{"id":1094,"date":"2025-12-11T12:33:34","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T12:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/?p=1094"},"modified":"2026-03-10T12:39:03","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T12:39:03","slug":"break-down-or-dismantling-the-house-that-narrative-built-moosje-moti-goosen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/plotting.rietveldsandberg.nl\/?p=1094","title":{"rendered":"Break Down, Or: Dismantling the House that Narrative Built\u00a0\u2013 Moosje Moti Goosen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Today is Saturday, 26 October, 2024 (or, a beginning)<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am writing from a hospital room where I am being treated with a methylprednisolone (MPS) IV cure for symptoms of acute donor organ rejection. I had a bilateral lung transplant in 2017. Earlier this year, I was in intensive care at the same hospital, Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam. I was here from the beginning of January until the end of March, after having contracted Covid-19 while on immunosuppressive medication for my transplant lungs. The first two weeks of January I was in an induced coma. The current acute organ rejection, I am told, can be cured, although a similar treatment earlier this year did not yield the expected results. <\/em>


Quoting the late Palestinian-American academic and activist Edward Said: \u201ca beginning is a first step in the intentional production of meaning and the production of difference from preexisting conditions.\u201d I, on the other hand, will or must begin by moving away from my intentions.1<\/a><\/sup> I had intended to write a text according to the preexisting conditions of the academic or scholarly tradition: the argumentative essay.


a first step 
on the other hand 


But this, this seemingly matter-of-fact movement towards the beginning\u2014beginning to write\u2014ends up not being the place to start from, in my case, because my body and, therefore, my mind, is also always somewhere else. (See the above). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Said, repeated: 

\u201c. . . the intentional production of meaning . . .\u201d 
\u201c. . . the production of difference from preexisting conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was trained in academic writing, the kind of writing that knows what it is going to say, adding something of significance to what has already been said. Academics write the facts, supported by arguments. For me, in order to maintain this kind of writing, I have to force myself to change my mind, suppress the facts of life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing is, no matter how much learning and reading and writing I do, or, more accurately, because of it<\/em>, I never arrive at a clear beginning with confidence (real or falsified) of mind, knowing what I\u2019m going to say, making a solid argument, singular and uncontested. My thoughts are never solid or resolved. I don\u2019t know how to begin; I do not arrive at conclusions.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a living breathing problem because scholars provide disembodied discursive expertise on subjects. Subjectivity is out of the question. I am a living breathing problem to writing because authors, in post-structuralist, academic terms, are considered to be dead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, here I am, writing. And with my decision to write, a thought begins to form\u2014always, inevitably. Maybe it\u2019s a dream image, like those conjured in automatic writing sessions by the surrealists. Maybe it\u2019s a recurring idea. Maybe the thought is so premature it is hardly worth one\u2019s attention. I like to linger in this state of mind: observing something on the brink of existing, something not-yet-known and about-to-be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A prompt from Oblique Strategies<\/em>, a card set for creative processes by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, first published in 1975, says: \u201cOnce the search is in progress, something will be found.\u201d It means, I think, that the search creates the object of recognition, it projects an outcome, somewhere in the future. Even when you don\u2019t know what you are after, something will always make itself seen and known, because perception and expression are close cousins or maybe even twins. At least they are born of the same body. They produce, if not a structure or a pattern, a motion<\/p>\n\n\n\n

a first step.

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I have a book by theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, in which they present a series of thought forms<\/em>: visual depictions of thoughts based on what the authors call \u201cclairvoyant observations.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> In 58 illustrations, they show how their thoughts appear to them, what actual form and colour they take in their minds. The thoughts are visual, pure form, made using gouache and watercolour paints. Only the captions reveal something about their content. Some thoughts look like fireworks in an empty, black sky. Others remind me of the abstract figures or blots that sometimes appear on your eyelid before falling asleep, or the visual auras of a migraine attack. The drawings are aesthetically pleasing but they fail to capture what thought does<\/em>. Thinking is a process, a phenomenal action, always in<\/em> action: it moves<\/em>, it is all over the place, it remains unfixed. It is subject to change. Morphing, evolving, mutating, and adapting itself according to new insights, input, experiences, and acquired knowledge. An essential part of thinking is its inevitable, necessary unthinking: we change our minds, and we do it all the time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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fig. 8.<\/em> a thought (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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fig. 9.<\/em> another thought (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n


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What am I thinking? What are my intentions, and what is an academic intention? What does writing do and how do we read the intentions of the writer? These are thoughts and questions forming themselves, right here inside this room, inside a hospital, inside an unreliable body. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Hold these thoughts for now.) 
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve decided to follow these inarticulate thoughts-without-an-argument (which is not the same as a thought-without-purpose) by writing. To find out, in my own experience of body and mind, what constitutes a narrative, and in what way narrative gives form to or structures\u2014directs or dictates, perhaps\u2014this pleasing form and motion called thinking. And I\u2019ve decided to do so because I want to be realistic. More than a scholar, I want to be a realist. Because my own beginnings, as a writer, are always corrupted, so to say, by my life\u2019s circumstances\u2014interrupted, for instance, by the reality of a nurse entering this room to unplug the IV line in my right lower arm, so that I can move around the room without the IV pole. I have to stay inside this room because of isolation protocols. That means I am stuck with my thoughts for the next few days. 


