Human beings are magical. . . . Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialised in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities. . . . And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.
—Sylvia Wynter1
Pause. Break. Respite. Breath. A lingering residuality.
What follows is a series of notes: fragmented encounters with spectrality and the grand ensemble; collected thoughts on philosopher and author Sylvia Wynter’s framework of the plot and plantation; meanderings on abolition inspired by a cosmology of Black radical thought; a cursory attempt to reconcile the contemporary pitfalls of Craft2 and language; and an embrace of poetry as social poiesis and the imagination as a recalcitrant register towards a future not yet attained. Make no mistake: “everything is now. It is all now.”3 In this shadowy realm of the not-quite-said, I am attempting to thread together an epistolary embrace of something else—the possibility of an otherwise. Otherwise, as in, “a firm embrace of the unknowable; the unknowable as in, a well of infinity I want us to fall down together.”4 Unknowable as in, hearken to me, hearken to the ghostly utterance of those no longer with us. Otherwise, as in, the dead always surround us. Otherwise, as in, “the future is now and all those movements that clear space and mark our struggle to live free, live better, love more, to knit abundance all that is the work of another realm that is not-here”5—yet. Otherwise, as in, “if there wasn’t a door, there wouldn’t be a key.”6
This is not an epitaph. This is an opening. The ghost in the machine is attempting to tell you a story, but perhaps you are reading another one altogether. The canary in the coal mine will “sing for death, sing for birth.”7 Despite its perpetual mutilation by a regime of violence—hearken to it. Pay close attention, then move as far away as you can. I will these fragments, words, and enunciations to remain with you.
note: hauntology <> frenzied chorus <> entry point
Borrowing from those who have come before us, Lola Olufemi sonorously points out that “experiments can and do fail.”8 What is made through this failure is an inherent reminder that the world has already ended many times. Those of us who loom in the shadows, and silently strive towards the attainment of an otherwise, are in a constant state of reckoning. After all, we have lost countless battles. We have had to scrape our bloodied knees clean in the face of state-sanctioned violence upon our most intimate trinkets of sociality; our relationship to the land and to each other; the inferior mirage of something else looming on the horizon. In an initial and cursory attempt to language and thread together a poetics of refusal, I am interrupted. The ghosts visit me, and I am jolted. A glaring tension is readily apparent. “How do I know this? Only by feeling.”9 Something akin to a spatiotemporal antagonism, in this inter/disruption, I tread a particular inarticulateness. What do I make of the remnants, the stories and memories siphoned off, relegated to an elsewhere? For those of us concerned with the otherwise, the haphazard echo and utterance of the ghost is a wayward register, a recognition that the ghost—much like the promise of another future—is neither here nor there. The logic of the ghost is a haunting of its own, “phenomenal and non-phenomenal: a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance.”10
My relationship with the ghost is altogether bound up with an attempt to assuage grief. The grief is nagging, personal, and collective. “We sing,”11 we mourn. But mourning as a politics must “avoid becoming only a litany of horrors,”12 and orient itself instead as fugitive pursuit: the process of running towards something else. Communing with the ghosts that linger is not “undertaken in the expectation that it will reveal some secret.”13 Instead, it pushes and wedges itself against the “boundary of language and thought.”14 Haunting is not merely reducible to the logics of the supernatural and mythological, an aberration. Haunting “is the cost of subjugation. It is the price paid for violence, for genocide,”15 for systematic displacement, and for planetary exhaustion. Haunting is a constituent mode of our modern social life. We are haunted, yes, but only in the name of the unyielding belief that to heal and mourn is “to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed.”16 To imagine an otherwise, and to be transversed into a belief of its existence is, as in philosopher Walter Benjamin’s profane illumination,17 a recognition that it could have been and can be otherwise. In an adamant and effervescent refusal to give up on each other, and our conviction to structure ourselves differently, I am reminded that the ghost exists in an atemporal state. It belongs to neither the past nor the present. As do we, I surmise. The ghosts birthed from empire’s original violence—destined to mutate precisely due to the relentless violence and genocidal dispossession innate to the western nation-state concept—refuse to submit their allegiance to the horizontality and linearity of time. See, what if time is not a unitary march forward, but a labyrinth—a circle that meets itself at the end, even as it begins again? If you press close to the wall at the right place, you can hear the hurrying steps and voices. You can hear yourself walking past on the other side.
