This is an excerpt of Palestine 1492: A Report Back, by Linda Quiquivix
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That night in West Jerusalem, George Jackson taught me the importance of knowing when to lose a fight. He had even prepared me for my loss, helping me understand that losing can help make you stronger. On page 130 of Blood in My Eye:
It is not defeatist to acknowledge that we have lost a battle. How else can we “regroup” and even think of carrying on the fight. At the center of revolution is realism. To call one or two dozen setbacks defeat is to overlook the ebbing and flowing process of revolution, coming closer to our calculations and then receding, but never standing still.
Knowing when to lose a fight means knowing when to accept reality, when to accept the truth. That night in West Jerusalem, watching Israelis in willful shopping delusions with Palestinian blood under their feet, I recognized a familiar yet younger face of fascism before me.
The following year, I found myself losing again and quickly expressed gratitude. I was battling the Afropessimists, opponents whose great concern is the health of the resistance, specifically the health of Black liberation. Losing to them taught me that if we’re serious about “a world where all the worlds fit,” we need to first begin with those who do not fit.
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Afropessimism as I have encountered it is critical thought, specifically Black thought analyzing the foundational requirement for Black liberation: the world needs to be dismantled for the creation of the world anew. Afropessimism doesn’t spend a lot of time, even spends no time, talking about the creation of the world anew, which seems to bother people. Admittedly, it is nice to hear stories of resistance and creativity and love under even the worst circumstances, as if the good eventually balances out the bad in the world. Afropessimism points out that for Black people there exists no such eventual balancing out in this world. This world is set up as a great imbalance of White social life at the cost of Black social death.
Usually, this is where people get triggered most, at “Black social death.” It forces us back to slavery time, which History says is over now. Afropessimism argues that it’s not. The whips and chains may have pulled back, but the structure persists of master vs slave. Indeed, the truth of the structure of above vs below is that the structure of master vs slave persists. Master vs slave is the primary relation of above vs below.
Reality is usually the part that triggers. Afropessimists don’t seem to be saying something different from what every Black person already knows, and from what every person paying attention already knows. They’re just saying it out loud, using precise words. Afropessimism insists we first admit the world itself is a problem for Black life before moving on to questions of solidarity and resistance. It insists we admit the reality before us: that the world itself is deadly for Black life. That’s it. And maybe that’s Afropessimism’s entire project, to get us all to admit reality, a worthy project in times of genocide and willful delusions.
Nicholas Brady, John Murillo III, and Omar Ricks were the fighters I encountered in 2012, a time when Afropessimism was still more underground than it was above ground. Black Studies and Africana Studies departments at most universities were discouraging their students from reading the Afropessimists. Something about how they didn’t like the Afropessimist focus on ontology, the study of being. I was long ago convinced the dominant world is the problem, and all I did was think about ontology, the study of how the world is and how I wish it to be, the study of who we are and who else we might be. Encountering the Afropessimists was generative for me.
Brady, Murillo, and Ricks were patient, respectful, and strong while I lost almost every round, some of the fiercest defenders of Black people I have known. About the world, none of them lied to me that it was going to be alright. I found hope in that.
They were graduate students at the time studying with Jared Sexton and Frank B. Wilderson III, who I have sparred with only through their writings and lectures. All of them introduced me to the writings of Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, all of whom in my mind are part of the Afropessimist current, although I don’t think everyone calls themselves that.
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Afropessimism looks at the chessboard and points to the capacity granted to the Queen and the capacity granted to the Pawn before the game even begins. That’s all. Afropessimism looks at the world and points to the different capacities granted to people who are white-adjective and to people who are black-adjective, and the capacities granted to those in between. Their analytic points out that the structure of the world’s antagonisms is foundationally anti-Black.
The Afropessimists didn’t make the term up, but it was in their writings where I first encountered the phrase “anti-Black.” I had thought it was harsh. We were already in agreement well before our encounter that the world needs to be dismantled for the creation of the world anew. It was their insistence on the specificities of Blackness that called me in, their insistence that Black was different from People of Color.[1] They were not wrong. I just had never heard anyone say it out loud before. Since then, the term Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) has arisen, in an attempt to give both Black and Indigenous struggles more specificity.
My instinct had been to disagree about the specificities of Blackness until I realized they were describing not a theoretical reality and not every possible reality; they were describing this reality, a White-supremacist reality whose opposite pole is anti-Black, a world that tells you every day that if you want to survive and if you can’t be White, then at least don’t be Black.
