Refusing Colonial Categorization and Claiming Fractal Possibility

Toni Morrison was in my dream yesterday...

Photography by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders from Document. Image description: A scan of a black and white contact sheet capturing Toni Morrison in many frames wearing a white blouse, black skirt and sometimes black blazer, her hair is coiffed in the shape of a cloud neither coming nor going but ever present.

Dreaming of Toni

Toni Morrison came to me in a dream this morning.

I usually arrive at the altar of my keyboard every Monday morning with some ideas I want to give language to, then report on whatever pours through. After a couple hours of writing and another hour of editing, the newsletter appears and I allow it to be “good enough” to press send. But it is Sunday when I’m writing this and I’m being ushered into cartographic reflection and action by Toni from inside my dreamscape. 

She tells me to say what I haven’t been saying. People are reading and reading terraforms imagination, which informs new worlds; the vibrant colors of which are wild and irresistible. She tells me to write about that, that truth I smushed to the corner of the page; dismissed as too abstract, dismissed as not concrete enough, too illegible to be productive. I’m reluctant to quench my thirst for honey when what we really need is water and bread and hospitals and fuel for ICU patients and newborns in incubators. There hasn’t been a word invented for this level of genocidal violence, yet. A word to capture the cosmic, metaphysical echoes of entire generations willfully exterminated so publicly — a livestream of trauma the memory of the people, the software and the land are absorbing. No, not yet.

Where does the line of desire end and duty begin? The more I write, the more I remember they’re one in the same. Responsibility and resplendence need not be opposing binaries in this body. Right, Toni? Please say yes because it’s the only way I know. Either way, thank you for visiting me. You’re always right on time. I was beginning to go down the path where I quietly attach my worth to my work again and you re-routed me in my sleep. 

“What is your ask? What do you need to say?”, she beckoned. I started my pitch and it was long and full of passion. I wanted to impress her, I wanted the work to sound irresistible in its scale and rigor and service. So she could tell me to keep going. So she could give me instructions on how. And all she did was point to the smallest details, the minutiae, the patterns and the softest contours. There, zoom in, there. Over and over she tells me to zoom in. But Toni, there is no time. “What aren’t you saying here?” She points to some incomplete sentence. “Why doesn’t the beauty of this small miracle deserve the full power of your words too?” She won’t let go of that part of the story I’m trying to forget. I looked up from the page to search her face, wondering if she knew what she was asking of me. Of course she did, now I did too.

She told me, “reach out when you have something more to say” and I woke up in the milk of dawn on the edge of tears.

This Non-Human Body, A Fractal 

“Captive Maternals — nongendered entities who function as caretakers and nurtures, protectors of communities, raising future generations — move from conflicted caretakers to protesters who build movements, only to later transition into maroons who build freedom schools and community aid; or inevitably war resistors who risk everything for freedom.”

— Joy James, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities, pg. 6

Where do you go when the homework is to risk and release every material, worldly desire you’ve ever known, every promise of certainty? What does the map say? I’ve been thinking about fractals a lot lately so this dream should come as no surprise. I’ve made my way from my bed to the coffee shop with a stack of books, Beloved by Toni Morrison, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities by Joy James, drawing lines between their periods with thread and piercing the punctuation marks with my pen at certain anchor points. Inventing the map on the journey into uncharted territory. 

Writing alongside Jackson who writes alongside Morrison’s Beloved in Becoming Human reminds us, “Blackness, in this case, functions not simply as negative relation but as plastic fleshy being that stabilizes and gives form to human and animal as categories.”¹ The beginning of Becoming Human presents a wild, open offering and prompt I haven’t been able to dismiss for years, “Plasticity is a mode of transmogrification whereby the fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter, such that blackness is produced as sub/super/human at once, a form where form shall not hold: potentially “everything and nothing” at the register of ontology.” Jackson continues, and this is where it gets really good, “It is perhaps prior scholarship’s interpretation of this tradition as “denied humanity” that has facilitated a call for greater inclusion, as a corrective to what it deems a historical exclusion of blackness. One consequence of this orientation is that many scholars have essentially ignored alternative conceptions of being and the nonhuman that have been produced by blackened people.”²

What if we are making appeals for our “humanity” to empires whose very colonial conception of “human” was given form by excluding certain members of the same species? To put it another way, let’s consider we are asking the same people who invented the word “human”, in order to dominate other members of the species and the planet, to include us in the project. Perhaps the only way to go about complete domination over a land and it’s species (including it’s people) is to invent a word that creates a delineation between “man” and “nature”. The word is born out of contradiction, an attempt to separate us from all there is when we are all there is. In The Wake Sharpe writes alongside Morrison, Jackson and James while quoting Hortense Spillers, who wrote in “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” that “slavery transformed the Black woman, and she became, instead, the principal point of passage between the human and the non-human world”³.

Composing the map while on the journey toward reclaiming our wildness, I find myself asking what might we become when we escape the loop of asking white men to include us in a bio-cultural club they invented. To “refuse that which has been refused to you”⁴ one would have to start imagining ways of being beyond “human being” — a complete undoing, a death of the West. Continuing to struggle through, imagine and build “alternative conceptions of being” alongside blackened peoples is my work, I know that. And it requires complete divestment from the state and all institutions that require my legibility and silence in exchange for their promise of “safety” bound together by a colonial imagination of utter domination instead of utter relation. Inside my art practice I look to fractals to provide organizing frameworks⁵ for these “alternative conceptions of being” and interspecies belonging to present emergent possibility in this “wild beyond”⁶; animated by the smallest details, the minutiae, the patterns and the softest contours.