A shadow, blithely interference, and a gentle muttering is a ghost’s tensor. The otherwise, much like a haunting and the non-linearity of time, “requires a commitment to not knowing”18 what is still to come. “Are you ready for that?”19 The clock has had its way with us. I am, once again, obsessing over the linearity of time. I am stuck in a time loop. Forward. Linear. Progressive? Hegemonic clock time is at play here: picnoleptic, a violent colonial regime, and a destructive architect. But recently, there’s something lingering in the shadows. In my persistent attempt to tend to an otherwise, not so long ago I stumbled across the letters my grandmother authored and enclosed to her friends, family, and confidants in the years following the liberation of Zambia; the dismantling of Britain’s so-called protectorate, Northern Rhodesia. “A voice interrupts.”20 These fragments imply the existence of a larger whole. I am left with these traces, par excellence. The ghost touches me, and touches bone. Delirium ensues. “I’ve been trying to articulate a method of encountering a past that is not past.”21 This is a kindling. This note repeats itself into our present.
The African people had no idea what these sea creatures had come for. In time, they understood that the sea people had come to rape, steal and plunder. This is our land. The struggle for superiority was born when ‘explorers’ came and landed on our shores. The story still goes on, and they never learn, or mind their own. They impose, loot, destroy.
The invaders are here. The settlers in Northern Rhodesia.
The slow trade and demarcation was set and settled.
The wars are raging, matching the velocity of the storms and winds.
We are all waiting, and need a better life.
The one we are in is unstable.
A better life!
And yet, the underground was born to imagine.22
Political theorist and author Achille Mbembe notes that the archive is “fissile material,”23 and that “at its source, it is made of cuts.”24 Perhaps the radical rupture required to envision the otherwise is instilled in the fragmented stories whispered to us in the form of oral histories, murmurs, and uncovered correspondences; in the beckoning calls from the aether; in the stories and blueprints tucked away, encountered and subsequently refashioned. The cacophony of those no longer with us are a guiding hand outstretched, adorned by moonlight, urging us to recognise disruption and ruination as connective tissue, residual invocation, two sides of the same coin. “Hapticality,”25 as poet and theorist Fred Moten and activist–scholar Stefano Harney remind us, is the feeling of “what is to come here.”26 It is the growing capacity to “feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you.”27 This process of rubbing-against, rubbing-with, and rubbing-together is a register that transcends the structural and linguistic limitations of the physical world. See, if you tuck the story of a loved one under your tongue for too long, it becomes dried blood, bated breath, prolonged sigh, renegade. “We are part of the story,”28 remember? I invoke hapticality and mean for you to understand the vibrational potency of our forbearers’ wishes for something else. This is their poetry. I utter hapticality and mean for you to consider poetry as a defiant form of social poesis, for after all, “a meagre story is not a failure.”29 At this point of fissure and hapticality, we uncover, substantiate, and enact a cut in the machine of violence: “organised abandonment.”30 Elsewhere, Moten implores us that “to collect is to gather, and the term (meaning, to collect) insists upon that gathering.”31 Relation manifests and rears its head in this gathering of souls lingering—this ever-present, metaphysical glue. “Ghost to ghost. Ghost as what lingers.”32 The task endures: “follow the ghosts and conjure otherwise.”33
my hands juggle glass pieces; metal remnants.
I watch the cuts before I can feel them.
it’s all just happening so fast, you see.
