To Live and Die in the Colony: Notes on Fractured Temporality and Fugitive Thought
En tiempos de pandemia
Ballesta 9 ©2o2o
As of late, I have been thinking deeply about death. I have been thinking about the various time fracturing technologies employed by the racial capitalist patriarchal and colonial order which renders us as “out of time,” as marked for death. I am not trying to reify a Hegelian notion of racialized peoples as atemporal or supposedly stuck in time, but rather I am thinking about the ways in which the racial capitalist patriarchal and colonial orders fracture our “coherent relationship with Time through physical and metaphysical coercion” (Sawyer 2018, vii). For example, to have a coherent relationship to time requires, among other things, to be inserted within a personal genealogy, a genealogy many of us do not have access to. We search through archives, photographs, and now, 23andme, to try to re-insert ourselves within some ever-elusive family tree. We are also aware of the ways in which time is fused to space, such that to fracture one’s relationship to time results in the fracture of one’s relationship to space. Therefore, the gravity of modernity’s time-fracturing technologies also operates to fracture our locality which, according to Cherokee Nation philosopher Brian Burkhart (2016), constitutes an ontological kinship with the land through which our being manifests. A coherent relationship to time and space may be a fundamental aspect of our humanity, which makes me think about the egregious conditions our comrades in Vieques and Culebra are subjected to.
I write this in the final days of March, as residents from both municipalities have taken to the waters and to the streets to protest said conditions. The residents of both island municipalities have been subjected to time fracturing technologies (eg., inadequate maritime transport services) which also function to fracture their locality, which, in resonance with Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez’s (2020, 95) conception of destierro, “can be understood as processes of gendered racialization and dehumanization that are contingent upon the dispossession or tearing-away of a person or peoples from land.” Resistance to the fracturing of space-time in the context of these two island municipalities has been continuous. For example, historian and viequense Marie Cruz Soto (2020, 363) highlights the ways in which, in a context where the local clinic, now rendered inoperable due to damaged sustained during Hurricane María, lacked a maternity ward, “women […] placed reproductive rights at the center of the struggle [against the US Navy between 1999 and 2003]. They have demanded the right to comfortably and safely give birth in Vieques and to partake in the making of new generations of Viequenses.”
En tiempos de pandemia
Ballesta 9 ©2o2o
So, as “People who have learned to live in the womb of death” (Etoke 2019, xx), who suffer from a peculiar form of melancholy which pre-reflexively conditions our being-in-the-world [1], what does it mean to produce knowledge? For whom are we producing that knowledge and how? To what standard are we holding that knowledge? Why are we producing it, what is its purpose, and how do we engage with it? To live and die in a colony or its diaspora(s) produces a particular form of thought which, in my view, does not stem from some detached sense of wonder as the ancient Greek philosophers would have it, nor does it make claims to “objective” Truths. As I reflect on my book, Filosofía del cimarronaje (2020), and what I was thinking/feeling at the time when it was first conceived in the darkness of my home after Hurricane María, I realize it was an exercise in what I would denote “fugitive thought.”
Fugitive thought is not about representing another’s position or arguments faithfully. It is not interested in presenting a neatly constructed “logical” argument. It is even less so interested in building, or blindly adhering to, any already established framework or theoretical construct, which in the context of academia in the US, is often required to secure one’s ability to publish, receive tenure, and pay the bills, and often time sediments to such an extent that we remain faithful to it like gospel. In other words, fugitive thought does not attempt to discipline the human experience but rather stems from a sentipensar on the irreducibility of one’s existential condition, always grounded in temporality in anti-teleological fashion.
To put it differently, fugitive thought takes what it needs/wants/has access to from any particular school of thought, author, or source inasmuch as it helps the thinker put into words the pain felt in their soul. The objective, then, is not to produce “rigorous scholarship” – for what constitutes rigor is often defined by the white supremacist structures of the academy – in extractive fashion, but rather to produce a piece of writing that allows the writer to sit with their pain and come to terms with it, rather than externalizing that pain through interpersonal violence or self-destructive tendencies. It is writing that is opaque.
En tiempos de pandemia
Ballesta 9 ©2o2o
In Filosofía del cimarronaje, I am attempting to tell the story of enslavement and marronage, with broad brushstrokes, before thinking through some of modernity’s constitutive features, then finally grappling with the question of marronage in a metaphysical sense and what the potential implications could be in sociopolitical terms today. As I reflect on the text, I realize that it is a text in which I delved into my own existential condition as I grappled with the desire to remove myself from the world of European modernity in an exercise of ontological sovereignty while understanding that one must always negotiate with the hegemonic structures that seek our extermination. In other words, the book represents a movement within my own consciousness in which I am trying to articulate a tension within it, a tension which I see in Edizon León Castro’s (2015) conception of maroon consciousness; in the excerpt from my book below I engage with this concept. But more fundamentally still, there is a metanarrative at play in Filosofía del cimarronaje which becomes evident during the last lines of the book which gestures towards the way in which philosophical reflection warded off my suicidal ideation. One could say then that Filosofía del cimarronaje is an exercise in filosofía como cimarronaje.
In this sense, fugitive thought is not something practiced for clout, nor is it practiced as currency within the academy for it eludes the market of ideas. At a very fundamental level, fugitive thought is a technology of survival, one mode of many through which the thinker can re-insert themselves into a coherent relationship to time. It is a way for folks outside the academy, with scant to no resources for research, or those marginalized within it, to grapple with their suffering. There is no loyalty to frameworks, Rigor, Logic, Reason – only loyalty to our kin, our pain, and our struggle for liberation.
[1] I am thinking of Dana Miranda’s (2019) work here.
References
Burkhart, Brian. 2016. “‘Locality Is a Metaphysical Fact’ -- Theories of Coloniality and Indigenous Liberation Through the Land: A Critical Looks at Red Skin, White Masks.” Indigenous Philosophy 15 (2): 2–7.
Cruz Soto, Marie. 2020. “The Making of Viequenses: Militarized Colonialism and Reproductive Rights.” Meridians 19 (2): 360–82. https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-8308443.
Etoke, Nathalie. 2019. Melancholia Africana. Translated by Bill Hamlett. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Figueroa-Vásquez, Yomaira C. 2020. Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
León Castro, Edizon. 2015. “Acercamiento crítico al cimarronaje a partir de la teoría política, los estudios culturales, y la filosfía de la existencia.” Doctoral dissertation, Ecuador: Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar.
Miranda, Dana. 2019. “Approaching Cadavers: A Philosophical Consideration of Suicide and Depression in the African Diaspora.” Connecticut: University of Connecticut - Storrs.
Sawyer, Michael E. 2018. An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pedro Lebrón Ortiz is a former mechanic, practicing engineer, and independent scholar of philosophy, with particular focus on Caribbean, Latin American, and Africana philosophy. His research agenda currently revolves around four main areas of interest—marronage, suicide, temporality, and science and technology—undergirded by a broader interest in colonization/decolonization. His first book, Filosofía del cimarronaje, was published in 2020 through the press Editora Educación Emergente. He is currently working on a second book project titled Matarse en la colonia. Pedro can be reached at plebron.upr@gmail.com and via Twitter (@plebronortiz); his website is https://pedrolebronortiz.com/.