In 2013 I was diagnosed with a progressive lung disease. It coincided with my intentions: I was about to begin a four-year period of PhD research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

before the first step\u00a0
on the other hand\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life became its own form, with its own will, encroaching upon my stated intentions, to the extent that I felt as though every piece of writing, every form of thinking (every thought form<\/em>) from then on would need the pretext of this vital, real-life health condition that intervened in the \u201cpreexisting conditions\u201d of a disembodied academic scholarly intention. Illness turns your body into a story that wants to tell itself. You cannot argue with it. And what I learned from writer Susan Sontag is that you can analyse and criticise illness as much as you want, you can throw all the possible arguments towards it, but unfortunately, it doesn\u2019t make you any less sick in the end. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beginning, therefore, and still<\/em> not, as Said wrote, with \u201cthe production of difference from preexisting conditions.\u201d Beginning, neither \u201cthrough first advancing some ideal type which it [or I] then seek[s] to fulfill\u201d\u2014that is to say, neither through writing and arguing towards something that has been prefigured, pre-formed, and presupposed. But beginning, from the mis<\/em>step or even the mishap, and everything that is supposedly beside the point.3<\/a><\/sup> Writing in a hospital bed, from the supposedly besides-the-point lateral position and point of view of a sick woman who is in chronic unstable health. A first step: beginning by stepping out of narrative line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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fig. 42.<\/em> the centre or: the logos pervading all (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live . . . We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the \u2018ideas\u2019 with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

These famous words by author Joan Didion are often quoted out of context. That\u2019s because we long to live by those words. We want to believe in the stories we tell ourselves. Narrativity, as cultural theorist Mieke Bal points out, is a cultural mode of expression, an almost\u2014almost<\/em>\u2014natural form of cohering, of making sense of the \u201cshifting phantasmagoria\u201d that comprise our existence.5<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0But Didion wrote these lines in a state of crisis, caused by the\u00a0disruption<\/em> of these storylines. \u201cI was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no \u2018meaning\u2019 beyond their temporary arrangement.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0She was losing narrative sense: she had admitted herself at the psychiatric clinic at St. John\u2019s Hospital in Santa Monica, where doctors described her condition as an \u201cattack of vertigo and nausea, and a feeling she was going to pass out.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Breaking down or breaking up, stories no longer made sense to her and therefore, couldn\u2019t reassure her any longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does incoherence appear to a clairvoyant, to Besant? Didion sees flash pictures, images with no meaning, sequences without plot, the collapse of narrative integrity.


<\/p>\n\n\n

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fig. 27. <\/em>sudden fright (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

So my first fully formed thought beside the point, here inside this room on the tenth-floor pulmonary unit of a hospital in Rotterdam, is more of a memory-refresher, reminding me of what I already knew, what we all know, I believe, when we quiet down and observe our minds: that the structure of thought is anything but linear or progressive (everyone who has ever had a breakdown knows what it is like to think in circles). This, the thinking itself, is on my mind. And it brings me back to my academic education. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In academic writing we also tell ourselves stories: we bring order to a chaos of existing, sometimes contrasting ideas and meaningless data. We cohere information, add context, in a framework of our choice. All of this, while striving for an order of knowledge. We manipulate data into an order of linear narrative, pretending that thought naturally and progressively leads to order and resolution. Academics are transparent about everything except about the fact that this order is fabricated. My thinking is wild and disorderly and its order in writing is a fiction. The fiction of linearity, singularity, and narrative structure helps us structure our thoughts. I strive for a knowledge that is open and aware of the entanglement between narrative fiction and the production of knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives,\u201d the Canadian poet and thinker Dionne Brand writes.8<\/a><\/sup> This is another way of saying that there are writers who cannot begin at what is generally conceived as \u201cthe beginning\u201d of a narrative; writers who cannot assume the role of the impartial scholar, and cannot detach themselves from lived experience,\u00a0as is favoured by rationalism. Rationalism, of course, is another story we tell ourselves. A very dominant story. One enters the story of an empty room where history resides, but only hauntingly, without making itself \u201cknown\u201d (or present)\u2014pretending it is not there. The room itself is already a construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I, too, am constructing this writing, fragment by fragment\u2014I will not pretend that writing is a natural expression. The thought, any thought here, is formed by the consideration of a word (and not another), a sentence, a syntax. The text\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0the thought form. The thinking doesn\u2019t \u201chappen\u201d in the supposed room; the room (the writing, and its form) is a fundamental part of the thinking.

My room has:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n


a hospital bed
a shower\u00a0
air conditioning\u00a0
medical equipment\u00a0
an IV pole
a television to pass the time
a clock to see time passing
a window view
a door that has to stay closed\u00a0

To pass the hours inside this hospital room, I brought books of poetry by Etel Adnan, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Anne Boyer; I brought the script of\u00a0Blue<\/em>, Derek Jarman\u2019s film about his experience of illness and AIDS. None of these texts are told in a linear fashion. It\u2019s almost as if intuitively, or perhaps instinctively, I knew when packing my bag that prose was not going to help me through these days.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday, in fact, I did not read at all, as I was caught up in the routines of hospital care: intake, medication, tests, preparation, waiting, receiving, exchanging information. I listened to podcasts instead\u2014recent episodes of\u00a0Between the Covers<\/em>\u00a0with writers Dionne Brand, Adania Shibli, and Isabella Hammad. I felt better and less lonely hearing these women talk to each other, inside this sanitized room. They also entered my mind, forming thoughts, so to say, because all three of them express, in one way or another, their concerns with what the podcast host David Naimon calls language\u2019s misuse: \u201cthe deliberate misuse of language as an enabling of an ongoing genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0Elephant in the room: there is a genocide going on, killing Palestinian men, women, and children, destroying their houses, depriving them of water, food, gas, electricity, health services and medicine, under the pretence of war.\u00a0



Intermission. Room NE1013, Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam. Voices in the Room<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isabella: \u201cPalestinians were always denied the ability to narrate for themselves . . .\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wislawa (Szymborska), quoted by Isabella: \u201cI prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems . . .\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Robyn Creswell, quoted by the host, David: \u201cWhile readers may be tempted to look for political messages, Edward Said suggests that the real drama in Palestine\u2019s body of literature is the writers\u2019 struggle to come up with a coherent form, a narrative that might overcome the almost metaphysical impossibility of representing the present . . .\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my notebook, I ask myself: Who has the ability, and who has the power, the right to imagine something coherent out of the experience of the present? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adania: \u201cPalestine is an ethical relationship. That is to say, how the word Palestine, erased from the map, is no longer related to a nation-state or to a country or specific group of people but is open to so many possibilities, meanings, and practices . . . It transforms what is being erased into something that cannot be erased any longer . . .\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dionne: \u201c. . . narrative must take a more open form than the handed-down processes of the narrative of imperialism and imperialistic structure . . .\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adania: \u201c. . . writing begins with a refusal to explain to people who narrate too well . . .\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dionne: \u201c. . . there\u2019s a regime of literary practice that demands, from certain bodies, explanations for their presence. And this is the indignity of it. This is the insult (\u2026) It\u2019s an economy of some kind. But that economy dovetails with colonialism and imperialism. And therefore it demands of these bodies a certain explanation about their presence \u2026\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dionne: \u201cCapital summons certain parts of our being that are useful to it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another note in my notebook, told by Adania: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn Arabic, the word for literature and ethics is the same.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n