I’m pushing up against the boundary, and
I can’t remember my grandmother’s smile.
listen:
transmute the feeling, the memory
sustain it, and
turn it into ten years’ worth of poetry.
note: plantation, plot <> ceremony <> revolution in a minor key
Wynter’s groundbreaking decolonial work marks the European Renaissance and Enlightenment period as violent fractures in time that birthed the concept of Man, concretising a project to colonise time and space, fomenting an imperialist expansionist project. The plantation, as a site of ontological, economic, and ecological transformation, dates back to 1452 with the enactment of European extraction vis-à-vis African slavery. It is primarily underpinned by the colonial view of Europe as the “cradle of civilisation, modernity, culture and progress.”34 While “the plantation has been analysed as a historical event, a production system, and a model for current economic, social, and geographical arrangements,”35 it is vital to simultaneously consider that the plantation as not merely reducible to its temporal configuration—as a momentary event of captivity and enslavement. “Involuntary servitude wasn’t one condition, nor was it fixed in time and place. The triangulated severing of will, the theft of capacity, [and] the appropriation of life”36 in the form of chattel slavery “conditions an aftermath that bears itself,”37 and an afterlife that prolongs itself in the present. “The use of the body as a tool or instrument; [as a site] of occupation or possession”38 was an intentional configuration. The plantation and its structuring logic lingers and resubstantiates itself through a host of forms in our here and now—namely through a global capitalist system that wilfully deracinates, extracts, and exploits (non-white) bodies, ecology, nature, labour, sociality, and our conception of time and leisure. As writer, activist, and scholar Suzanne Césaire sonorously reminds:
It seems that in the nineteenth century Euro-American humanity was seized with a real craze for science, technology and machine, the result of which has been an imperialist philosophy that has generated the world economy and the encircling of the globe.39
The plantation, as a regime, is altogether embroiled with topology, enclosure, and the systemic appropriation of nature. Topology and mapping, the process of reducing “Nature to Land under the impulsion of the market economy,”40 are imperial projects deeply embroiled with the desire to make the earth into a commodifiable possession. The imposition of linearity as a structuring matrix that not only demarcates time but also space is grossly evident throughout colonialism’s history. Through physical demarcation—materialised squarely through an ongoing process of fencing, enclosing, and bordering—the nation state ensures its longevity, exclusionary nature, and capitalist production. The global settler-colonial project and the enclosure of our commons, which the majority of the globe continue to feel the effects of in a modern context—specifically in areas such as Palestine, the Congo, and Sudan—derives from the colonial-imperial formation of the plantation. The plantation and enclosure are intrinsically attuned; they are symbiotically attached. Wynter notes that the foreclosure of our commons—alongside a definition of Human that excludes anyone outside of the strict confines of its white proprietors and architects—is intentional. It is deeply tied to a strict code of classification, codification, and linearisation that would come to define the so-called “New World.”
The nation state, in its original and current formulation, has contorted our modes of social existence and relationality into fabulated zones of subjection, abjection, exclusion, disenfranchisement, and abandonment. The plantation is reified and consistently manifests itself throughout every facet of our lives, ranging from the carceral logics embedded in our interpersonal relationships, the magnitude and perseverance of unpaid labour within the “global South,” to the obfuscation of our “rights” under the nation-state formation. The plantation is, as political geographer Katherine McKittrick elucidates through a reading of author Toni Morrison, “a space we all run from, but nobody stops talking about; it is persistent, [and] ugly;”41 an unruly “blueprint of our present spatial, social,”42 and economic “organisation.”43 And yet, it is perhaps precisely because of the plantation’s “built-in capacity to maintain itself”44 that we would do well to strive towards its abolishment altogether.
In the midst (and afterlife) of the violence and desolation precipitated by transatlantic chattel slavery, Wynter nevertheless outlines the disruptive force of the plot. “The plot exists within the surreal, utopian nonsense of it all.”45 In “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Wynter notes the dialectical incongruence between the spatial configuration of the master’s plantation and the slave’s provision ground––their otherwise. The plot system, as she notes, “was . . . the focus of resistance to the market system and market values. Within the confines of the plot, the land remained the Earth.”46 Wynter expands on the concept of the plot and plantation elsewhere, noting that “the plot was the slave’s area of escape from the plantation. It was an area of experience which reinvented and therefore perpetuated an alternative worldview, an alternative consciousness to that of the plantation.”47 Nevertheless, the plot should not be considered as a stand-in or substitute for the otherwise. Not “otherwise” as in a romanticised departure or an outside of the brutality of the plantation, but rather, a constitutive refuge in the midst of cruelty: a cursory introduction to the possibility of fugitivity. The plot, by way of its historical origin and enduring existence, “exists as a threat”48 to past-present-future capitalist formations. “It speaks to other possibilities.”49 This spatial demarcation , yet not irreducible to this arrangement alone was and is, as academic and writer Saidiya Hartman sonorously reminds, “revolution in a minor key.”50 “Abolition now,” I imagine they uttered to each other while gathering, plotting on these generative spaces enmeshed within brutality. “Abolition now,” we utter to ourselves . . .
