financial crisis generated by the Israeli siege.

On May 11, 2021, with the start of the Unity Intifada, Israel launched an eleven-day aerial offensive on the Gaza Strip. The bombardment killed 252 Palestinians, including 66 children and 5 university students.52 Israeli fire wounded over 1,948 Palestinians and internally displaced over 107,000 during that campaign alone. Aerial strikes made over 2,400 homes uninhabitable and damaged over 50,000 units, including the headquarters of major Palestinian, Arab, and International media outlets.

Samir Mansour watched his printing house and bookshop reduced to rubble as the Israeli military destroyed the Kahil building adjacent to the Islamic University, which also housed several major cultural and educational centers and labs with expensive equipment. The bookshop was beloved by the university community and frequented by its students. It housed diverse collections of academic and literary texts, some of which were originally translated by the bookshop. Mansour had carefully collected and printed over 100,000 books across genres, proudly serving his community for decades. He described arriving at his bookshop after the bombing:

“The scene was frightening, as the building had come to ruins with only a few books covered by thick dust spared from the destruction. Some books could be seen to be strewn across the floor at great distances from the place, as they washed away 40 years’ worth of memories since the founding of a library that served as a beacon and outlet for academics, intellectuals and science students in Gaza.”

During the eleven-day offensive, all seven universities in the Gaza Strip were forced shut. In the wake of the campaign, they faced a long struggle to fully reopen. Israeli forces had bombed the Gaza Strip data center and communications network, disrupting internet service and forcing universities to suspend all online educational activity, which was essential throughout the pandemic. The Palestinian Minister of Communication reported that bringing in the necessary equipment to restore internet service in the Gaza Strip was impeded by Israeli restrictions, which he called “inhumane.” University students in the Gaza Strip decried the devastating effects of Israeli strikes. Iman Safi, a student at Al-Aqsa University, described the bombings as “causing a complete paralysis of life,” immediately derailing the academic trajectories of the hundreds of students who were maimed, whose homes were destroyed, and who lost family members in the aerial strikes. These students, Safi reported, were “in a state of dispersion, instability and homelessness.” Palestinian faculty and students know that the repeated aerial strikes on their universities are not coincidental. As Adnan Abu Amer, a professor at Ummah Open University, explained: “Educational buildings have always been primary targets for the Israeli forces in any attack on the Gaza Strip.” With Palestinian education regarded as a threat to Israeli rule, Palestinian universities are defined as military targets.

April 28

content/trigger warning: discussion of mass displacement and refugee exploitation

---

Selection from Chapter 7, “Refugees versus 'Palestine Refugees': Race and the Postwar International Regime,” from Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work by Laura Robson

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 1

0:00/261.66276643990931×

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 1

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson Part 1.m4a

3 MB

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 2

0:00/258.96925170068031×

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 2

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson Part 2.m4a

3 MB

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 3

0:00/167.227097505668921×

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 3

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson Part 3.m4a

2 MB

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 4

0:00/211.229024943310661×

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson, Part 4

Selection from Human Capital by Laura Robson Part 4.m4a

3 MB

The racialization of the refugee regime, already evident in the divergence between the destinies of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees, now became obvious in a still more dramatic way. In the 1948 war that birthed the new state of Israel, three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs were made refugees—not only by military strategies of expulsion during the war but also, perhaps more to the point, by the subsequent Israeli refusal to allow them to return. The attempts of the newly established “international community” in the form of the United Nations to deal with this new refugee problem layered on top of the older one revealed, above all, the extraordinary nonuniversality of the emerging refugee regime. The fact that different types of refugees were to be treated differently had, of course, been an evident aspect of the system from its early days in the 1920s, when the League explicitly declared that not all displaced or stateless people would qualify as refugees. Now, as the new Israeli government—backed by the UN, the IRO, and any number of private humanitarian organizations across Europe and the United States—moved Holocaust survivors out of European DP camps and into the towns, neighborhoods, and houses of exiled Palestinian Arabs, this long-acknowledged truth would become a formal legal commitment; indeed, the basis for a permanent legal premise that some kinds of refugees were entitled to more rights than others.

The emergence of Palestine as a test case for a racialized international refugee approach was, in part, a consequence of the UN’s own central role in the simultaneous birth of Israel and of the Palestinian refugee crisis. In November of 1947, following the British declaration of intent to give up its mandate over Palestine and turn the problem over to the UN, the General Assembly voted in favor of partitioning Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab “territories”—a decision whose implementation, as many at the time recognized, would necessarily involve the forcible expulsion of enormous numbers of Palestinians from the mooted Jewish nation. (At the time of the vote, Jews owned between 6 and 7 percent of Palestine’s land and constituted approximately 35 percent of the population; a previous British proposal for partition in 1937 had acknowledged that such a “solution” would require the removal of about 300,000 Palestinian Arabs, to create a much smaller Jewish state than the one being proposed now.) With the outbreak of war, this eventuality came to pass very quickly. In the first stage of the war, the so-called civil war that took place between December 1947 and May 1948, Zionist militias forced more than 300,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages. The second stage, in which the surrounding Arab countries declared war on the newly established state of Israel, saw the expansion of Israel’s borders well beyond the area proposed in the UN’s partition plan and the expulsion of a further 400,000 Palestinians. By the time of the armistice in 1949, a majority of the prewar Palestinian Arab population—some three-quarters of a million people—were refugees.

The United Nations, because of its own role in the conflict and because Palestine’s prominence made it a useful venue in which to assert the importance of this new form of internationalist authority, positioned itself in the war’s aftermath as the primary arbiter of the Palestine-Israel question. In December of 1948 it established something called the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), which was intended to take over the tasks of the former United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte (murdered in September of 1948 by Zionist terrorists) and work towards a “final settlement” of the Palestine question. With respect to the refugees, the commission declared that those “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.” To this end, the UNCCP was instructed to facilitate their “repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation … and the payment of compensation.”

