“We know that capitalism, which is already racial, gendered and violent, is not inevitable. And there’s nothing natural about it.” Listen to this week's episode of MovementMemos:
As someone who reads a lot of books about politics and collapse, I found the style of the book particularly captivating. Robyn and Leanne capture so much history and convey so much vision in, but the letter-writing format also makes the book a very personal experience.
And so I think Robyn really started the process. And I found that responding to that first letter… And this is something that I’ve started thinking about last week because Robyn and I were in New York City and we were talking to my friend Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, and we were talking about this component of intimacy.
So I think that that intimacy had a tradition within Anishinaabe thought and culture. And I also think, and I’ll let Robyn speak to this, there’s just a large tradition from Black feminists of letter writing and including intimacy as a set of knowledge production, as part of the movement. As a crucial part of the movement.
But what I’m realizing now that I can look backwards is to say that there is something that I think, letter writing as a form is something that at least can embody a very deeply feminist politic that is about thinking together as opposed to thinking as I. That is, I think contra-arrogant at least in the way that we were trying to do it, where it really is about collectivizing what it means to think about freedom. So Leanne and I were thinking with one another.
So I think that in setting out to write letters, it just kind of allowed us a different inroad to think in a really collective way, and to think in a really open-ended way that wasn’t setting out with particular ideas that we had about some of the main questions in the book. Whether that’s abolition, Black and Indigenous land politics, carceral violence. But allows us to approach those in a way that allows us to create more openings than closings.
So we can look at the kinds of crises that we’re seeing in the present moment. And I think it’s really important to situate those within a longer history of 500 years of racial violence, of violence against so many of the living things on this earth who are also non-human. And the same kind of logic was applied to people. We see that enslaved people had a life expectancy of less than 30 again, because it was like this idea of extracting as much as possible towards profit. And I think that if we can understand that kind of logic that sees all earthly life as only existing toward profit, that that is exactly what has gotten us into the throes of this present moment in which most human beings are disposable.
I think there’s also sort of a parallel awakening that’s maybe happening for Indigenous organizing in Canada. Because up until the 1950s, Indigenous peoples in Canada because of the restrictions of the Indian Act, weren’t allowed to organize politically. We weren’t allowed to gather more than three people. We weren’t allowed to hire a lawyer. Our resistance was very much controlled by the state.
Because we have ample evidence that up until 500 years ago when a particular mode of production of slavery and colonialism was globalized, we have countless, countless, countless examples of civilizations that were able to live, and indeed excelled in living with and in harmony, again, with the life forms around them.
And I think that it’s something that Indigenous thought, whether it’s coming from North America or anywhere else in the world, is constantly intervening and contributing. And saying our societies, our way of governing, our way of forming societies has always taken into account that we are not the only ones here. We’re sharing time and space with this diversity and cascading ocean of life, plants, animals, birds, insects.
And I think that that’s such an interesting way to live, this kind of constantly divesting yourself of whether it’s the emotional capital that you have. Or whatever gifts you have, just constantly giving those away. And then in return, being given that back. When everybody’s living in that way, it’s such a beautiful formation. And it’s only tricky when you’re enmeshed in the kind of world endings of colonialism.
So if we look back to for example, Claudia Jones trying to build a global anti-capitalist Black world in a Caribbean based in socialism, freedom of movement, of an anti-sexism and the exploitation of colonized Black women. We can see visions for worlds that were not based in exploitation, and destruction, and the mass incarceration of Black and Indigenous people. We can look to the environmental movement in Nigeria in the 1990s.
And something that is so crucial I think to understand when it comes to the state is that the history of the nation state as we’ve seen it historically emerge, has been the carceral state. So if we look to the creation of nations the world over, of course that was done as a part of and as an outcome of Europe’s massive colonial project. Which of course split the vast amount of people living all over the world into discrete geographical entities that it ruled over first as empire.
So I think that for me, really understanding that the legacy of the nation state, is the legacy that we inherit of slavery and colonialism, is the legacy of carceral controls. That we need to be able to imagine ways of governance outside of that. And I think that it’s something that me, and myself, and Leanne, and Andrea spoke about in a past conversation that was explicitly about the role of abolition in this state.
And so this question really makes me think that it’s so important to dream and vision beyond this present moment. We have to scale up our dreams. I think my ancestors might think that this whole question is ridiculous, because they had so much experience living in these beautiful stateless formations that kind of rejected hierarchy and rejected the kinds of violence that has to be embedded in the system in order to maintain the state.
One of the most moving moments that I saw, for example, was when there were several Black migrants on strike in Laval Immigration Detention Center. And then there was this beautiful letter that had been written by Black prisoners in Nova Scotia in solidarity with them, that was really about what it means to demand freedom for everyone.
And even in moments that aren’t moments of heightened movement activity, that moment I think planted roots in ways that I hope that we’ll see what comes out of that in the years ahead because it was a vastly transformational time. It was a rejection of the death-making and racial ordering of the status quo, in a moment when people genuinely believed not only that another world is possible. But like Walter Rodney says, another world is necessary.
So I think I’ve learned a lot within this Anishinaabe context from my children about power. Because as a parent, when you’ve got two humans who are completely dependent upon you, you have a lot of power. And power over even.
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