I was challenged by how the category of the slave is different from the category of the colonized; how the Black condition was not legible by even People-of-Color struggles who fight only against White supremacy, not also against anti-Blackness. A struggle against only White supremacy is a struggle to stabilize one’s own condition within a world that keeps crushing Blackness. A struggle against only White supremacy is a struggle to stabilize one’s own condition on a foundation of anti-Blackness.
I was challenged by their argument at first that the Black condition was not the same thing as a colonized condition; that Black remained instead an enslaved condition; that the Black condition was not in the realm of the non-Human but of the anti-Human. I was challenged by their argument that while the non-Human can complement Human life, the anti-Human is the enemy of Human life; that whether captive or escaped, the slave is a terror to the master’s psychic life.
The master’s identity as master is possible because the master has the capacity to enslave. If the slave were to escape, there would be no more master, a terror to the master’s psychic life, a terror to the master’s sense of self. If the master would become another self, one who does not enslave, the world comes undone and a new world is born. The commitment to the capacity to enslave is the problem; the commitment to being a master is a problem, a question of ontology; the commitment to being a master means the slave is not granted the capacity to escape.
The non-Human has more capacity for protection from the Human, more capacity for assimilation into the Human. The anti-Human has neither. If you can’t be White, then at least don’t be Black is what the dominant world says to People of Color, even to People of Color who are also Black. In this world, many Black people don’t wish to be Black. To be Black is to be the truth of this world, and it’s not easy to be the truth of this world. It is a terror to the psychic life of this world to be its truth.
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Without their own legibility, Black liberation struggles are forced to use the concepts and words of others in order to be heard just a little bit, an amount not sufficient enough and a grammar not specific enough to listen to Black suffering.[2]
Non-Human is not a grammar specific enough to listen to Black suffering.
Racism is not a grammar specific enough to listen to Black suffering.
People of Color is not a grammar specific enough to listen to Black suffering.
Worker is not a grammar specific enough to listen to Black suffering.
Civil Society is not a grammar specific enough to listen to Black suffering.
Refugee is not a grammar specific enough to listen to Black suffering.
Immigrant is not a grammar specific enough to listen to Black suffering.
Colonized is not a grammar specific enough to listen to Black suffering.
Indigenous is not a grammar specific enough to listen to Black suffering.
Here in Abya Yala, in the lands Black people were brought as the White Man’s property across a whole ocean, Black people do not qualify under the dominant world’s category of Indigenous to make their claims to rights. To be Indigenous means you can point to your ancestral lands on a map. To be Indigenous means you can prove you were there before the White Man’s time. To be Indigenous means you can make a claim of sovereignty on the map.
I can point to my ancestrally Indigenous lands; I cannot point to my ancestrally Black Afrikan lands. Blackness does not exist on any map.[3] Blackness is not limited to land. Blackness, black-adjective mapped onto Black-noun, exists on the body, whether on water or on land.[4]
Enslaved is a grammar more specific to listen to Black suffering.
Property is a grammar more specific to listen to Black suffering.
When Black people were kidnapped as the White Man’s property across a whole ocean, enslavement on water and not only on land, they were stripped of their genealogies, their languages, calendars, geographies, and kin, disappearing any possible map of home in this world, becoming a stranger even when returning to Afrika in this world.[5]
In the Caribbean, unlike in the United States, Black slaves were allowed to keep their language, their families, their religion, their drum. They say Black slaves in Haiti organized a successful rebellion because of this cultural continuity. “Successful” is what official History calls a slave rebellion where the formerly enslaved are forced to pay reparations to their former masters rather than the other way around.
Reparations not for the masters but for the enslaved requires something very simple that everyone seems to resist: dismantling the world built on enslavement. That’s it.
It is clear that a new world would be the true justice. For what is justice if not the work we do to ensure the crime doesn’t happen again to you, to me, or to anybody else.
But not a lot of people are talking about a new world or of this world as a problem. Instead, it seems everyone else wants to stabilize their own position within this world, within a foundationally anti-Black world.
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I wonder if we might have a conversation about Black liberation and this world, a conversation about Palestinian liberation and this world, about Jewish liberation and this world, about all our liberation and this world.
An invitation from years ago from Frank B. Wilderson III:[6]
One of the things we need to deal with is the ways in which right reactionary white civil society and so-called progressive colored civil society really works to sever the Black generation’s understanding of what happened in the past. So right now, pro-Palestinian people are saying, ‘Ferguson is an example of what is happening in Palestine, and y’all are getting what we’re getting’. That’s just bullshit. First, there’s no time period in which Black police and slave domination have ever ended. Second, the Arabs and the Jews are as much a part of the Black slave trade—the creation of Blackness as social death—as anyone else. As I told a friend of mine, ‘yeah we’re going to help you get rid of Israel, but the moment that you set up your shit we’re going to be right there to jack you up, because anti-Blackness is as important and necessary to the formation of Arab psychic life as it is to the formation of Jewish psychic life.’