In the midst of overwhelming barbarity in our current moment, Wynter’s words and thinking beckon us onwards. “The ceremony must be found,”51 she says. In the shadow of a totalising order fixated on extractivism that surpasses mere capitalist accumulation—to encompass the violence of the border regime, manufactured threats, and genocidal wars—the question rests less with a discovery of the ceremony as a spatiotemporal event and rather with the realisation of it as an on-going series of entry points which direct us towards a sonorous invocation of an otherwise. The unsettling of the overrepresentation “of Man and its onto-epistemological link to whiteness”52 presupposes and necessitates a unified desire to “unsettle the coloniality of power.”53 This is enacted, in part, by our affliction to the possibilities enshrined within the imagination, within conversing with the ghostly ensemble, the frenzied chorus. Think of the ceremony as a call and song: tend to the ongoing, quiet, and dissenting work done on the plot by those who came before us. Growing yams in arid terrain, as Wynter notes; refusing to capitulate to the war machine and its beating drum in our present moment; keeping our neighbourhoods safe when the cloaked paramilitary forces comes for them in the dead of night; languaging your refusal to the artistic spaces, museums, and institutions that have opted for half-baked neutrality; disrupting and attempting to defang the arms production factories that fortify settler colonialism globally. Tend to the refrain, the pause, and the very real possibility of our intentions for the otherwise to be halted, thwarted, snuffed out, and misinterpreted. For, as feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine succinctly point out, now more than ever, “colonial oppression”54 has been “normalized, while resistance is seen as terrorism.”55 And perhaps despite the seemingly impossible invitation to fashion something else, the ghostly ensemble that surrounds us urges us forward, cajoling us onwards: braid together the implausible stories, the blueprints and roadmaps left behind precisely because of this impossibility. Claw your way towards “unspeakable wonder // to freedom that blooms on stumps.”56
The plantation “moves through time, [as] a cloaked anachronism that calls forth the prison,”57 the vicious corralling of space-time, all while sustaining global anti-Black violence and the oppression of non-white bodies. “No modern intelligent person [is] content [with] merely existing”58 in the face of these atrocities. Sometimes we need to take a chance and imagine more. The propensity of the state to enact violence upon those it claims as its citizens will never abolish our act of rubbing with each other, our desire for more. More: less as a destination but as an enactment of our disavowal—breaking loyalty with the stultifying hold of the nation state and its manufactured threats, promises, bogeymen, and its propensity and capacity for cruelty. And the question remains, pushing at the very seams of our current social order: how do we sustain a commitment to foreclosing the ontological and organisational protocols that wreak havoc on our lives? This is a social, common, and poetic project. To sustain a non-commitment to the systems around us, while equally nurturing an anti-colonialist desire is no easy feat. The plot is altogether enmeshed with the ceremony’s finding, enunciation, and re-finding. The ceremony, as I contend by echoing Moten, is “the plot against the plot.”59 Against as in, “contrapuntal,”60 wayward, hauntological, elusive, fissile—the “fugitive turn.”61 The fugitive turn not merely and hastily defined as “running away,” but as a fantastical running towards. While the otherwise is kept alive underground and within, it is not defined in its entirety by this logic alone. The otherwise finds its genesis in poetry and is gestated by a litany of “runaway tongue(s), dissenting bod(ies),”62 the spectres of those no longer (physically) with us—“from the story within the story.”63
when the gossamer is at your throat,
can you breathe past it;
manoeuvre and find a way out
hand in hand, adorned by sunlight,
running towards something-else.