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fig. 31. <\/em>on the first night (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David: \u201cTo put forward a grand narrative of Palestine, given the absences, would be to put forward a fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David\u2019s words remind me of something I read in Sylvia Wynter\u2019s short essay, \u201cNovel and History, Plot and Plantation,\u201d a piece of writing that I have been reading and re-reading, in the context of the research group Art & Spatial Praxis focused on \u201cplotting,\u201d organised by Patricia de Vries, lector at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. In the essay, Wynter quotes the Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias who said, after the CIA-backed coup of the legally elected government in Guatemala in 1954: \u201cThese things that happen? . . . It\u2019s best to call them fiction!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the essay, Wynter, who began her academic career researching Caribbean literature, culture, and the history of slavery, proposes what could be considered an ethics of fiction. That is to say, she looks at the way fiction and the novel have been instrumental in the telling of a story based on humanism, rationalism, Christianism, and the violent de- or sub-humanising of beings in Europe\u2019s project of colonialism and imperialism. From the same essay: \u201cHistory . . . these things that happen, is, in the plantation context, itself a fiction; a fiction written, dominated, controlled by forces external to itself.9<\/a><\/sup> Wynter deconstructs history, and more particularly the history of humanity itself, as a fiction, a narrative genre.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We tell ourselves stories, we create fictions, in order to rule and reap profits. Humanity, as it is \u201ctold\u201d by the west, pretends omniscience, universalism: an absolute point of view that in itself is purely fictional. Universal man is a fiction (or, a genre, in Wynter\u2019s words) produced by a narrative founded on the silence, the ontological existential silence of the subhuman, the Black slave, who has no power to produce his own narrative, who has no \u201croom of his own.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Invoking Brand here, in my room: One enters a story and the plantation follows, one enters a room and the plantation precedes. Or, the totalising force of the plantation is<\/em> the empty room; the empty room is the plantation. The plantation is the foundation. And the story, the history, the science or academic knowledge that does not take this into account before all else is always already a fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The entanglement between fiction and history goes both ways. The western novel in its popular form, as a product of entertainment for readers of different classes, was established in the seventeenth century and evolved alongside global disruptive changes of imperialism, colonialism, and the Atlantic slave trade. In \u201cNovel and History,\u201d Wynter, quoting philosopher and sociologist Lucien Goldmann, writes: the novel form \u201cappears to us to be in effect, the transposition on the literary plane, of the daily life within an individualist society, born of production for the market.\u201d10<\/a><\/sup> In a decolonial reading of the British novel of this time, stories of the daily lives of individuals making up British society are haunted by slavery and wealth extracted from the plantation \u201celsewhere\u201d (a compartmentalised room, sometimes an attic). In most cases, this elsewhere of slavery and extraction is not made part of the story: the wealth of the British individuals \u201cjust is.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

(The story, most of the time, is only half the story.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, here inside room NE 1013, evening has fallen, and I\u2019ve picked up my small blue copy of Jarman\u2019s Blue <\/em>(1993). Derek is my loyal friend in illness. He has been for a long time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Derek: \u201cThe worst of the illness\u201d\u2014I actually wrote down \u201cThe words<\/em> of the illness\u201d\u2014\u201cis the uncertainty. I\u2019ve played this scenario back and forth each hour of the day for the last six years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back and forth and back and forth. A compulsive, repetitive non-linear thought form without beginning without end. This is how I will conclude my day.


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fig. 51, 52. <\/em>helpful thoughts (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905) <\/p>\n\n\n\n




Today is Monday, 28 October, 2024 (or, in the middle of inaction)<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have been waiting all morning to be discharged from the hospital. I\u2019m an impatient in-patient eagerly waiting to get out of here. Time is passing, my thoughts linger.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I may have arrived at the supposed middle of the action, the moment where the narrative is supposed to take a turn; situations are about to unfold and explain themselves; arguments are made, and so on. At this point, the reader is, perhaps instinctively, anticipating a transition, a turn of plot. In a lecture last year, Hammad talked about the plot element known as the turning point, not knowing that one\u2014a point, it seems now, of no return\u2014was about to happen. (It was nine days before the attacks by the Al-Qassim Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, happened, on 7 October, 2023).
<\/p>\n\n\n

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fig. 43. <\/em>intellectual aspiration (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isabella, back in my room: \u201cSomewhere recently humanity seems to have crossed an invisible line, and, on this side, naked power combined with the will to profit threaten to overwhelm the collective interests of our species.\u201d12<\/a><\/sup> It\u2019s been a year of ongoing destruction and murder in Gaza, and yes, we are still in the middle<\/em> of it.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isabella: \u201cthe flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it.\u201d13<\/a><\/sup> In this year, I have learned most about Gaza and Israel from fiction writers, and that is because they don\u2019t make a secret about their writing fiction. This, to me, is more honest and therefore, closer to the truth than the stories told by the media, sold to us as news. The frame in western mainstream news media up until now is that this \u201cwar\u201d began with the attacks by Hamas on 7 October, 2023. But from a Palestinian narrative point of view, these attacks took place in medias res, in the middle of the action that was already happening, ongoingly, since the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The Naqba is ongoing. A flashback to the opening paragraph of Said\u2019s essay, \u201cPermission to Narrate,\u201d from 1984, provides some backstory here and also, a recurring motif: in the essay\u2019s opening lines he refers to a report by an international commission speaking of attempted \u201cethnocide\u201d and \u201cgenocide\u201d by Israel.14<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forty years later, Israel is still in denial, while western authorities are still\u2014again<\/em>\u2014contesting, negotiating, and suppressing this observation, made then and now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And back and forth and back and forth and Never Again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only yesterday, I was watching a Dutch talk show from my hospital bed, where Dutch Palestinians were interviewed under the host\u2019s conditions that they condemn the Hamas attacks and declare right there on the spot and in front of the rolling cameras that the state of Israel has the right to exist.15<\/a><\/sup> Before the interview could even begin, it had already turned into a rather hostile interrogation, and it was remarkable and disturbing to see narrative power in action, to see what it takes to keep language\u2014to keep people<\/em>\u2014fixed in place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One enters a room and one is not allowed to begin at the beginning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n