I believe that looking at it from an anti-capitalist perspective, from an anti-White supremacist perspective, the Palestinians are right—provisionally—until they get their shit, then they’re wrong. So this is a historical thing: what we have to do is remind each other, to know our history in terms of slavery and our resistance to it, but also to be able to have x-ray vision, and say that just because we’re walking around in suits and ties and are professors and journalists doesn’t mean we’re not slaves. That is, to understand things diachronically. And that will allow us to be in a coalition with people of color, moving on the system with them, but ridiculing them at the same time for the paucity — the lameness — of their desire and demand. And for the fact that we know, once they get over [their own hurdles], the anti-Blackness that sustains them will rear its ugly head again against us. So that we don’t fall into a sort of genuine bonding with people who are really, primarily, using Black energy to catalyze and energize their struggle.
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Black liberation struggles have powerful historical moments that other struggles adopt as their own without a lot of care: Apartheid, Jim Crow, Civil Rights. Most who adopt those words don’t seem to study those struggles, learn from them, disagree with them, agree with them, disagree again. The words were made powerful by Black struggles as examples of injustice and the attainment of justice. The words were made powerful by Black struggles and still Black Lives Matter quickly becomes Muslim Lives Matter, Native Lives Matter, Immigrant Lives Matter, White Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, taking away the specificity of Blackness again.
Many who speak about Palestine with a lens from above bring up the racial segregation of South African Apartheid as a comparison to Israel’s Apartheid but can’t tell you about who Steve Biko or Chris Hani were.[7] They can tell you about Nelson Mandela and quote Desmond Tutu saying Israel’s Apartheid is worse than South Africa’s ever was. They rarely also quote Tutu saying life in post-Apartheid South Africa is also worse than South Africa’s Apartheid ever was. Instead, the end of South African Apartheid is celebrated rather than analyzed. Instead, what happened in South Africa after Apartheid is supposed to be the model of justice for what should happen in Palestine.
Those with a lens from above can’t tell you that the end of South African Apartheid came at the beginning of the Fourth World War. Those with a lens from above can’t even tell you about the Third World War. They’re still calling it the “Cold” War. Those with a lens from below, from the below of the below, can tell you it’s been one long war, even before the First World War, even before 1492 when the already existing war on Blackness became a globalized war.
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Patriarchy is often described as the struggle of the masculine against the feminine, seen as humanity’s oldest contradiction. In a global war on Blackness, the enslaved fits differently in that gendered contradiction: disposable, unnecessary, undesirable, an anxiety, a terror for the reproduction of the Human species. Under patriarchy, women are exploited but have the capacity for protection; for reproduction, they are a necessity. In this world, Blackness does not have the capacity for protection. For reproduction, Blackness is disposable, unnecessary, undesirable, an anxiety, a terror.
Capitalism is often described as the struggle between the boss against the worker, seen by some as modern society’s main contradiction. The enslaved fits nowhere in that contradiction. The worker is the owner of their own labor power; the enslaved does not own anything, the master owns the enslaved and the enslaved’s labor power. The worker consents to work for the boss; the enslaved has no capacity for consent. Both boss and worker are rights-bearing subjects; the enslaved has no capacity for rights.
The enslaved is like the tree in capital: no capacity to own; no capacity for consent; no capacity for rights.
The enslaved is unlike the tree in capital: the tree is the non-Human, an important distinction from the anti-Human, an important distinction to keep in mind in times of eco-fascism, in times of diagnosing this world’s problem of ecological catastrophe as a problem of “overpopulation.”
To dismantle this world and to create the world anew, to build a world in common where all the worlds fit, side by side with all our difference, we need to start first with those who do not fit. We need to start first with those this world wishes did not fit, each in their own geographies, each by their own calendars, each in their own ways.
In times of extinction, genocide, and willful delusions, I will not lie to you that this world will be alright.
Maybe you will find some hope in that.
This has been excerpt of Palestine 1492: A Report Back, by Linda Quiquivix
Footnotes
[1] Jared Sexton (2010) “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 103, 28:2
[2] Hortense Spillers (1987) “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, 17: 2
[3] William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition (AK Press, 2021)
[4] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
[5] Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008)
[6] Frank B. Wilderson III, “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson,” Ill Will (November 23, 2014)
[7] See Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (1978); on Chris Hani, see Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid by Frank Wilderson III (South End Press, 2008)