This first showdown between the new state of Israel and the newly formulated United Nations clearly demonstrated, and not for the last time, the total impotence of internationalist rhetoric in the face of Israeli intransigence. The Israeli government refused utterly to entertain the idea of Palestinian return, declaring not only that they would constitute a security threat but that “the reintegration of the returning Arabs into normal life, and even their mere sustenance, would present an insuperable problem.” Given the realities on the ground (quietly supported by the UN’s power brokers in the form of the United States and the Soviet Union alike), officials turned their attention instead to the question of relief. In late 1949 the UN created a new agency it called the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to assist Palestinian refugees with the practicalities of their displacement. This organization—established as a temporary one whose mandate would have to be re-upped every three years—essentially marked the abandonment of the political project of a “final settlement” in favor of basic material relief for the displaced. The UNCCP, charged with representing Palestinian interests in the search for a political settlement, slowly withered into invisibility. UNRWA, charged with the nonpolitical provision of practical aid on the ground, was serving nearly a million people by 1951.

The introduction of these two organizations, representing an approach to Palestinians that purported to believe both in the necessity of immediate assistance and in the possibility of an eventual political solution, provided cover for the United Nations to make the decision—as one legal scholar has put it—“to exclude Palestinians from the ‘universal’ refugee regime incorporated in the 1950 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Statute and the 1951 Refugee Convention.” This exclusion rested on two separate legal bases. The first was through the Refugee Convention’s definition of the “refugee” specifically in terms of the Second World War, as someone who had had to leave his place of residence as a result of “events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951” (one option for signatory states) or “events occurring in Europe or elsewhere before 1 January 1951” (an alternative option) and now could not return “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted.” It was a definition whose application to refugees from a now-disbanded or ethnically reconstituted former colony was not at all clear—a circumstance Palestinian refugees shared with any number of other non-European displaced populations; for instance, the millions of people displaced almost simultaneously in the violent expulsions of Indian partition in the summer of 1947 and totally ignored by the makers of this new refugee regime. The second, arguably more functional basis for Palestinian exclusion was that no one could claim the protections of UNHCR who was receiving aid from another UN organization—so, in practice, the prior existence of UNRWA rendered impossible aid from UNHCR or protection under the convention.

Though it was by no means a unique experience for a displaced person to remain unrecognized as a refugee and therefore ineligible for UNHCR protection, some specificities of the category of “Palestine refugee” gradually emerged. Apart from the short-lived United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency, disbanded in 1958, UNRWA was (and remains today) the only UN agency to deal solely with refugees of a single nationality. Its mandate did not really clarify who counted as a refugee or what their rights might be, and in the first years after the war relief providers often found themselves having to make essentially ad hoc decisions about who did and did not qualify for aid. As one Quaker worker in post-1948 Gaza noted, “We now feel the necessity of broadening our definition of refugee to include a considerable number of people who still live in their own houses but have been completely deprived of any source of livelihood due to the fact that their land is in the hands of the Jews.” Gradually, though, the UN began to enforce a procedural approach to Palestinian refugeedom that echoed its practical approach to the Refugee Convention from which Palestinians were formally and legally excluded: enforcing restrictions on the UNRWA rolls of refugees, limiting registration to those who had been physically displaced (rather than denationalized in place, as had happened to many Palestinians in Gaza), and requiring legal demonstration of claims of expulsion. By 1951 UNRWA had a serviceable legal conception of a “Palestine refugee,” which it began to use to determine eligibility for registration: “Persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” Palestinians who fell under this rubric were ineligible for UNHCR assistance or protection—partly because the UN did not want to confront Israel over its refusal to allow the refugees reentrance, but also because its Arab delegates feared that UNHCR resettlement practices would strip Palestinians of their right of return. “The refugees should be aided pending their repatriation,” the Saudi delegate declared, “repatriation being the only real solution of their problem.”

In other words, something truly important was happening here: the international community, in the form of the United Nations, was actively making the decision that there could be different categories of refugee, based on place of origin and method of dislocation. No one at the UN seriously disputed that the million or so displaced, denationalized, dispossessed Palestinians filing for international assistance by the early 1950s were, by any contemporary measure, refugees. But because they were not Europeans, and because they had been expelled as a consequence of a political project strongly supported by the UN’s main showrunners, and because admitting the permanence of their expulsion would anger so many in the rest of the Middle East and beyond, they could not be given the same political status as—for instance—the European Jews now being ushered into Israel with the approval and help of the IRO. The solution, then, was to subdivide the concept of refugee into different, distinct, particular legal categories, and to limit the possibility of seeking asylum in the West to only one of them. In the first instance, the concept of separate and unequal refugee status would apply almost exclusively to Palestinians, under the specific metrics of the 1951 convention. But the more general idea of differentiated refugee status based on point of origin and cause of expulsion would eventually come to dominate global systems of refugee law—not least because, as the Palestine case had now demonstrated, it offered a way to maintain a theoretical commitment to humanitarianism and the principles of the Refugee Convention while in practice closing off access to asylum, citizenship, and political rights to all but a select few.

Many relief workers within and without the UN, sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and not infrequently hostile to the Israeli state that had violently expelled them in the name of ethnonationalism, understood refugee return as the only real and just solution to Palestinian exile.

But the UN, and especially the Americans, had very different ideas. In April of 1949 Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson went on a tour of the Middle East. He was preparing, on the president’s instruction, to put together a new scheme for the mass resettlement of Palestinian refugees across the Middle East: a solution that would help stabilize the new Israel and guarantee its demographic future as a Jewish state, but also provide invaluable labor for various regional development schemes. To this end, he put together a new commission and called it the “United Nations Middle East Economic Survey Administration,” a name that subtly but clearly reflected the intent not only to disburse refugees across the whole of the region but to do so with an eye to American-backed economic development and labor needs. When the UN’s formal negotiations with Israel broke down over Israeli refusal to allow refugees to return, George McGhee—the new assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs—convened his own meeting, to which he invited not only the main refugee relief agencies but also commercial enterprises with interests in the region: “Oil companies, construction firms, a steamship line, and State Department personnel.” To the disappointment of AFSC representatives, the conversation revolved not around repatriation but resettlement: in Iraq (an idea proposed earlier by the OSS and the M Project), in the Sinai, in the Jordan Valley, and in Syria. As in some earlier American proposals, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA, Roosevelt’s 1930s-era project to harness the Tennessee River as a source of energy for comprehensive rural development across much of the American South) served as a kind of model for developmentalist schemes that might now be deployed in Jordan and Syria—to the mutual benefit of the American companies charged with their execution, the commercial enterprises around the region who required political stability for continued profit, and the impoverished refugees who would populate the area in lieu of going home.