Today is Monday, 13 October, 2025. An after-thought, inserted here.<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to return to Wynter, whose earlier critical work on the novel as a cultural commodity provided the base for her analyses of the more structural aspects of narrativity and the emergence of the human as Homo narrans: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I identify the Third Event in Fanonian-adapted terms as the origin of the human as a hybrid-auto-instituting-languaging-storytelling species: bios\/mythoi.<\/em> The Third Event is defined by the singularity of the co-evolution<\/em> of the human brain with<\/em>\u2014and, unlike those of all the other primates, with it alone<\/em>\u2014the emergent faculties of language, storytelling.16<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That the human is therefore, in part, a human invention by a species that lives by the stories it tells itself, also tells us something about the way humans produce knowledge. In writer Rinaldo Walcott\u2019s words: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Wynter is interested in demonstrating how Europe\u2019s conception of Man \u2018overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.\u2019 Her project, then, comprehensively attends to the ways in which we have come to and produced our contemporary conditions of being human\u2014wherein Man is the measuring stick of normalcy and Man\u2019s human Others are excluded from this category of being\u2014and how we might unsettle and undo this conception of humanness.17<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Wynter\u2019s work is a form of intellectual epistemological activism. She suggests no less than a decolonisation of\u00a0being<\/em> itself, by imagining a new \u201cform of life\u201d: a \u201cnew way of knowing\u201d that is based on what the Martinican poet and thinker Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire proposed, in his 1944 piece titled \u201cPoetry and Knowledge\u201d as a new science of the word.18<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0This hybrid science is based on the notion that understanding human culture, language, and storytelling (the\u00a0mythoi<\/em>) is crucial for comprehending the natural world (bios<\/em>) or sciences.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the human as a category is an invention, a myth produced by the storytelling human, we can become active readers<\/em> of the so-called universal knowledges established by four centuries of academic science, tracing back its thought forms, so to speak, to their initiating agents or, narrators<\/em>. This is what Wynter does, taking up C\u00e9saire\u2019s call for a science of the word. \u201cMy major proposal is that both the issue of \u2018race\u2019 and its classificatory logic (as, in David Duke\u2019s belief that \u2018the Negro is an evolutionarily lower level than the Caucasian\u2019) lies in the founding premise, on which our present order of knowledge or episteme [Foucault, 1973] and its rigorously elaborated disciplinary paradigms, are based.\u201d We live by an order of knowledge that is not only Eurocentric in its foundation, but also, more profoundly, an order in which \u201cwhite racism becomes logical.\u201d19<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cNovel and History, Plot and Plantation,\u201d Wynter defines the plantation as a superstructure that initiates the modern world, which she describes as \u201cthe process of the reduction of Man to Labor and of Nature to Land under the impulsion of the market economy\u201d thus providing the basis of our late-capitalist global free-market system.20<\/a><\/sup> In an interview with the journal Small Axe<\/em>, she extends on this: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

I\u2019m going to suggest that the world in which we live today, it is not primarily the mode of production\u2014capitalism\u2014that controls us, although it controls us at the overtly empirical level through the institution of the free market system, and the everyday practices of its economic system. But you see, for these to function, the processes of their functioning must be discursively<\/em> instituted, regulated and at the same time normalized, legitimated. So what I am going to suggest is that what institutes, regulates, normalizes and legitimates, what then controls us, is instead the economic conception of the human\u2014Man\u2014that is produced by the disciplinary discourses of our now planetary system of academia as the first purely secular and operational public identity in human history.21<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The university is also the plantation. The assumed objectivity of the sciences is a fiction, a story it has to perform in order to live. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to Monday, 28 October, 2024.<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside this hospital, I cannot avoid the fact that I am of flesh and blood and bones: nurses check my vitals\u2014temperature, blood pressure, pulse, oxygen saturation\u2014multiple times a day. Each morning I am asked to weigh myself on a scale to prove that gravity still has its\u00a0effect on my body. So I feel I am physically burdened with the question of what it means to be human and to write academically. The university\u2014its boards, its systems of bureaucracy, its neoliberal rationale\u2014feels more and more like an enemy today, fighting its own students for taking an ethical position, against the fossil industry, against Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, against fascism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So much is so wrong in the very extreme today. Hammad: \u201cour moment, the one in which we now live, feels like one of chronic \u2018crisis.\u2019\u201d22<\/a><\/sup> What is the writing form for this chronicity? This moment will extend or repeat itself, as long as we do not look at the root causes that cause conflict and catastrophe to \u201cflare up\u201d time and again, like a chronic disease. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This time asks for a treatment, beyond the \u201clogic\u201d of war and geopolitics. Academics need to come to terms with their foundational story, their \u201corigin myth.\u201d They need to criticise the legacies and effects of the plantation economy and its own historical complicity in the telling of this story on a global scale. Will a turn of plot, within the same academic narrative and narrative structure, suffice? Or do we need to give up this story altogether and re-narrativize our truth? Here, I am not just pointing to the story itself but also, more profoundly, to the way knowledge is represented in traditions of reasoning, argument, objectivity, material reductionism, linear narrative, and so on.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wynter says, I refuse to live by the story that tells \u201cblacks that they are nothing, not the same as whites.\u201d23<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0These are the stories that emerge from the rooms in the academy, and we have to face this problem. In her essay, \u201cMoral Inhabitants,\u201d novelist Toni Morrison condemns the kind of academic scholarship that trains students \u201cto make distinctions between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor but not between rice and human beings.\u201d24<\/a><\/sup> What is reasonable or even rational about an education that cultivates this type of disinterest, a kind of learning that requires people to forget their ability to see with their own particular eyes, sense with their unique bodies? Morrison continues, \u201cThat is what indices are like, of course. Not the fan-shaped spread of rice bursting from the gunnysack. Not the thunder roll of barrels of turpentine cascading down a plank. And not a seventeen-year-old girl with a tree-shaped scar on her knee \u2013 and a name.\u201d25<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday evening, before going to sleep, I read the following words by poet Anne Boyer: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One imagines that one can escape a category by collapsing it, but if one tries to collapse the category, the roof falls on one\u2019s head. There, a person is, then, having not escaped the category but having only changed its architecture. Once it was a category with a roof, now it is a category in which one is buried in the rubble made of what once was a roof over their heads.26<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once again I am with the poet and the fiction writer. I don\u2019t want to go on producing knowledge from inside the academic room that is so obviously in moral ruins. 

