BY Nyala Thompson Grunwald
Every day we reckon with the mash-up of past, present, and future intersections of what it doesn’t mean to be human. It’s like we’re seeing in layers; what’s been done, what we’re witnessing and fighting now, how we imagine otherwise…the multiple ways that will make up one thing and will still be the because of so many other things. Olufemi reflects that when she says ‘feminism’, not enough people understand that we mean “revolution in the service of every living thing”. What we can understand from intersectional feminism is that, for our layered and mix-up experiences; what we carry with us, our lives, transform an intersectional outlook. We are not one thing, so we cannot resist all as one thing.
What it doesn’t mean to be human was fashioned into global modern systems in the holds of ships trafficking human bodies branded as sites of plunder. What it doesn’t mean to be human is written in ideologies that declare ‘this is human!’ so eloquently and violently, dissected in the experiments inflicted on the bodies of enslaved and indigenous women. Manipulating humanity in 5,112,644 captives trafficked to Caribbean plantation colonies alone, in the decades to centuries-long torture, assault and murder of enslaved populations. Or in the Belgian-executed genocide of at least 15 million people in Congo from 1885-1908, in the dispossession of Boricuas in their own lands, occupied by yet another invader – the US – since 1898. Or again, in the near-century long Nakba executed by a settler colonialist state forcibly displacing Palestinians and, in the last 20+ months, escalating a long-held program of ethnic cleansing, claiming over 67,000 (recorded! The true number is closer to half a million at least) lives at the time of writing. And again, in the forced displacement of over 12 million people in Sudan and the widespread war on the bodies of women everywhere. What it cannot mean to be human gets written into inequitable policy and healthcare, where freedom and rights are values to be earned, in lands that blur on the map, all stolen from indigenous peoples and bordered up in service of those who steal from them.
The extractive, brutally exploitative systems massively engineered on plantations during chattel slavery, thereafter globally reproduced a racially extractive capitalist system. These are sustained through the deeply dehumanising processes of race and racialisation and their lasting corrosiveness in the realities of certain communities, certain lands, and certain bodies.
Intersecting forms of social justice refer to these connections, partly due to the linked processes from which these injustices were/are generated. Here, the Caribbean is a site that was the historical laboratory for developing and implementing such harmful ideologies and systems, condensing the inherited, contemporary consequences of racial, colonial, ecological, and gendered trauma. Caribbean histories and cultures manifest the difficulties in surviving within those paradigms, as well as the joy in collectively creating other ways of being.
So what we are resisting intersects as much as we do. It plays into the hands of those who find ever-creative ways to oppress us if we flatten our histories and flatten this world to one dimension. It’s very convenient to reduce things to one line from point A to point B, or from space A to space Z. Geographies are physical spaces we navigate, as well as the geographies of difference that are made up to drive us into further exploitation in the service of unsustainable extraction.
Those who chartered our world relied on a vision to conquer and take – what can be wasted for the benefit of some. Geography became defined by the colonial playbook of invading land, raping and violating the bodies of women and persons indigenous to the land, occupying lands and bodies. Producing these spaces is connected to producing difference, a mapping of disposability.
The movements of Caribbean peoples in the region and diasporas speak to how this connected production shapes our relationships with people and land. These movements speak to how we can provide for ourselves, how we relate with each other, how we can care for each other, how we are cared for, especially focusing on all the gaps that are created when the solutions to these questions are not determined by us. Navigating the material and immaterial ways in which our bodies and ecosystems are and are not disposable equips us to resist global frameworks of disposability. The histories I briefly mentioned above are symptomatic of (and to some extent, defining parts of) colonialism as a politics of waste. Connected to racial capitalism, as an economy of waste. Connected to patriarchy, as a form of the violence of disposability. Sometimes I think that I’ll never stop writing, since what I write is quickly surpassed by what I learn moments later, as if I can never make full, final sentences.
So how do we survive this global engineered breakdown? Not only are we in different spaces, but some of us are in the actual frontlines of these conflicts, with immediate life-or-death realities that many of us may not have. And I can’t lie, I am in the depths of burnout (apparently I am the last to become aware that I am in this ‘chronic state of being’ and have been for awhile), so I may not be able to give the best suggestions on how we survive. Right now, survival feels like the community we build through resistance. Community is something that systems that actively make us disposable are determined to uproot. Resistance right now, doesn’t just mean organising in the immediate, it also means imagining and practising otherwise – how do we divest from the systems that entrap us in a politics of waste and death?
The networks of resistance organising in the Caribbean take up completely different forms, and may focus on distinct fronts – like frontlines. These movements may focus on the colonial-made and sustained climate breakdown that pollutes our shores more and more each year, or on advancing the betterment of gender justice for instance. As someone close to me recently said; those of us (resisting in social justice movements) fighting multiple and different frontlines do so not only in different roles, but also in/through different spaces and with distinct focus. The solidarities that make us stronger in our resistance organise multi-laterally and transnationally.
Perhaps some tactics to start: we keep informed, we keep talking, lending more voices to the truth that these same systems wish to erase. We critically ‘accumulate our knowledge’, crucial to why we resist, what we resist for…and plenty more tactics that I do not know, but if you do please share! The same way that what we resist is not a monolith, the same way we are not single things, the ways we resist are not single things. We all have distinct roles, in organising protests, in being on the ground in the streets, in donating/sponsoring initiatives, researching/knowledge production and sharing, and providing communal spaces for organising. This all requires us to seriously de-center ourselves, since the patriarchal narrative of the sole saviour hero is a myth, and incompatible with reality.
Feminists cannot do this work just for ourselves or for those we feel deserve it, our work is in solidarity. In a global complex where our rights to exist are variably questioned, invasively excavated, feminism is a politics of care as much as it is collective work that sits at the intersections of all forms of social justice.
In all the crises we are witnessing or suffering today, what remains glaring is that some bodies, our bodies, are not considered human unless determined so by certain extractive frameworks and ideologies. Our survival relies not on the terms of that which places the values of humanity as a matter of profit, but in our capacity to resist and practise humanity through communal solidarity praxis.