The Israeli military government set up its own formal committee on transfer almost immediately upon consolidating its grip on its territory. Its refugee-related goals were very clear: to prevent refugee return, devolve responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem onto the surrounding Arab states, move refugees away from the newly created border, make the preservation of a Palestinian national identity impossible, and moderate the diplomatic pressures on the Israeli state from external actors. Though there was overlap between these goals and those of some American administration members and hangers-on (Joseph Schechtman, for instance, moved from the OSS and the M Project directly into a position with the Israeli Cabinet Transfer Committee where he advocated for a mass transfer of Palestinians into Iraq), the Israeli and the American positions were not the same. For Israel, the rationale for and commitment to enforcing continued Palestinian exile was clear. For the United States, the priority was to stabilize the region enough to permit unencumbered commercial and strategic development, a goal that could encompass any number of different approaches to the refugee problem and did not preempt irritation with what Truman, at least, often viewed as uncooperative behavior on the part of Ben-Gurion and his new administration.

---

content/trigger warning: reference to war crimes, discussion of genocide, some questionable language?

---

“Rebirth of Student Activism” by Hesham Yafai, from Springtime, edited by Clare Solomon & Tania Palmieri

“Rebirth of Student Activism” by Hesham Yafai

0:00/250.656507936507951×

“Rebirth of Student Activism” by Hesham Yafai

“Rebirth of Student Activism” by Hesham Yafai.m4a

3 MB

One of the most remarkable features of the present wave of student activism has been its ability to place itself within a wider struggle: both with other areas of UK society under attack from the Coalition government, and with people in other parts of the world fighting for the right to education. We can see the former in events such as Goldsmiths’ occupation of Deptford town hall to protest at council cuts, King’s College London students joining RMT workers at tube stations to protest ticket office closures, and LSE students joining the fire-fighters on picket lines in solidarity with their efforts to prevent unfair contract changes. But to appreciate the movement’s internationalism, we need to return to 27 December 2008.

On that date Israel began its 22-day offensive against the besieged Gaza strip, in what Amnesty International has since called the ‘22 Days of Death and Destruction’. The official United Nations investigation into the attack found that Israel had committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. While international leaders the world over trotted out their usual, tired chorus of rehearsed ‘condemnation’, in the UK hundreds of thousands of people joined demonstrations across the country as anger spilled out onto the streets.

Yet the anger did not end there. Students returned to their campuses and began to organize. There was an acknowledgement that the conventional democratic channels had failed them. To effect real change students realized they needed to self-organize and move to unconventional channels to fight the battles that lay ahead. In early 2009 students from the School of Oriental and African Studies occupied one of the university’s largest galleries in solidarity with the people of Palestine. The myth of the so-called ‘iPod generation’ had been exploded; suddenly, there was talk of the reawakening of the spirit of ’68. Dozens of universities soon followed, including Essex, Birmingham, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester.

Students at the occupations began to organize effectively, ushered along by the visitations of experienced campaigners and activists from Tariq Ali and Alex Callinicos, to Ghada Karmi and Lindsey German. Lecture shut-outs, walkouts, demonstrations, stalls, stunts, planning meetings and large-scale events embraced colleges and universities up and down the country. It was truly a rebirth of student activism, transforming disempowered students to front-line resisters, spurred on by an injustice committed halfway across the world and signalling a new era in student politics.

The fact that British students were protesting in their name was not lost on the Palestinians, who sent thousands of messages of support and gratitude. Today, education in Palestine continues to come under attack from a variety of directions: the cantonization of the West Bank severely delays and periodically prevents students from reaching classes via check-points; the controlled Palestinian economy means tens of thousands of students wishing to study cannot afford to do so; strikes by UNRWA workers mean classes have to be cancelled; students constantly face risk of arrest and trial before a military court; schools and universities face closure and transmutation into military barracks; and so on. Despite these many adversities the Palestinians continue to struggle on and, remarkably, still exhibit the second highest literacy rates in the Arab world.

An international Right To Education campaign, which has its roots in Birzeit University, is gathering momentum: in the summer of 2010 it held an international conference in the West Bank. Right to Education week is slowly becoming a permanent fixture, and is helping to link up the various struggles across the world for a free and fair education. It is a struggle that crosses national borders, as has also been seen through the acts of solidarity with French and Greek students and workers.

So from Gaza to Golders Green, via Greece and beyond, a collective struggle is beginning to take place. International solidarity is back on the agenda and the sentiment of a shared cause is pervasive. Perhaps this sense of unity is best expressed through the statement most manifested in messages of solidarity between different groups across the world: ‘Our struggle is your struggle, and your struggle is ours.

---

content/trigger warning: discussion of economic precarity, use of an anti-Roma slur?

---

Selection from Chapter 1, “The University and the Undercommons,” from The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

Selection from The Undercommons Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Part 1

0:00/278.05605442176871×

Selection from The Undercommons- Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Part 1

Selection from The Undercommons- Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Part 1.m4a

3 MB

Selection from The Undercommons Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Part 2

0:00/281.58548752834471×

Selection from The Undercommons- Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Part 2

Selection from The Undercommons- Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Part 2.m4a

3 MB

Selection from The Undercommons Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Part 3

0:00/99.657097505668931×

Selection from The Undercommons- Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Part 3

Selection from The Undercommons- Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Part 3.m4a

1 MB

THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNIVERSITY TODAY IS A CRIMINAL ONE

“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.

Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow low-down maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.

What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work of the university. Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of that onto-/auto-encyclopedic circle of the state” that Jacques Derrida calls the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical withand thereby erased by it. It is not teaching that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened.

The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually one should not teach for food. If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teach- ing is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it with having the “deter- mination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.” “Have the courage to use your own intelligence.” But what would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call “the beyond of teaching” is precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance? And what of those minorities who refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond (that which is beyond “the beyond of teaching”), as if they will not be subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste. But their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of the enlightenment. The waste lives for those moments beyond teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase – unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the enlightenment truly better than this?