Before I fell asleep, I saw in my mind this metaphorical rubble, the \u201crubble\u201d of academia\u2019s self-ruination, by giving narrative consent to Israel\u2019s genocidal project, and by violently suppressing protests by students who demand their universities to break ties with Israeli partners. I also saw in my memory the actual rubble and dust of bombed building structures in Gaza, which I am seeing every day on my Instagram feed and \u201cstories.\u201d These two images, metaphorical and actual, merge, they turn into mirror images. They are no longer discrete forms of thought. 
<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
fig. 23, fig. 22. <\/em>sustained anger; murderous rage (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The narrative news frame that supports the violence in Gaza and dehumanises Palestinians is so sickening that I for one feel story-afflicted by it. You do not have to be Palestinian to take this personally. Where, what, and who<\/em> provides the roof of narrative structure? Does it give shelter, protection from external forces? Protecting, whom<\/em>? Whose rubble? Who establishes the room where history is already present, seated on a throne? My thoughts move on and over into the rubble of a text, into the breakdown of a narrative, but a breakdown for the sake of health. Wynter: \u201cEvery poem says things that you have to break down to explain.\u201d27<\/a><\/sup> Perhaps our story time must come to an end. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think we need texts whose words are self-conscious and worked-through, demanding our active engagement in thought-forming, so that it is up to us, one human reading body after another, to make up our minds and embody the insights it has helped produce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Postscript in the Middle, still Monday, 28 October, 2024.<\/u><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, all the time, I have been waiting for the approval of my discharge from the hospital. Waiting is always endless, a form of enduring. I am now waiting for the medical exams that are to show my health\u2019s improvement after treatment\u2014even though, the doctors admit, it\u2019s probably too early to tell. Still, doctors are required to monitor progress, if only in retrospect. Again: linear structure, a form of fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So this is now being typed (thought-formed) on my phone as I am seated in the waiting room of the hospital\u2019s lung clinic, waiting for someone to measure my lung capacity with a spirometry test. I\u2019m full of thinking, a busy mind, but also extremely tired\u2014it\u2019s so incredibly tiring to wait and to have to keep on waiting. My mind and body are drifting somewhere between these two opposing energetic forces: thinking and waiting. Can you be story-suspicious and still have a desire to write, or are these bound to cause friction together? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think I would like to think of narrative in positive terms, as something flowing, as a stream of consciousness in which one of the currents will force its way up, while undercurrents do their work more quietly. Yes, I think, I like to think like water, but through words. This is not to say I want to write intuitively or without intention, but rather pushed forward and jammed sideways by all the elements that affect my thinking. And I want to take these affectations seriously. Like the woman who sits beside me, right here and right now, in this waiting room, who makes me self-consciousness about my rapid finger-tapping on my phone. Yes, this is how I would like to think about narrative. But I also observe the persistence of a story of straight canals made to ship units of cargo from A to B. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Today is Thursday, 31 October, 2024 (still somewhere in the middle or, N.H.I: No Humans Involved)<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m back home, in my living room, making an effort to pick up where I left off. Obviously, this, too, is a fiction and narrative strategy\u2014the passing of time pretending not to have happened. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2024, Graywolf Press published its fifteenth-anniversary edition of Zong! <\/em>by poet M. NourbeSe Philip. It\u2019s a book of poems based on the massacre of over a hundred Africans by the crew of the British slave ship Zong in the days following 29 November 1781. The ship, owned by the Liverpool-based William Gregson syndicate, took part in the Atlantic slave trade. The company had taken out insurance on the lives of the enslaved Africans as cargo, and when the ship ran low on drinking water following navigational mistakes, the crew decided to throw sick and\/ or weakened Africans overboard. Relying solely on the public document of the Gregson v. Gilbert court case over the insurance money, Philip\u2019s poems excavate from its legal vocabulary what she calls \u201cthe story that cannot be told yet must be told\u201d\u2014the murder of some 130 Africans, drowned in the sea because they were presumed to be worth more in insurance money when sacrificed, so as to preserve the rest of the \u201ccargo.\u201d Quoting from the Gregson v. Gilbert report: \u201cThis was an action on a policy of insurance to recover the value of certain slaves.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zong!<\/em>\u00a0consists of phrases, words, and fragments of words taken from the Gregson v. Gilbert legal text, in verbal collages of increasingly disintegrating language, and interrupted by the occasional word or phrase in languages that, as Philip imagines, were\u00a0\u201coverheard on board the Zong.\u201d28<\/a><\/sup> This vocabulary is translated in an appendix glossary, comprising words from West African languages such as Shona, Twi, West African Patois, and Yoruba. Dutch words also appear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the Dutch-speaking reader, this is where the plantation hits home, inside the room, inside the body. Before the ship Zong was purchased by the William Gregson syndicate, it had sailed in the slave trade under the Dutch flag. It had been baptised \u201cZorg\u201d by the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie, which was in the business of shipping enslaved Africans to the Dutch colony of Suriname. Zorg<\/em>, in Dutch, means \u201ccare.\u201d Zorggg, <\/em>a word with a guttural sound that is typical of the Dutch language. The sound is formed at the back of the mouth and produced by pressure in the low abdomen, the gut. Not everyone can utter from the gut and pronounce this word properly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Dutch voice\u2014my own\u2014makes itself heard on the page of Philip\u2019s poetry, reverberating, back to myself. Suddenly I am caught up in this, my tongue implicated in Philip\u2019s words. Words that, I realize, also give a sound (a gut, a body) to the silencing<\/em> of these African men, women, and children. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zorg. To take care. Uw zorgen wegnemen; <\/em>to take away your worries; to unburden. Burden: a load, typically a heavy one. Burden, shipload, cargo, care. This ship made its first voyage in 1777, delivering Africans to the Dutch colony of Suriname. Passed on to its successive owner, the company of William Gregson, the ship was painted over. Zorg<\/em> turned Zong<\/em>. Care was meaningless to begin with, a perversity in the context of the plantation\u2014nonsense adding further distortion to an already distorted course of history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zong zong zong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other Dutch words that appear in Zong!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

