This is not a case-study, not decolonial. That I wield a colonial language to resist colonial violence is hardly subversive—that irony has a popular poetic luster, but it is not my formal nor aesthetic choice. As a deliberate lens, I’m convinced such a choice imminently protects and facilitates the structures that fail me, wait upon my failure, or even, at last, fell me. Am I liberated if I convinced my masters in their tongue to free me? With their manners of speech, conventions of thought and knowledge-making? From platforms I was afforded only by complicity and contribution? 

***

          Power is erected and reinforced by delegating classifications of usefulness or novelty. These roles—often bound to industry, social class, race, ethnicity, diaspora—wield suffocating influence on the ever contentious question of identity. Even in creating new roles, marginalized identities are positioned to function at the margins of a centered world, creating novel value with reference to the center’s limits, to the benefit of its expansion. The marginalized can hardly exist, much less be liberated, without arguing their value to concentrated power. It is no longer—was perhaps never—revolutionary to advocate by representation. At long last, my identity and its representation become one volume in the imperial catalog.

 ***

          I am as speechless as I am defiant. It is my faith that when you realize my writing has no aim, no contribution, you will join me in my endless coming and going. I have not arrived. Take my hand. Trust me. There is a chance we will discover each other, despite insurmountable distance—I am a being of desire, therefore a being of words, a being who looks for her body and looks for the body of the other. This, Nicole Brossard continues, is the whole history of writing. 

***

          Instead of viewing an instant in the lens of eternity, we can glimpse eternity in the lens of an instant. We can meet in this moment, a garden in the heart of the city. Perhaps our resistance begins in this invisible stillness, despite our constant orbit around a world perpetually restless, perpetually defining, complicating, exalting itself—ravenously laboring to annex the lunar, the other. 

***

          I reject representation. I desire a different kind of representation: not visibility, but vision. This is my gamble: I trust your vision, I trust in mine. I require of you, as I require of myself, only audacity. Not the audacity to violate, consume, comprehend, but to seek what we can never fully know yet will—and should—desire to know: the other, the non-self, the public. I believe our orbital communion, the attempted collision of our optics in art—an imaginative space both idle and dynamic, both private and public—approaches the beginning of a revolutionary cosmology. But to posture past the beginning, we must relinquish the need for arrival, which is the final border at which all empires composed of borders collapse. I dare say we replace it with the desire for play—is that irresponsible? Whatever. In our play, we look back at beginnings, past beginnings, we sprout to blazing futures. We do all this alone and together. We’ll die before we arrive. We’ll arrive in the imaginations of our survivors.

Notes

Brossard, Nicole; Trinh, Minh-ha.Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Indiana University Press. 1989.