Perhaps the biopower of the enlightenment knows this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must. But even asit depends on these moles, these refugees, it will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmatic – why steal when one can have it all, they will ask. But if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the underground of the university, into the Undercommons – this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is at the same time, the only possible act.

In that undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualisation of research. To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. The undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood.

As Fredric Jameson reminds us, the university depends upon “Enlightenment-type critiques and demystification of belief and committed ideology, in order to clear the ground for unobstructed planning and ‘development.’” This is the weakness of the university, the lapse in its homeland security. It needs labor power for this “enlightenment-type critique,” but, somehow, labor always escapes.The premature subjects of the undercommons took the call seriously, or had to be serious about the call. They were not clear about planning, too mystical, too full of belief. And yet this labor force cannot reproduce itself, it must be reproduced. The university works for the day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general, of the trouble of labor. It will then be able to reproduce a labor force that understands itself as not only unnecessary but dangerous to the development of capitalism. Much pedagogy and scholarship is already dedicated in this direction. Students must come to see themselves as the problem, which, counter to the complaints of restorationist critics of the university, is precisely what it means to be a customer, to take on the burden of realisation and always necessarily be inadequate to it. Later, these students will be able to see themselves properly as obstacles to society, or perhaps, with lifelong learning, students will return having successfully diagnosed themselves as the problem.

Still, the dream of an undifferentiated labor that knows itself as superfluous is interrupted precisely by the labor of clearing away the burning roadblocks of ideology. While it is better that this police function be in the hands of the few, it still raises labor as difference, labor as the development of other labor, and therefore labor as a source of wealth. And although the enlightenment-type critique, as we suggest below, informs on, kisses the cheek of, any autonomous development as a result of this difference in labor, there is a break in the wall here, a shallow place in the river, a place to land under the rocks. The university still needs this clandestine labor to prepare this undifferentiated labor force, whose increasing specialisation and managerialist tendencies, again contra the restorationists, represent precisely the successful integration of the division of labor with the universe of exchange that commands restorationist loyalty.

Introducing this labor upon labor, and providing the space for its de- velopment, creates risks. Like the colonial police force recruited un- wittingly from guerrilla neighborhoods, university labor may harbor refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways. But there are good reasons for the university to be confident that such elements will be exposed or forced underground. Precautions have been taken, book lists have been drawn up, teaching observations conducted, invitations to contribute made. Yet against these precautions stands the immanence of transcendence, the necessary deregulation and the possibilities of criminality and fugitivity that labor upon labor requires. Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa- expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers. And what will the university say of them? It will say they are unprofessional. This is not an arbitrary charge. It is the charge against the more than professional. How do those who exceed the profession, who exceed and by exceeding escape, how do those maroons problematize themselves, problematize the university, force the university to consider them a problem, a danger? The undercommons is not, in short, the kind of fanciful communities of whimsy invoked by Bill Readings at the end of his book. The undercommons, its maroons, are always at war, always in hiding.

---

content/trigger warning: discussions of genocide and settler colonialism, depictions of police/state violence, references to starvation and arson

---

“TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS: ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION” by Within Our Lifetime

TO THEM WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS ENCAMPMENTS ESCALATION by Within Our Lifetime, Part 1

0:00/255.161088435374151×

“TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS- ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION” by Within Our Lifetime Part 1

“TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS- ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION” by Within Our Lifetime Part 1.m4a

3 MB

TO THEM WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS ENCAMPMENTS ESCALATION by Within Our Lifetime, Part 2

0:00/267.09623582766441×

“TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS- ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION” by Within Our Lifetime Part 2

“TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS- ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION” by Within Our Lifetime Part 2.m4a

3 MB

TO THEM WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS ENCAMPMENTS ESCALATION by Within Our Lifetime, Part 3

0:00/231.871564625850341×

“TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS- ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION” by Within Our Lifetime Part 3

“TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS- ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION” by Within Our Lifetime Part 3.m4a

3 MB

TO THEM WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS ENCAMPMENTS ESCALATION by Within Our Lifetime, Part 4

0:00/232.126984126984131×

“TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS- ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION” by Within Our Lifetime Part 4

“TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS- ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION” by Within Our Lifetime Part 4.m4a

3 MB

After over 40,000 martyrs, seven months, and 75 years, the movement to Free Palestine in the imperial core has reached a watershed moment. We have been marching, chanting, engaging in mass protest and direct action for decades, trying to show the world that our people in Gaza are worthy of life as they bear witness to 75 years of genocide. Yet it was the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and their resistance forces who won the support of the global majority.

Over forty thousand martyrs and seven months have largely demonstrated that the tactics and strategy of the movement in the imperial core has hit its ceiling. Large marches, milquetoast speeches from celebrities, half-hearted solidarity from organizations that are not committed to our liberation have taken us as far as we can go. None of it has been enough. None of it has stopped the bombs from dropping or filled the stomachs of Palestinians being starved by the zionist entity. In fact, settlers have only grown more brazen in their violence—from the West Bank where they are regularly burning Palestinian homes to Gaza where they are committing unfathomable acts of horror against men, women, and children. Our cause has always been righteous, but now the image is clear to anyone looking that we are facing a monstrous settler colony committed to our annihilation as a people.

A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire

Yet, there are glimmers of hope in the belly of the beast. Our first real glimpse was April 15, a coordinated yet decentralized action that drove people all over the world to take action against points of production and logistics networks including ports, bridges, weapons manufacturers, financial institutions and more. The day of action was framed as “a shift from symbolic action” to materially effective action.

Over the past seven months of non-stop mobilization, the repression exerted by police, administrators, and politicians that we collectively have faced in all sectors of life has expanded and intensified. Death threats and doxxing have become the norm for people of conscience since October 7th. Unions have come under attack for expressing simple rhetorical (and not material) solidarity with Palestine.

Mobilizations are often indistinguishable from cop riots, with drone surveillance, arrests of youth, and repeated incidents of cops pulling off women’s hijabs quickly becoming routine. And students have been doxxed, harassed, suspended, expelled, evicted, and subjected to physical violence for supporting the rights of an exiled people to return to their homeland.