note: language <> poetry, poesis <> towards an otherwise
Language is a slick-tongued thing. Capitalism and settler-colonial violence have ossified language; rendered it illegible. Language has been transfigured, defiled. The transmutation of language into a formalising logic of objectification, categorisation, precision, rationality, and morality is fallacious, imbalanced, and altogether bound up with the “colonial matrix of power.”64 Accordingly, performance artist and author Fargo Nissim Tbakhi uses the term “Craft” to “describe the network of sanitising influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities of the state and of empire.”65 Now, perhaps more than ever, “we want language to be able to make sense of the genocidal wars. We think it enough, and every writer must come to the same conclusion: it is not.”66 Capitalism and colonialism’s exclusionary and extractivist logics have crept their way into the very fibre of language, resulting in the mass propulsion of ordinary people towards “premature death,”67 and into a perpetual nightmare of violence. Craft is “the machine for regulation, estrangement, sanitisation.”68 This is overwhelmingly evident in the context of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and their violent terrorisation and displacement by the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) and armed settlers in the West Bank. The settler-colonial state of Israel—armed, bolstered, and enabled to the teeth by the USA and the west more widely—has contorted our comprehension of language, all while the global media establishment joyfully consents and contorts itself into a mouthpiece for genocide and settler-colonialist expansion.
What use is it to say a person // committed “war crimes?”
What language breathes to catch // the hugeness of that poison?69
The numbers of those lost in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Lebanon, Yemen, Haiti, and elsewhere “doom love. The death tables, the murderous abstractions”70 enacted by the seemingly clandestine power of neoliberalism; the language of crisis and craft risk sinking us further into tumult. This is intentional. We are meant to be immobilised. But these lists and catalogues of the dead, dying, unaccounted for, martyred, and forgotten “should in no instance be taken as the index of what the empirical reality of our social universe”71 is, or can be. The ghost whispers, ‘these are dark times, beloved,’ and in this telling, “thwarts the attempt to order time into tidy categories of past, present, and future.”72 The threat of ruin looms, but this is not an epitaph. This is an opening. This is a defiant circle: one that meets itself even as it begins again. An ouroboros, or something akin to it. “The chorus of poetry opens the way.”73
Language is a slick-tongued thing. See how I utter otherwise and mean instead the abolition of the systems that govern us, while recognising the otherwise’s prolonged arrival. Language is a slick-tongued thing! The finitude of our modes of thinking and imagining beyond our present social formations is largely due to the effects of racialisation and the coloniality of our Being. This organising matrix is stamped in the character of our thought, and it can be alienating to even attempt to imagine something otherwise. And yet, in the here and now, we must take up writer and poet Édouard Glissant’s tender musing, and tend to our consent not to be single beings. Language is the overflowing cup, the little nagging voice that belongs to a body before it belongs to a mouth or tongue. Poetry is the intentional excess of language, a transcendence from the present order of knowledge and its biocentric paradigms. It is the opaqueness of individualising logics borne of finance capitalism’s encroachment into the interpersonal. Poetry, and by extension poiesis is a “living commotion,”74 concerned with fractal undoing, embroiled with speculation, and altogether preoccupied with “encountering a past that is not past.”75 Poetry is not conjecture. Poetry is a language sharpened, piercing the soft flesh and disanimating armour. Poetry reveals a narrow path of possibility “at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out”76 and fashioned by disruption, are foreclosed. This is where language meets its maker, or perhaps, its match. The otherwise, the vibrant demand to do away with the foreclosure of something else, cannot be realised in its entirety through the boundaries and formalisation of language. After all, language is a slick-tongued thing.
