The Technology of Certainty
On entitlement to nothing but my body and care-filled relationship
Deep in intergenerational conversation with my cousin who is suspicious about abolition, we walk past grazing zebras in Kenya. Black and white feasting amidst soil the color of chemical weathering. Talking with a passion as red as the clay we walk on, I am absolutely sure abolition is the only way forward. It’s a truth I feel in my bones. We looked up to find a pod of giraffes enjoying the leaves of an acacia tree less than 50 feet away and that was all the confirmation I needed. I enjoyed the cool breeze of certainty for a molasses moment, then a sticky suspicion turned the air heavy with hubris’s humidity. I remember to be sure of anything is to simply be sure of the story of the thing.
We exit the off-road truck to share the shore with a sea of pink flamingos and I remember how buoyant certainty is, how easily it can and should float away. I remember we get into the most trouble when we try to anchor what we know to the shore. An obsession with sure footing can turn into a leash. A leash on our imagination and capacity to navigate our collective vulnerability with care, creating conditions for new modes of harm. Language is a tool anyone can pick up, those who pray to rivers and those who prey on rivers.
Remember, we've been here before. We have ended slavery and we slid into Jim Crow. We ended Jim Crow, and we slid into the new Jim Crow. I do hope and I believe that we are at the end of mass incarceration, but I'm also fearful and full of trepidation that we may be slipping into something new that none of us can quite name yet unless we fully grapple and reckon with how we got here.
— Kelly Lytle Hernández1
I am certain certainty got us here. Prison abolition will introduce forms of systemic harms and freedoms we haven’t yet imagined. The forms of harm will leverage the same “technology of certainty” powered by the biocultural efficacy of language that we are currently using to organize and imagine a world without prisons. Through the “technology of certainty” we will dissemble the prison, song by song, poem by poem, protest by protest, brick by brick, until it’s rubble. But inside the rubble are always new tools, new maps, new memories, new poems and new modes of domination, new ways to bend language toward abusing power, and new ways to carve hierarchy into stone.
While on an island that was once a peninsula, ironically named after the moon, floods displaced hundreds of indigenous people and they have been replaced by hippos and water bucks2. I remember writers are like that3, flooding the world with words, displacing old stories, remembering where it all used to be, or inventing a new story all together. Toni Morrison calls our rush of imagination, “flooding”. These floods can rewrite the terrain with new stories rooted in care, collective power, and shared vulnerability and/or new stories rooted in fear, dominance, game hunts for control and more clutching to certainty. Due to the “technology of certainty”, we can be certain there will be both. These days there is a lot of flooding, the weather is unpredictable and the air is thick with storied humidity. May we maintain a sticky suspicion in our rush to certainty, in our restless search for the shore amidst all the new stories heavy with possibility and water. The aftermath of a flood creates an opening to rebuild. Abolition demands our rigorous imagination, may we never forget white supremacy does too.
Just as the poetic righteousness of abolition burns as fiery red as Kenyan soil, I remember the masters of domination are also skillful at the “technology of certainty”. How easy it is to forget white supremacists are poets, artists, visionaries, community organizers and cultural workers with a similar full body belief in the world they’re building. Maybe the practice is less about navigating change with toolkits and new innovations but more about a commitment to harm reduction while surfing vulnerability with curiosity. Maybe they’re the same practice, but the only thing that does seem trustworthy in the face of such uncertainty is the safety of the water vessel that is relationship. A commitment to anything else can, usually, and must float away. Because one thing will be true now and forever: to say you have the answer is to tell a lie, but inside relation is all the truth we’ll ever need.
I saw jewelry make music, swinging from the hips of Maasai men and was comforted by the certainty of the sound. What if the only truth we can claim is the tangled texture of the present? The vehicle slowed to let wildebeest and zebra cross the river as the hills rolled and clouds kissed mountain tops. Allowing certainty to float amidst the flooding of stories I tell myself about the future, I remembered the world was already perfect before we imagined we could improve it.
We are not entitled to efficiency.
We are not entitled to modernization.
We are not entitled to the future.
Meditating on the waves of domination certainty leaves in its wake, I grieve how unskilled we are at navigating the chaos of existence with care at the center. The planet provides and the ancestors made promises but we are owed nothing. As I write this from Maasai Mara, I contemplate my complicity in the hubris of certainty and wonder if entitlement to nothing but my body and care-filled relationship will ever be enough.
How the Mexican revolution of 1910 helped shape U.S. border policy, Fresh Air Interview with Kelly Lytle Hernández and Tonya Mosley, July 5, 2022
Flooded lakes make communities landless in Kenya's Rift Valley, By Rédaction Africanews, Last updated: 08/02/2021
Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory, pg. 99, in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2d ed., ed. William Zinsser (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), pg. 83-102