Although the universities, police forces, and politicians intend to force the people into submission with this wave of repression—to force us to accept that this genocide is inevitable and that we must allow it to proceed or else face severe consequences—it has done exactly the opposite. Seven months of this brutal repression have laid clear the task at hand and has forced all of us to become fearless. Protestors are not as frightened by the prospect of arrest as they used to be, students have been doxxed and have no reason to bite their tongues. As we confront zionism and imperialism, we are forced to confront the fact that we are not free at all and that any mobility we have within a dying empire can be stripped away in a heartbeat. So what is there left to do?

The students of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition answered this question on Wednesday, April 17, when they set up the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on campus at 4 AM, insisting that they were not leaving until their demands were met. Columbia administration has shut down the university’s SJP and JVP chapters; suspended and evicted students; called the NYPD, FBI, Homeland Security, and even private investigators to surveil organizers; and allowed them to face a violent chemical attack committed by former IOF soldiers with no serious repercussions against the perpetrators. Columbia administration made it so deeply clear to its students that it does not stand with them and that its allegiance fully lies with the violent zionist project.

The struggle at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment has been historic, powerful, and awe-inspiring to today’s students across the country and those of 1968, who inspired the idea for a liberated zone on the lawn. CUAD has brought in students from other universities, dozens of organizations, and every day people who want to support what is seen not only as a serious escalation in movement strategy but a model for how the student movement can force power to concede to its demands. In only a few days, encampments have popped up all over the country from Cal Polytech to the City University of New York, from the ivy league to the public university. Within Our Lifetime salutes every student of every Gaza Solidarity Encampment and liberated zone and encourages everyone from all walks of life to plug into your local projects and support them however possible.

Confronting the Enemy

There is no further symbolic victory to be gained, there is no more “proving” that the Palestinian liberation struggle is just. There is no institution of power to appeal to, because every institution of power from the UN to the ICJ to our city councils and university administrations are corrupt and rotten to the core. Decades of electoral pandering has produced nothing but sellout politicians who demonize our resistance forces and our student organizing any chance they have. Years of appealing to the United Nations has produced international court rulings that are fundamentally incapable of stopping the bombs from raining on our people.

What these brave students have shown the world is that there are no allies within enemy institutions, no more appeals to be made, and certainly no more negotiating the terms of our existence and resistance. There is only an enemy to fight and a struggle that seeks victory. What is crucial in sustaining this moment is identifying clearly who our friends and enemies are. On the morning of the second day of Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, President Minouche Shefik called on the NYPD to sweep the site and arrest the protestors. This same response was repeated at NYU, UT Austin, USC, Emerson, and more. At the time this statement is written, CUNY students are engaged in a standoff with the NYPD and CUNY Public Safety. On the first day of the CUNY encampment, CUNY students and community members successfully pushed out CUNY Public Safety from the encampment who had attacked members of the encampment with no justification. On the same day, CUNY Public Safety abducted a member of the encampment on the same day, a teenager, turned her over to the cops, and charged her with a felony for the crime of allegedly spraypainting the ground.

As the movement grows into a new phase, the terms of engagement with these enemies must be made clear. We cannot treat them as anything but hostile to our goals of ending the genocide of the people of Palestine. This is why we have made an effort to study, track, and report on the activities and capabilities of the New York Police Department. If they’re willing to throw us in jail and put us in the hospital every night for the egregious crime of using a megaphone without a permit, what would they do if we were on the precipice of truly throwing wrenches in the gears of the ongoing genocide? It is no use chanting “NYPD KKK IDF You’re All the Same” if we ignore the role of the US police forces in maintaining the status quo – which, for over 75 years, has included the genocide of our people. We understand the police as a functionary of US imperialism, and we understand that the zionist state wouldn’t last a Palestinian summer without the never-ending spigot of military and diplomatic aid provided to it by the US empire. If the police can quash the Palestinian solidarity movement on the streets of the U.S., that ensures that spigot does not have a domestic threat and can continue unabated.

At the same time as we assess who the forces of repression are, we must simultaneously be cautious not to let opportunists co-opt these spaces of revolutionary potential for photo-ops. Already, we have seen a number of individuals—many of whom have explicitly condemned the Palestinian resistance or even support the zionist entity’s existence—come and take photos, or even make speeches at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. In New York, we’ve seen sell-outs like Alexa Aviles play revolutionary and take pictures at the Columbia encampment a year after helping evict Mexican and Latin American workers from Plaza Proletaria in Sunset Park. We’ve seen Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweet in support of the encampments while demonizing “outside agitators” and condemning our resistance fighters in Palestine. Well-known intellectuals get on the mic and admonish us for daring to chant from the river to the sea, and implore us to consider the legitimacy of a settler-colonial state.

They are not our allies and they do not stand in solidarity with any of us. The attempt at co-optation by politicians, celebrities, and nonprofit organizations is a counterinsurgency strategy to de-escalate the encampments, de-fang the movement, and de-mobilize the momentum we have been building for so long.

Enough with De-Escalation Trainings; Where are the Escalation Trainings!

The movement trips over itself to provide endless trainings, webinars and infographics on de-escalation tactics to avoid bad press and antagonisms with police, zionist agitators, and university administrators. This is not inherently a bad thing and we are quite aware of the need to avoid pointless confrontation in order to build our camps and consolidate our forces. We ourselves have provided Know Your Rights trainings, for example, and employed this approach in specific protests and conditions. But like everything, we have a choice in what we prioritize and a responsibility to adapt to meet the moment. We need Know Your Rights trainings: but we also need Know Your Enemy trainings. We can choose to prioritize de-escalation trainings, or we can choose to prioritize escalation trainings. We can choose to learn how to build effective barricades, how to link arms most effectively to resist police attacks, or what type of expanding foam works best on the kind of doorknobs present in our universities.

This is not rhetoric — this is an urgent need. We will all share the inspiring images coming from Cal Polytech — but who will commit to studying and adapting those lessons to fit our conditions? These questions are a priority if we are serious about turning this movement from one that tries to advance our rhetorical position on solidarity and morality to convince power brokers of the righteousness of our cause, to a movement that becomes a power broker ourselves.