bel<\/em>: bell
bens<\/em>: thing
geld is op<\/em>: money is spent 
hand<\/em>: hand
ik houd van u<\/em>: I love you 
op en neer<\/em>: up and down 
tak<\/em>: arm
tong<\/em>: tongue<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am unfamiliar with the word bens<\/em>, an archaic word. Apparently, it is a thing, but what kind of thing is it? I have to look it up in a Dutch dictionary. More than a thing, I read, it is someone\u2019s<\/em> thing: someone\u2019s property, owned goods. The economy of a thing. Dutch, it is sometimes said, is an economic language. Not a word too much. But also efficient, pragmatic, straightforward. The Dutch have a koopmansgeest<\/em>, a mercantile spirit. Always in for business, turning people into business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ik ben<\/em>\/ jij bens<\/em>
(I am\/ you thing) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A tak<\/em> is a tree branch, or the metaphorical arm of a tree, as in a branch of knowledge: een tak van wetenschap<\/em>. In de wetenschap<\/em>\u2014in the knowledge\u2014of the Dutch reader. The Dutch reader is in the know. A body, however, does not have two taks<\/em> or takken<\/em>: it has arms. The body is not a metaphor. It is made and unmade by language. This misguided speech, this \u201cviolent syntax,\u201d as Brand has named it, is the tongue, de Nederlandse tong<\/em>, of Zong. The tong<\/em> of Zong is no longer silenced within me; it produces an anti-narrative that can only be told by not telling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a Dutch reader to read the history of slavery is to be confronted with the long stretch or arm (de tak<\/em>) of a historical vocabulary, reaching right into the present moment, onto our present tongues. It is a terminology that turns a human being into a ship\u2019s cargo, a shipload, an insurance\u2019s worth, a unit of labour. In Lose Your Mother <\/em>(2007), academic and writer Saidiya Hartman lists the terms that were introduced in the terminology of fungibility in the Atlantic slave trade, in order to quantify the body of the negro slave: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The Portuguese referred to them as bra\u00e7os<\/em>, arms [again, a tak<\/em>?] or units. The Spanish called them pieza de India<\/em>, which roughly translates into an \u2018Indian piece.\u2019 A pieza<\/em> was a \u2018mercantile unit of human flesh,\u2019 which often comprised more than one human being. A male slave in the prime of his life was the standard against which other slaves were measured. People with limited physical abilities or who were elderly constituted only a fraction of apieza<\/em>. Two boys or a mother and her child might equal one pieza<\/em>. The Dutch called them leverbaar<\/em>, that is, a healthy or deliverable male or female slave.29<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I am back home but still sick and therefore not capable of working full-time (full disclosure: I am writing this in my pyjamas, half-reclining on the couch). Wynter enters my mind again. She tells about the Rodney King beating by the L.A. police and how, in the university\u2014she taught at USCD\u2014this brought students together:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

And then, on the radio we heard that whenever the police were told that somebody was calling about the trouble in their household, and the people were black\u2014or if they were white prostitutes\u2014they would say \u2018NHI\u2019: no humans involved (\u2026)  I then wrote an open letter to my colleagues, \u2018No Humans Involved.\u2019 In a sense, meaning that all knowledge should be addressed to that concept.30<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Much of her comprehensive theories on the genre of the human, \u201cthe coloniality of being,\u201d and the present-day overrepresentation of Man2, with the jobless poor as outside but establishing the sanctified social order, emanate from this letter (to which her colleagues never responded). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The letter is her beginning towards the production of difference from preexisting conditions, but it cannot take off in a place where this call for change is ignored.


I, too, am affected by the categories imposed on me by governing authorities. The Dutch UWV, Het Uitvoeringsinstituut Werknemersverzekeringen or Employee Insurance Agency, in charge of national social security and welfare, evaluates the health condition of its citizens and judges whether and to what extent, he or she is benutbaar<\/em>\u2014\u201cusable\u201d for employment, employable. Benutbaar, leverbaar<\/em>. In a capitalist society, one must deliver. In order to function and participate in society, you have to use your takken<\/em>, you have to carry out labour. I know there is no human involved when my employability is calculated in FTEs, full-time equivalents. In the past, I have been labelled as GBM\u2014geen benutbare mogelijkheden<\/em>. Deepl translates this to \u201cno exploitable possibilities,\u201d un-exploitable. This is the language of the Dutch verzorgingsstaat <\/em>or welfare state, a state taking \u201ccare\u201d of its citizens. Zorrrrgg<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Elsewhere, I read that a seaman is still referred to as an AB today: an \u201cable-bodied.\u201d And if you\u2019re not able-bodied you are thrown into the sea).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me be clear: I am not likening the fate of enslaved human beings to that of the sick or disabled. As it turns out, slavery and sickness are not allowed to go together. A slave cannot be onbenutbaar<\/em>. It has to be leverbaar<\/em> at all costs. When, for want of water, ill health turns to slave, slave is off-loaded, thrown overboard as cargo, damaged goods. \u201cSixty negroes died for want of water . . . and forty others . . . through thirst and frenzy . . . threw themselves into the sea and were drowned; and the master and mariners . . . were obliged to throw overboard 150 other negroes,\u201d Philip quotes from the Gregson v. Gilbert case.31<\/a><\/sup> We know and only<\/em> know about the fate of these drowned African men, women, and children, because their bodies serve as extras in a case that considers not their illness nor their drowning<\/em> but the legal effects of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sylvia: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Most of all, and this is the point of my letter to you, why should the classifying acronym N.H.I. [No Humans Involved], with its reflex anti-Black male behaviour-prescriptions, have been so actively held and deployed by the judicial officers of Los Angeles, and therefore by \u2018the brightest and the best\u2019 graduates of both the professional and non-professional schools of the university system of the United States? By those whom we ourselves have educated?32<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Implicated in the Gregson v. Gilbert case, the report of the ship\u2019s owners v. the insurance company, is the story of all those humans involved who cannot tell their stories and whose stories cannot<\/em> be told. Their case was never the case. 