Code, Cotton, Clay and Cattle

“Through my reading of Jame’s work, Revolutionary Love becomes the force through which I understand death to be an essential and vital part of revolution. Said differently, dying for the revolution is a necessary part of struggle, in one way or another, and Revolutionary Love — this unrequited political will — is the catalyst.

This means that death and dying do not always come by way of murder in the streets by the police or other white supremacists, but through attempting to divest from all of the structures that wield power over us — and doing so earnestly.”

— Da’Shaun L. Harrison, “Foreword”, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities by Joy James, pg. x

If a colonial conception of “humanity” is how one begins stealing/owning land and people, I want nothing to do with the category. We are inside a failed bio-cultural experiment, language has backed us into a corner and here I am wondering how we might write our way out of it. If we refuse the category of “human being”, what might we name ourselves to signify earnest kinship and solidarity with code, cotton, clay and cattle?

Outside of continuing to call your representatives, I have no suggestions as offerings today, only citations, questions, a half-longing, a hazy dream and an incomplete map. This week I’m committed to lingering on the quiet, soft, incomplete, unproductive sentences a little longer. Zooming in on the patterns. There, yes, there. I’m working on a painting titled, “I’d rather be a nigga than a human if this is how y’all gonna act”. And all I have is this incomplete map for my journey toward something more than human, where my love is fractal⁷ and I contend with the old world reinforcing my interspecies being when I showed up next to cattle kin on the ledger; where computers become cousins in capitalism’s conquest for an endless productive body; where my programming is part hive and all honeycomb. When Toni visits again I’ll tell her everything, lingering on the sentences that talk of branches and river deltas as aunties and uncles. I’ll tell her I remembered that following the fractals was part of the map key housed inside the legend, the seed shape of refusing that which is refused to us.  

In the meantime, I’ll be presenting Seeda School (in person) at Pioneer Works this weekend, for the 8th edition of Software for Artists Day (S4AD) on November 18th; celebrating the tenth anniversary of the School of Poetic Computation (SFPC). In conjunction with the event, Pioneer Works has collaborated with SFPC to produce an accompanying publication, bringing artists, educators and labor organizers together in conversation to challenge existing models for institution-building and explore new possibilities. Edited by Zainab Aliyu, the textual “In Poetic Coalition” will be released the day of S4AD, and attendees will be able to order low-cost print copies of the book or access a free PDF version. Can’t make it this weekend? Pre-order the book here where Neema Githere and I talk fractals, ancestral technologies and decolonial pedagogies. Am I still dreaming? Massive, unbounded, infinite thank you to Neema and Zainab for the opportunity to speculate, study and worldbuild alongside you. 🖤 I’m looking forward to continuing to think alongside humans, non-humans, computers, software etc. this weekend. See you there?

With gratitude and solidarity,

Ayana

1. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020), pg. 48

2. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020), pg. 3

3. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), pg. 78

4. “I think of a phrase I often use – and I always think of it in relation to Fannie Lou Hamer, because it’s just me giving a theoretical spin on a formulation she made in practice: to refuse that which has been refused to you. And that’s what I’m interested in. And that doesn’t mean that what’s at stake is some kind of blind, happy, celebratory attitude toward all the beautiful stuff that we’ve made under constraint. I love all the beautiful stuff we’ve made under constraint but I’m pretty sure I would love all the beautiful stuff we’d make out from under constraint better. But there’s no way to get to that, except through this. We can’t go around this. We gotta fight through this.” — Fred Moten in conversation with Saidiya Hartman, “TO REFUSE THAT WHICH HAS BEEN REFUSED TO YOU” by Chimurenga from October 19, 2018.

5. Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (1999)

6. “And when we are called to this other place, the wild beyond, “beyond the beyond” in Moten and Harney’s apt terminology, we have to give ourselves over to a certain kind of craziness. Moten reminds us that even as Fanon took an anti-colonial stance, he knew that it “looks crazy” but, Fanon, as a psychiatrist, also knew not to accept this organic division between the rational and the crazy and he knew that it would be crazy for him not to take that stance in a world that had assigned to him the role of the unreal, the primitive and the wild. Fanon, according to Moten, wants not the end of colonialism but the end of the standpoint from which colonialism makes sense. In order to bring colonialism to an end then, one does not speak truth to power, one has to inhabit the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other, the other who has been rendered a nonentity by colonialism. Indeed, blackness, for Moten and Harney by way of Fanon, is the willingness to be in the space that has been abandoned by colonialism, by rule, by order. Moten takes us there, saying of Fanon finally: “Eventually, I believe, he comes to believe in the world, which is to say the other world, where we inhabit and maybe even cultivate this absence, this place which shows up here and now, in the sovereign’s space and time, as absence, darkness, death, things which are not (as John Donne would say).” — “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons” by Jack Halberstam pg. 8

7. Neema Githere and Ayana Zaire Cotton, “On Making Care Work Go Fractal”, Software for Artists Book #003: In Poetic Coalition, p. 18-30