We are inspired by the Cal Polytech students — a student body where a fourth of the students do not have enough food to eat and have experienced homelessness — who were the first in this current period to take a building and fight off the police. We are inspired by the Columbia students who have shown a model on how to re-establish a camp after a police sweep and how to last for days at a time. We are inspired by the Emerson and Emory students who teach us to link arms in rows and build barricades to resist police assaults. We are inspired by the USC students who teach us that a single police car surrounded by hundreds can effectuate a de-arrest. These students are creative and adapt to their conditions and represent a shift in the solidarity movement from one of symbolic power to one that understands tangible power. We call on New Yorkers to learn these lessons and prepare for the next chapter.

No to Student Power – Yes to People Power

As we wrote nearly eight years ago, “the student movement can provide revolutionary leadership to a larger movement if it is integrated among broader progressive struggles to build power for oppressed people. But if instead the student movement is limited either solely to the specific struggles of students (tuition, student resources, etc.), or is isolating students from their communities instead of uniting them, the student movement becomes non-revolutionary or even counter-revolutionary.” This has not been more relevant than today, where new student encampments are established every single day.

There are several important lessons to draw from the rejection of the student power line — lessons that have been synthesized decades ago by revolutionaries in the United States and elsewhere, particularly the student movement integrated in the ongoing revolution in the Philippines.

Firstly, we note that it is crucial to keep our focus and demands on Gaza and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. The protest itself can not be the dominating headline. And yet because our analysis of the Palestinian struggle is an internationalist one, part of these demands requires us to make our encampments and organizing relevant to the majority of New Yorkers who are not Palestinian, Arab or Muslim.

Our encampments exist in a city that is plagued by displacement, hunger, and state violence. If we limit our encampments to students alone, and on narrow demands that ignore the material context where we live — where our neighbors struggle and die — we are bound to fail. But if we force open the gates of the university, share our struggles, understand we have a common enemy and build our respective capacities to fight them on and off the campus — the universities are ours for the taking.

Secondly, it is more important than ever that we reject the so-called “outside agitator” line thrown at us by the right-wing media, cops, university administration, and so-called progressive forces. As the comrades in Cal Polytech teach us, “the distinction between student and non-student only enforces the gates between the university and its surrounding communities. By rejecting this difference we break open the gates.”

Emory students in Atlanta have declared “as clearly as possible, we welcome ‘outside agitators’ to our struggle against the ruthless genocide of the Palestinian people.” If we restrict political participation to students themselves, and only them, and turn away those at the gates, we are bound to fail. Students did not win in ‘68 by turning away the people of Harlem who threatened to storm the gates of Columbia, and neither will we now. In the eyes of our enemies in the belly of the beast, we are all outside agitators.

CUNY is for the People

That brings us to today — April 27, 2024. The CUNY encampment has entered its third day. The City University of New York is the key to New York City. What happens here determines the fate of the student movement in the rest of the City.

There are nearly 250,000 CUNY students in New York. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 New Yorkers work in the university system. CUNY has 25 campuses across 5 boroughs. The vast majority of college students (and their siblings, cousins, neighbors, coworkers…) attending demonstrations for Palestinian liberation do not go to the Ivy Leagues — they go to CUNYs. The high schoolers walking out of their schools for Gaza join the ranks of CUNY senior and community colleges year in and year out. CUNY was free for the vast majority of its existence — and our predecessors fought and won for open admissions — so that every New Yorker could go to CUNY.

That all changed when the first freshman CUNY class was majority non-white. Tuition and a restrictive admissions process was soon introduced, and now we find ourselves in a system that is desperately trying to become the UCLA of the East Coast — public in name only — whose prime beneficiaries are out of state middle or upper class students who have no connection to New York or its people. Now turnstiles, public safety officers, Starbucks, tuition hikes, and restrictive admission policies are everywhere you turn on a CUNY campus. Within Our Lifetime, formerly known as NYC Students for Justice in Palestine, was formed specifically out of this reality — Palestinian and Arab New Yorkers in the CUNY system who saw an isolation of the student movement and sought to bring the struggle out of the classroom and into our neighborhoods.

We encourage CUNY students to take stock of their campuses. Who are the progressive forces, who can be won over, and who must be politically isolated? Which buildings on your campus have the most favorable conditions to blockade doors and smuggle in supplies? Will student government and faculty push the administration to call off the cops? What of the student representatives in the Board of Trustees? Will the neighborhood the campus is located in support our struggle? Have we given them a reason to?

We salute the courageous CUNY students, alumni, faculty and community members who brought the struggle to the CUNY system. We are at your service.

length: 597 words

---

I've lost track of the number of visions I've had since transitioning. I've lost track of the number of visions I've had since birth too, but there's a lot about that life I don't remember so it isn't as concerning. It is concerning. Just not as concerning. Error is possible.

Most of the time I don't know what to say. I know what to say in real life, in my day-to-day; that's why my day-to-day life is most interesting to me now, most rich with possibility, most urgent and accessible. In the time of Art, Strike!, Art, Strike! was real life, my day-to-day. The start of its hiatus coincided with a time in my life when everything other than myself flooded into my foreground, maybe that's why Art, Strike! was possible when it was possible, maybe that's why Art, Strike! isn't possible now. I think this is a good thing. Art, Strike! occurred in something of a vacuum, a sudden lifting of certain constraints and an embracing of brand new ones. I'm in no vacuum now, that's for damn sure. I think that's the way it's supposed to be. Error is possible.

There's an essay of mine about to be published. All I need to do is send over a corrected version, and add a few footnotes for clarification. It was written in one of the last moments when I felt I knew what to say, as last year spiraled to a close and this year opened up with promise. I have a lot I want to share, there's just not much reason to share it. Not here, at least. An artist lives their life in public; their life pushes at what they make, warping it, threatening to burst through. Art distorts life, life distorts art. Distort is another word for imitate. Error is possible.

My methodology for course correction is this: what can be done to make my vision unreal. I'm always fighting against what I see. What do you call a clairvoyant who sees only warnings. When was the last time I had a vision of something good. I think the answer is never. Maybe every action is a vision of a future nearly imminent, maybe my life is an unending dream. If my visions are nightmares and my life is a dream, what do you call the process of living. Error is possible, error is possible.

[REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED], which is something of a relief. It is concerning. Just not as concerning as what will happen when they're not. It won't be [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED], there're countless [REDACTED] whose [REDACTED] [REDACTED] is all tangled up with their clairvoyance, and these are the people getting better at (untangling) it every day. I'd state what their fatal flaw is, but they already know. You already know. Error is possible.

I make lists now. I am always making lists. 1. Don't expect anything. 2. Don't plan. 3. Don't intend. 4. Error is possible. 5. Essay about the perception of time. 6. Follow up. 7. Say farewell. 8. Search. 9. Migrate. 10. Finish. 11. Reach out. 12. Reply. 13. Sssshhhh. 

Another list is coming. 

It's good to have a list to follow. 

To lead me here when I am lost.

length: ?

---

No art, for I am assured that it is indistraught—

and, yes, distaught—and, yes, disgusted—

that I throw all the hard out, distraught—

and, yes, when I start reading

so I criticize This

and don’t walk kinder on than was forcible

truth is that details always (have),

there is talk of so operating on the times I can't B

The path is never oranged

or Ionized

Ile fall apart at the sea, like

[REDARE you really are.

History will tell the story.

This escapes of art-making

(honestly, I skim the story because it is done for

the writers who wrote the words above,

who wrote each half of this work—

are still

One cyphical, jurisprudic mod. Flac my natal in the futurer

is better a skewr

then writetial, politired oath

i understant me es kind of file error

horrified Once when we see

encouraging of the shaving of edges, in its transl of the settlee;

how we want to add daun oforries; how we are currying.

To siginetic i-emes.

Flacucency or opacity rather than transpacism.

a sus attempt at speakective.

But there is also a risk, a sec you can in theory,

as I say in a poem, “keep it done

pic it coming / from the heart / messay

—I don't know where it's going,

I don't know what it's supposed to, sis

still a metapo cry, when I read

I don’t know anymalism—

founded on violeen—

I need to take myself out of it.

Maybe not mytime.)

length: 1,675 words

content/trigger warnings: discussion of capitalism, references to police/state violence, transphobia, incarceration, and colonialism

---

Note: This piece was written in early January, and I refrained from sharing it with anyone for some time. I didn’t even want to finish it. Writing incarnations drains me completely; I got two-thirds of the way through and kept telling myself not to plow forward. I did, and then regretted it. I considered sending it to a publication that was seeking sacred texts, but the word count was beyond their acceptable limit. Plus, I felt—however misguidedly—that it was worth more than the $5 I would be paid had it been accepted. Worth. I think a lot about the worth of every word these days. I don’t particularly want to. Hoarding a piece of writing has always felt unnatural, but “previously unpublished” does not yet always mean—as some publications put it—“previously uncurated,” and so I continue to play by the rules of the game.

This week, I write a poem, then a short story, then an essay, and I share them on this website immediately because I remember a time not so long ago when I published my work with more abandon. Since pivoting my efforts towards making a living from writing, I have exercised more restraint. I don’t know which approach is more acceleratory. But then the truth is I cannot win: there is no such thing as predestination, but there is such a thing as a brain. As accumulation. I take the poem, short story, and essay down and I feel a little better. Emptier. But better. I have a job to do; I still have a job to do.

Second note: Work makes love impossible.

---

In 2041, everything changed. Rivera exploded onto the abolitionist scene with her Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, which was distributed to more than a million readers worldwide, sparked numerous burnings, and was quickly banned by several major nation-states. The book, which tells the story of how an abolitionist named Erica Rivera discovers an anonymously written text that accurately prophecies the end of the U.S. empire, swapped the nefarious corporation for the colonial project writ large. But the autofiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved funhouse-mirror reflexivity but rather something much more prescient and incisive. Rivera had inserted the near-future—in name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.

Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called autofabulation, and it can be found everywhere abolitionists and anarchists are. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest name in anticolonial agitation today: Aro Nusar, Hi Hi, E.R.E.R., Cheus, I-El. The list of practitioners is long. Autofabulation describes fictional writing in which the author draws on historical knowledge to prefigure a future for themselves that has yet to become. It is frequently seen as the artistic corollary to clairvoyance, and thus as a genre of “prophetic writing” that prioritizes introspection.

This can come in different flavors: some prefer Riveran essay-length incarnations that give new life to the mundane nonfictional writing of the past, others favor the I-Elian community-based antitheory, replete with handwritten annotations, generative exercises, and iterative collaborations. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the future.

For Rivera, her autofabulist work deals with a particular kind of intimacy: the intimacy necessary for understanding one’s place in history and trajectory through time. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair activist, autofabulation, like its spiritual corollary, relies a great deal on a deep and strategic entanglement with space-time and, often, on first-hand experience building community. Autofabulists might report on the future of feminism by excavating a “speculative archive” of their potential path through it, based on the real experiences they’ve already had within it. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in traditional literature write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which autofabulists avow the prophetic techniques they use in their own writing. Autofabulation, after all, doesn’t just identify the conditions of an immediate present, it proposes a shape for the foreseeable future.

Over the next two decades, Rivera would use autofabulation to explore the work of abolitionism and anarchism. In texts like Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, as well as Antipower (2047), The Ecology of Art (2058), and The Robledo Revolution (2061), readers encounter a shadow narrative of Rivera’s actual life experience, which finds her, the protagonist, integrated alongside major historical events and figures that had yet to occur, from the Great Plague of 2081 and the Robledo Revolution of 2089, to the lives of abolitionist writers, famous revolutionaries, and other notorious autofabulists whose stories were still in the process of unfolding. Readers follow Rivera as she conducts interviews, uncovers documents, reviews footage, visits sites, and works with various kinds of sources that could not possibly exist, yet someday eventually would. These speculative archives often appear in the texts themselves, sometimes in the form of excerpts, whole articles reproduced verbatim, or even book-length investigations.

Rivera’s autofabulation diagnosed a number of problems across contemporary anarchist and abolitionist thinking. But one stood out among the rest: the problem of how to forge one’s political future when it doesn’t align with one’s present-day personality. In Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, the worldview of Rivera, the protagonist, gets upended when she begins researching the life of an unnamed, anonymous writer who had long ago accurately predicted the end of Western imperialism, and who, it turns out, had until that moment been far more interested in making a buck than in changing the world.