While “Craft is what keeps us polite while the boot is on our neck or on somebody else’s,”77 poetry is an openness, a dissonance, a residual informality, a refusal to coalesce, a differential resistance to enclosure, a sounded immateriality. Poetry refuses the “immobilising orientation”78 of the “temporal regimes that articulate crisis as ever-present and inescapable,”79 while simultaneously conferring materiality and sweetening the possibility of an otherwise. Languaging a poetics (of refusal, of the otherwise) is rooted in disruption. We have to “abandon Craft and write with sharper teeth, without politeness, without compromise.”80 And, as Olufemi contends,
I say no to X because I want something else. First it clears space: I repudiate what I am told is natural and that repudiation opens a space that did not otherwise exist. A poetics . . . expands this: it should provide a space to dwell for the dissenting voice, should encourage that dissent to expand, move, change and grow by nurturing the core of the political desire that has constituted it. It should make the world seem, temporarily, like it could be organised differently. Our interdependence is crucial for our survival. We stay with negativity, failure, we refuse to resolve or reform. No maintains the contradictions inherent to life under capitalism: how all social relations are subordinated to the value form. Poetics breaks with the hegemonic.81
Capitalism is “profoundly illiterate,”82 and scientific knowledge is oriented towards “enumerating, measuring, classifying, and killing.”83 In order to elucidate a semblance of the otherwise, I urge you to turn to poetry and its life-giving, revolutionary potential. Embedded within a poetics of refusal is an innately social poiesis: fashioning a system of relations that sutures, holds, attunes, and tends to each and every one of us despite its perpetual barring “by the gatekeepers of the everyday,”84 the antithetical hold of the nation state formation. Poetry, at its core, touches upon an “incomplete project of freedom.”85 It is an unruly excess—that which will always exceed the carcerality of the systems that surround us and the social formations handed to us. In our concocting of an otherwise, and our materialisation of a poetics of refusal, remember that “we write in order to not simply destroy; in order not simply to conserve. We write in the thrall of the impossible real.”86
We utter poetry and mean revolt.
the thicket of time, and a
haphazard effort to claw yourself to an opening.
if it feels impossible, it is.
the ghost mutters, and in this telling,
it reveals all that you do not (yet) know.
hydromel, and sulphur, and a litany of discredited theories.
I welcome this erosion. I welcome this hellish landscape.
this is not a clandestine revelation.
There is a great despair in recognising that our imagination is held captive. Coloniality and capitalism are totalising forces which ensure a stranglehold on our imagination, routinely decimating and snuffing it out in this same process. Like you, I have brushed up against this despair one too many times. It burrows itself in the shoulder blades, transplants itself onto bruised knuckles, and yet, perhaps despite my naïveté, I maintain that “the imagination”87 is a “constitutive force.”88 The imagination adopts an intensity that “becomes real through its intensification”89 and consistent “articulation.”90 See, the imagination wedges itself into the little crevices of the mind; patiently lingers in our dreams; manifests itself through our refusal of the current moment. The otherwise calls us to say “NO” to our present “reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond [this] reality.”91 The transitive nature of the imagination urges onwards, calls upon us to recognise that “life can be, and in some ways already is, different.”92 Hartman, in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments notes that waywardness is an “entry on the possible,”93 an otherwise. Much like our tempered and undulating attempts to tinker with images, plans, and blueprints for an otherwise, waywardness is “a beautiful experiment in how-to-live.”94 We “traffic in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life.”95 Waywardness is altogether embroiled with our imagination and machinations for more. It is a commitment to the “untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive,”96 the social and commoning project of poetry-as-poesis. Poetry, like our fidelity to the transformative possibility of the imagination and waywardness, “is a blossoming.”97 Poetry, and our machinations for something-else beget and insist, again and again, that there is life to be lived in the midst of chaos, capital, the cacophonous thundering of war drums, the usurping of life. Poetry, you see, is relentless: it is “a call to disrupt the normalization of brutality,”98 a revolutionary act “which engenders new realities.”99
I keep this feeling with me as we venture beyond the given.
Our Desire – dangerous, productive, deliberate – demands otherwise.
That in itself is a ghostly affair.100
note: this is not an epitaph. this is an opening.
no thing derides you
but the promise of a future not (yet) attained.
no syntax can sound you;
no language can encase you.
everything is now. it is all now.
I know you know there is no ending
or adequate response
or right answer.
this is not an epitaph.
this is an opening.
we are entering a frenzy where void
is a cajoling echo.
we are entering a chorus where moreness
is a murmur of thirst.
we are entering a susurration where fugitivity
is a running towards.
we are entering a wilderness:
hand extended, and sunlight adorning.
suture in sinew, dandelion stems, pine
residual breath, handwriting in the margins
and an elongated
nNOO0ooo
everything is now. it is all now.