And there are always stories that remain untold, by the telling of other stories all the time. A CNN news item from a week ago reports the suicide of an Israeli soldier with PTSD after having been deployed to Gaza and tasked \u201cwith driving a D-9 bulldozer, a 62-ton armoured vehicle that can withstand bullets and explosives.\u201d The news item informs that soldiers like him had to \u201crun over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.\u201d Reading this news item, I\u2019ve learned more about the bulldozer than about the hundreds of Palestinian bodies who were not involved, because they were never considered human beings to begin with, because they were always already labelled as Hamas terrorists or Hamas supporters. And we know about these run-over corpses\u2014one quoted soldier refers to these dead human bodies as \u201cmeat\u201d\u2014only because they figure as hauntings, spectres, in the flashbacks of traumatised Israeli soldiers, not<\/em> because they matter in and of themselves. \u201cHe got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him,\u201d the mother of the dead Israeli soldier is quoted saying.33<\/a><\/sup> These are the stories that are legitimated\u2014stories that do not just side with a particular point of view but that require the other, the Palestinian, to be subhuman. To cite Said again, \u201cThe Palestinian narrative has never been officially admitted to Israeli history, except as that of \u2018non-Jews\u2019, whose inert presence in Palestine was\u201d\u2014is<\/em>\u2014\u201ca nuisance to be ignored or expelled.\u201d34<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If these are the stories in which oppressed bodies (drowned bodies, run-over bodies, undeliverable bodies sick for want of water, bodies entering the room where history is already seated) are consigned to perform the script of their own dehumanisation; stories in which \u201cPalestinians are expected to participate in the dismantling of their own history,\u201d would it still mean something if they\u2014or we, on behalf of the people in Gaza\u2014seize permission to narrate, as Said hoped for, forty years ago, or are we now past that point?35<\/a><\/sup> Is this a turning point?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the relative peace and quiet of my living room, I end this day, this Dutch October evening, with a spiritual plea by Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott, a poetic answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPray for a life without plot, a day without narrative.\u201d36<\/a><\/sup>

<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
fig. 30. <\/em>at a shipwreck (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Today is Friday, 8 November, 2024 (still stuck in the middle).<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This morning, I had an appointment at the lung clinic to perform another spirometry test. My lung capacity shows a slight decrease. My doctor thinks it\u2019s too minimal to take action, but the change is too significant for me to pretend as if nothing is happening. I fall back into a state of worrying limbo. This, too, is part of chronic illness. After what has turned into almost a year of unstable, uncertain health, how to keep faith? What to do with the back and forth and back again, on and on, the back and forth to the hospital, the medical protocols, the adjustments of treatment and all the medication, the verdicts of test results?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have turned on my TV and watch some of the evening news programs. There was a riot yesterday, and there are different sides of the story. Supporters of the Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv came to Amsterdam, where, after the match, and after public provocations (racist anti-Arab chanting on the streets and in the metro, an attempt at vandalising a taxi, and the removal of a large Palestinian flag from a residential building), they were sought out by Amsterdam youth and assaulted in violent attacks. Reporters and politicians, including the Israeli president Isaac Herzog, all too eagerly jump onto the storyline of a present-day \u201cpogrom\u201d by Dutch-Moroccan teenagers on scooters and fat-bikes. The word works magically, like a spell\u2014of course it does: it excludes, expels, and it morally overrules all other possible readings of the events. On TV I watch people express their disgust of these young male\u2019s behaviour, condemning their hideous actions, calling for \u201cspeedy trial\u201d so their deviance will be re-affirmed judicially and they can be put to jail. Everyone speaks about them, but it occurs to no one to simply ask them: Why? What happened?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why? And why not? In her letter to her colleagues, Wynter refers to an editorial in\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, which points out \u201cthat it costs $25,000 a year \u2018to keep a kid in prison; which is more than the Job Corps or college.\u2019 However, for society at large to choose the latter option in place of the former would mean that the \u2018kids\u2019 in question could no longer be perceived in N.H.I terms as they are now perceived by all. 37<\/a><\/sup> Why not try something different for a change?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n
\n
\"\"
fig. 24. <\/em>explosive anger (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905)
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Five months later (or: could today be the end of something ongoing?)<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thoughts keep forming, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing. What becomes part of a text, and what remains untold, or is overlooked, forgotten? What is made insignificant? Time moves on. Here\u2019s a note I took from poet Etel Adnan\u2019s <\/em>Shifting the Silence (2020), one of the books that was with me in that hospital room, when I started writing this text, five months ago: <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