In The Robledo Revolution, which tells the story of how three of Robledo’s most prominent anarchists pull off a successful coup d’état on February 23, 2081, ideological commitments go out the window once the trio is informed by an oracle that the health of their comrades—and thus their revolution—will be put on the line by the sudden spread of an extremely contagious plague. Similar moments occur in Antipower, which profiles a left-wing figure who breaks down after learning she will be responsible for initiating the Trans Panic of 2035, as well as in The Ecology of Art, where Rivera, the protagonist, uncovers the accelerationist tendencies of her future self before throwing into doubt the extent to which words on paper can correlate with the future as it truly will be.

If the problem was how to understand the disconnect between the present and the future, these works, like many autofabulations, also proposed a solution. The solution, for Rivera, was that ideological commitment didn’t really exist and, thus, neither did the disconnect between one’s present beliefs and their radically different futures. Whatever apparent tension might exist could be explained away by assuming that people are never able to accurately articulate their politics as they might think they can—that the gap between action and articulation is fundamentally unbridgeable. The unnamed writer in Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization was simply incapable of understanding their status as a “reluctant messiah.” As for the three anarchists: “Only irreconcilable enemies—the certainty of impending death, and a stubborn, steadfast commitment to life—could reconcile the irreconcilable plague of 2081.” And “the ultimate enigma” of Antipower’s protagonist, the inadvertent architect of a mass incarceration, “is her absolute normality; also her absolute exceptionality.” As it turns out, people who are absolutely certain of their political futures can, in truth, still dramatically change them. The future in the end is always downstream of the future soon to be.

Are these bold arguments about major philosophical ideas? And why would Rivera want to couch them in autofabulation, or in writing at all? Part of the answer has to do with the form. Autofabulation is a genre that, by definition, blurs the history-future divide. As such, if deployed sensitively, it can have its cake and eat it too. Autofabulist writers who write about future politics can make claims on what is happening in a way that, say, a colonialist scholar cannot. This is because the blurring of past and future often persuades the writer into granting their writing a certain prescient legitimacy that would not be afforded to someone whose insight lies squarely within the realm of the presently possible.

More generally, autofabulation has a shelf-life that often exceeds that of conventional writing, especially the argumentative, narrative-based kind, such as a novel or essay. This means that it can also reach across and through a much wider span of time, potentially inaugurating the very future it predicts, as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Lastly, autofabulation is fabulation, after all. Despite the authoritative voice in the eyes of the writer, autofabulists are not beholden to what they’ve laid out for themselves. As a famous quote from Rivera’s early work reads, “[I vow] to respect the words I write as though they were scripture, for I live and die and thus am made holy.” In this way, bold predictions such as Rivera’s are more spiritual than contractual; they hinge on faith and belief, loose forms of commitment that grant the believer a peculiar (if problematic) ideological flexibility.

The other part of the answer has to do with Rivera’s stature as an anarchist abolitionist, that is, as a revolutionary who affects the public sphere through writing and publishing as well as by agitating for the publishing industry’s abolition—and along with it, conventional forms of writing. In Rivera’s case, that work has taken the form of a writing practice that began in 2023, when Rivera publicly began her gender transition, and has continued to this day. The figure of the anarchist abolitionist presents a dilemma: how do we deal with a writer whose work appears to simultaneously occupy the realms of art and anti-art? Anarchist abolitionists upset the typical understanding of art production, which turns out to be a tightly constrained arena in which ideas and feelings end up expressed according to intellectual standards that most often hew to norms of capitalism and colonialism.

These standards, however, might obscure the unique contribution anarchist abolitionists bring to public debate, namely, their access to certain forms of truth and thought through precognition that remain inaccessible using conventional conceptions of time, identity, narrative, and meaning. With Rivera, the dilemma is double: not only does she mix the present and future in her persona as an anarchist abolitionist, but her chosen genre of writing—autofabulation—has a particular knack for blurring the history-future divide.

For nearly twenty years, Rivera took advantage of these dilemmas, developing her signature form of autofabulation without regard for law or order. Ambivalences, infringements, contradictions, and other wrinkles in the practice of writing were what motivated her autofabulism, licensing her investigation and reinvestigation of her own future in fabulist form. The upshot was massive. Since the publication of Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization in 2041, Rivera has become one of the most sought-after prophets in the West, divining on all matters of history and future. She has also become a key figure of post-literature and one of the most well-known anarchist abolitionists worldwide, making her name through poems, prose, and experimental works at places such as Robledo, [REDACTED], and elsewhere.

Yet Rivera has never let go of both prophetic and historical authority in her writing. In fact, she has often doubled down on it with the publication of each new work. The author of autofabulation that attempts to intervene in the trajectory of our world, Rivera has never been satisfied with creating the kinds of texts that can claim to be cordoned off from the worlds they examine.

length: 1 triangle

content/trigger warnings: discussion of NFTs

---

Triangular diagram with two axes: at top and bottom, the words “MORE CENTRALIZED” and “LESS CENTRALIZED”; at left and right, the words “LESS SCAMMY” and “MORE SCAMMY”. An equilateral triangle at center, with its top point centered under the words “MORE CENTRALIZED” and labeled “CONTEMPORARY ART MARKET”. Annotation inside the top point reads, “ODDS OF EARNING >$1M: 0.001% ODDS OF EARNING >$100: 0.001%“. The triangle's bottom-left point, at the bottom-left corner of the diagram, is labeled “GIG ART MARKET (PATREON, FIVERR, ETC.)”, its annotation reading, “ODDS OF EARNING >$1M: 0% ODDS OF EARNING >$100: 1%“. The triangle's bottom-right point, at the bottom-right corner of the diagram, is labelled “NFT ART MARKET”, its annotation reading, “ODDS OF EARNING >$1M: 0% ODDS OF EARNING >$100: 0%“. Midway along the right edge of the diagram is a dot labeled “THIS DIAGRAM POSTED ON MY PERSONAL WEBSITE.” Midway along the left edge of the diagram is a dot labeled “THIS DIAGRAM AS AN NFT”. In the dead center of the triangle is a dot labeled “THIS DIAGRAM PUBLISHED IN A LITERARY MAGAZINE”.