The only thing worth beginning is the end of the world. Here, at the perimeter of the destroyed world—“beyond the threshold—is the luminous world.”114 A world born from the end, but concurrently breaking loyalty with the temporality of its ending. This is an ongoing ending and beginning. Perhaps the otherwise is complex, but it is not complicated. It is caught in an endless loop of flux, transmutation, and fluctuation: extinguishing and refashioning itself time and time again. A move towards an otherwise endures beyond the confines of language, archival aporia, belligerent scavenging, and ghostly communion. Perhaps despite a haphazard connection to the colonial specters that linger, and their particular affliction for the not-quite-said, we would do well to remain attuned to the “incomplete project of freedom.”115
Hearken to me. The encounter with each other in the midst of barbarity and chaos—at the site of the illegal rave, the strike, the protest, the community kitchen, the reading club, the solidarity fundraiser, the mutual-aid gathering—is a gentle reminder that the otherwise cannot be eradicated. The otherwise is a dream, lingering and looming. The otherwise is punctilious yet patient: “it licks its own fingers, bites its own nails, swallows its own fist.”116 The otherwise makes “itself its own ghost, creates itself from its own remnants.”117 It is a linguistic stand-in and a call to “substitute the otherwise for that thing that keeps you alive, or the ferocity with which you detest this world.”118 Sometimes you will not know what to say or how to end the story, but remember, the residuality of your breath and lust for more is vibrational. Our insolence and proclivity to disrupt brews due to the brevity of time, its circularity. This is just one of many revisions and beginnings. The spark endures as long as we remember. After all, “hope is the small hole cut into the honest machinery.”119
To echo feminist and abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who echoes historian C. L. R. James, “revolutions happen because people ‘wait and wait and try every little thing.’”120 And while we remain busy, steadfast in our commitment to imagine a beyond and concoct an otherwise, we would do well to hone in on the transitive nature of James’s words: try every little thing. It is in the violence of the present, in the here and now, that our attempts, no matter how futile, must remain attuned to meeting the machinery of violence wherever it manifests, and bringing it down. Intimately bound together by poet Diane Di Prima’s invocation elsewhere, the ghostly entourage beckons us forward, intimately reminding us: “no one way works, it will take all of us // shoving at the thing from all sides // to bring it down.”121
This is my last entry for now.
More entries await to be written
—some more pertinent than others.
In the time between now and then,
what shall we build on the ashes of a nightmare?122
gervaise alexis savvias is a Zambian-Cypriot writer and artist-researcher currently based between Amsterdam, NL and Nicosia, CY. Their practice figures itself through an entanglement of speculative historiography, experimental sound, cultural criticism, hauntology, and the mysticism of the chance encounter. They are currently compiling a publication of their collected writings on spectrality, chance, and notes towards a sociopolitical otherwise.
Andreas Yakovlev Michaelides, who works under the name YAKOVLEV, is a self-taught designer and music producer that examines the liminal zones between perception, memory, and sonic materiality. His practice operates at the intersection of field recording, digital manipulation, and auditory phenomenology, seeking to trace how sound mediates our experience of reality. Beginning with field recordings and fragments sourced from online archives–encompassing natural disasters, sites of conflict, and other unintended sonic events–Yakovlev reconfigures these residual signals through iterative processes of modular and digital transformation. The resulting works unfold as evolving soundscapes in which traces of the real are continuously displaced and reconstituted. Each composition articulates a state of flux, where the boundaries between noise and memory, presence and abstraction, remain unstable and porous. Through this methodology, Yakovlev has developed compositions for performances, films, and virtual environments, and has been presenting live works across Europe since 2018.
a note on collaboration:
A ghostly utterance, a chance encounter, a conversation by the beach, and the non-linearity of time serve as entry points for the first collaboration between gervaise alexis savvias and Andreas Yakovlev Michaelides (YAKOVLEV). Moving away from the audio-essay as a strict and somewhat–clinical format, this series of soundscapes is presented as a way to commune with the spectral chorus that runs throughout ‘notes towards an otherwise’. YAKOVLEV masterfully weaves together a host of field recordings, introduces multiple layers of digital manipulation, while the additional voiceovers provided by Androula Kafa (Cyprus-based artist and curator) and gervaise alexis savvias elicit a lingering feeling of lucidity; a persistent haunting.