We also think in ways we\u2019re not aware of. That sounds like a paradox, or nonsense, but I\u2019m serious. I experienced double thinking: one thought sliding on another, I was startled, didn\u2019t know which one to follow, lost sight of both. I was also slightly scared: are thoughts bouncing balls? Do we really own them?38<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I wrote (and am writing) this text in a diaristic form, with jumps in time. The diary imposes a chronology which is different from the constructed linearity of a story. In the flow of time, from the midst of life, we do not know what is going to happen, what the future looks like, if and how it all ends. Instead of prefiguring an outcome, the diary traces an unfolding, it performs a not-knowing, a not-yet, which becomes readable in retrospect. The diary does not require the coherence or logic of a linear narrative, which would require me to edit out what mattered in the moment, but what has been absorbed or dissolved in the meantime, by the continuity and constructed coherence of a time passing. What to say? Mid-January I lost my father-in-law; he fell into a coma and died after a major stroke. What also happened, around the same time: Israel and Hamas agreed on a ceasefire, which came into effect on 19 January 2025. It was broken again by the Israeli forces on 18 March. Netanyahu said that the army\u2019s renewed actions were, in fact, \u201conly the beginning.\u201d So we are back at the beginning, apparently. Again: who decides what constitutes a beginning; who can begin and end things, at their mercy? Who can put people that have other versions of the story under \u201cadministrative detention,\u201d their humanness put on indefinite hold? Does it still matter, I wonder, to point at the past glimmers of hope, however small\u2014the ceasefire, Palestinians gathering around long tables amid the rubble of former homes, breaking communal iftar on the first evening of Ramadan; displaced people returning to their homes (or what remains of <\/em>them), finding, perhaps, a photo or other remnant of their former lives; family members, separated by the war, by checkpoints, finally reuniting? Does it matter to tell this, when this hope is crushed again by fire, a deliberate blockage of food, water, electricity, medicine, and the killing of humanitarian workers trying to save lives? What remains to be told? What remains of the telling itself? <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Linear narrative asks, beforehand, what matters in hindsight, what is to be lifted from the flow of time. But we live and we think and we feel right here, and always now.<\/em>
<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
fig. 42. <\/em>the logos pervading all (a bouncing ball) (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Dionne Brand, in A Map to the Door of No Return:<\/em>
\u201cI had come here in search of a thought.\u201d39<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Brand I want to write, not in order to tell stories, but in search of a thought. Language initiates these searches, form-ulations.<\/em> The writing itself becomes the thought-form. Over the last months, we (a small group of readers) have come together on a monthly basis to discuss what \u201cthe plot\u201d means in Wynter\u2019s thinking, and what \u201cplotting\u201d could do to counter the order of knowledge that produced and produces the overrepresentation of Man (Man1, Man2). The plot is first and foremost a place, the peripheral piece of land assigned to enslaved plantation workers to grow their own food for their own subsistence. This in order to maximise the profits of the plantation. (So that they can take care of themselves and the plantation owners do not have to deal with their needs as human beings.) Wynter writes: \u201cAround the growing of yam, of food for survival he [the African peasant transplanted to the plantation in the Caribbean] created on the plot a folk culture\u2014the basis of a social order.\u201d40<\/a><\/sup> This order literally emerged from the same grounds as the plantation, but was also an alternative to its system of profit, extraction, and exploitation, yielding cultural forms of survival beyond the sustenance of food, such as Vodou and, later, the blues. As the percussionist, visual artist, and herbologist Milford Graves says in an article by Melvin Gibbs: \u201cBlack music in this country [US], during the time of slavery . . . it was music that played an integral part of their survival. The music was not used to get out and impress some music critics . . . It was out there to save your soul, to heal you.\u201d41<\/a><\/sup> The plot is therefore more than the land itself, it is a place to live<\/em>, sustain life: to survive, regardless, in spite of, the plantation order of economy and extraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But plotting, to plot<\/em>, is also a verb. Plotting may refer to a scheming or planning in secret: the clandestine organisation of a subversive action, resistance, or rebellion. On the plot, the enslaved workers plotted revolts and escapes. The plot is a site of potential, a place to imagine things differently. In a conversation with Black studies graduate students, Wynter cites Langston Hughes: \u201cThe land that has never been yet\u2014And yet must be.\u201d And she proceeds, \u201cThat\u2019s the land you\u2019re going to fight for. You see? The land that\u2019s not been yet.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a> That is also the plot. Wynter\u2019s work can be seen as an ongoing effort in, and call for plotting difference, on the epistemic grounds of academia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lastly, the plot is a narrative device, a matter of story, and a means to make stories matter: an ordering of events into a meaningful structure, which also requires an act of imagination. The difference between story and plot is perhaps most effectively exemplified by author E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel <\/em>(1927):<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. \u201cThe king died and then the queen died,\u201d is a story. \u201cThe king died, and then the queen died of grief\u201d is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. (\u2026) Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say \u2018and then?\u2019 If it is in a plot we ask \u2018why?\u201942<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Why, again, why? And perhaps we also need to ask ourselves what is outside of the question put forward here\u2014why do we grieve the death of some and not those of others? Why the king and the queen and why not the child that is starving to death in a hospital that is under siege? Why is the hospital that I am returning to, back and forth and without much linear progress, a place of assumed care and safety, whereas in Gaza, hospitalised patients are always already at risk of dying\u2014if not of ill health, then by Israeli fire? Why are these questions out of the question?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to live by the questions I ask myself. I cannot do this by pretending I have answers, conclusions, resolutions. I had come here in search of a thought and have ended up writing my way out of the academic form. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A woman in a hospital gown leaves her belongings behind, sweeping the dust of rubble from her sleeves. As she walks from the ruins of her former shelter, she is no longer writing towards the solidity of its architecture but in refusal <\/em>of it. Proposal for a new story: collapsing the narrative plot into a plot of land that is open to other forms of thinking. This thinking, this thought form, begins by imagining something else on this plot, or even better: it lets vegetation take hold and lets the weeds grow their own course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n




(Today is 19 October, 2025, and it is unending)<\/u><\/strong>
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\"\"
 fig. 11. <\/em>radiating affection (Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms<\/em>, 1905)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cBut thinking (alas) does not happen in front of your eyes, with a clear horizon.
It spreads its light.\u201d

\u2014Rosmarie Waldrop, from the poem Asymmetry in The Nick of Time<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This text was written in dialogue with the other members of the research and reading group on Plotting: Patricia de Vries (organiser), Laura Dubourjal (coordinator), Gervaise Alexis Savvias, Tabea Nixdorff, and Philip Coyne, as well as with various episodes of Between the Covers. <\/em>This podcast, by writer David Naimon, has been a space (a plot?) that nurtured my hope, provided insight, and sustained my belief in the need for ongoing resistance, against the hideous realities and fictions of the present moment. Transcripts of the interviews that have informed this text and\/or have been cited from can be found here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n