Tamarind Fever

Wordle 244 5/6

Trying to figure out what to do about computing the Gini index for a data set that has negative after-tax income values.

“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-­ knowledge, human knowledge— ­and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance toward its expression. They ask us why we have created them.

Finally, if I think of one thing the feminism I defend should be against, it is private property. If you think that private property was fundamental for the transformation of a human being into private property, as object – that the law of private property was essential to the making of white patriarchy; its laws of inheritance; to right of land; rights over wife and children, animals and plants, and again over racialised human beings; to the making of the Master’s House and its world – then you cannot envision a world that would keep private property as its foundation and would be more just. Private property of notions impoverishes the conversation, and we end up fighting over a word rather than its content, the dreams of futurity that we can deploy from that word. A decolonial feminism is to facilitate a leap in imagination, to be convinced that there are alternatives, and that they are worth fighting for.

A person in command of their spirit, at one with humanity, will labor over discord between allies until a solution is arrived at. She will take responsibility for the conflict, in order to resolve it. An empowered person always has the initiative in her own hands. She is in command of herself at all times. An empowered woman will never bow to pressure or abuse, nor will she promote discord between natural allies.

We must show how the politics of pacification and neutralization work, how power can finally acknowledge demands for visibility once it has emptied their content of any subversive element, but also how and why certain demands will never be accepted because they will lead to the dismantling of the structures of domination and exploitation.

And now as I am working in predominantly Indigenous communities, there is also something that’s transformed for me. There is an intentional slowness in processes which I’ve really appreciated. When I’m working with Indigenous people at work, people are saying, “Slow down.” “Have you gone out for a walk today? Have you eaten lunch?” I’m like, “People care about these things? What is this environment where we are not just driving our bodies into the ground? People are getting me to ask myself if I am in balance?”