A Hand, a Question, and a Path of Desire

Dearest Nilanjana, dearest Mimosa,

The Mercator projection of world maps, so commonly used because it makes the world neat and rectangular, flat, makes land masses near the poles, like Greenland and Antarctica, appear larger, and ones along the equator, like Central Africa, smaller. The Gall-Peters projection tries to preserve the different continents’ correct relative sizes, but it does so by totally distorting their shapes. 

Besides, I do not see the world from an aerial view, except rarely, en route, when leaving. I am tethered by gravity and history to land, and sea. In mainstream American social science, research that is smaller in scale, bottom up, or street-level tends to be seen as less rigorous, as inherently anecdotal, lacking in the systemic. As if documentation were an objective, neutral exercise. As if authoritative maps could possibly do anything but flatten us and frame us into rectangular shapes, as if they could represent the territory. 

***

A poem by Abhay Xaxa, an activist who works with the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights in India, reads:

I am not your data, nor am I your vote bank…
I refuse, reject, resist your labels… 
because they deny me my existence, my vision, my space,
your words, maps, figures, indicators…
So I draw my own picture, and invent my own grammar...

The first line of this poem reminded me of a moment from my fieldwork with grassroots organizations, when activists from the Urban Youth Collaborative in New York City met with then-Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. When Chancellor Klein repeated his argument that the police officers in schools were effective, one young woman pleaded: “Please. You keep staring at your piece of paper and referring to questionable ‘data.’ …look up and listen to us. We’re sitting in front of you. We are the data.”

Thinking about these two scenarios together—one in which research is extractive and colonizing, and one which activists demand for their evidence, their lived experiences and local knowledge, to be taken seriously as data—made me want to reflect on when and how documentation—in poetry, in academic research—can be thoughtful and helpful, and on the role of what I call critical friends, attempting to enact radical solidarities.

A grounded map, one that truly speaks to our circumstances, threatens state and corporate power. Why else would Congress consider banning federally funded mapping of housing inequalities, of gun violence? A bottom-up perspective is inherently a redistribution of relational power.

***

I remember attending a United Nations meeting where an Indigenous leader spoke about how official governmental protection of her land was anything but. The government opened up her community’s land to oil companies and paramilitary groups. When she went on to talk about intergenerational trauma, the presiding Rapporteur interrupted: “Excuse me, but your intervention is not smart.” I gasped. It took me a while to realize that the Rapporteur meant that her testimony was not SMART: specific, measurable, action-oriented, relevant, time-sensitive.

Intergenerational traumas are not smart. Because they lack a contained shape, because they cannot be addressed by specific individuals we can sue and name as racist, because they are pervasive and have seeped into our dreams as well as our nightmares, state institutions claim that they are too amorphous, that they do not exist.

Even as I endeavor to work with (not on) communities in my fieldwork, I am ultimately deigned the author of the narratives published. If I could, for instance, trace the contours of absence, that would be something. Who participates? How do we account for the voices of the historically marginalized, without romanticizing, exoticizing, or flattening them into discursive tropes? Whose knowledge, what knowledge counts most? When is documentation a critical intervention? When does it perpetuate status quo power inequalities?

I turn to poetry to resensitize myself to language, to the absurdity of our everyday practices. Formal restlessness and fragmentation, documenting polyvocalities through texts in the margins, quotations, images, running footnotes, and various registers, serve as different strategies of refusing categorization. This helps me to think through our subjectivities, the extent to which our attempts to make claims, to have rights, are performative struggles as well as substantive ones. 

***

After a while, we don’t need UN Rapporteurs or Schools Chancellors to remind us of what sounds smart. In my work with social justice organizations and democratic initiatives, activists quickly become super adept at navigating legal, bureaucratic, or corporate negotiations. I have also listened to many of these same activists lament the extent to which they now censor and police themselves, how they now automatically whittle down demands in order to render them “reasonable” and “feasible” in the eyes of the state. 

One Indigenous leader I spoke with remarked that different “enhanced participation” initiatives at the UN were “domesticating us [Indigenous leaders] like animals.” Many of the activists with whom I work in my research fieldwork note that they are adept at critiquing current injustices, but that they struggle to not just dream bigger but differently, to imagine alternative realities, speculative futurities. To me, this latter struggle is the work of poetry as social practice.

***

Paper streets appear on maps, but they have not (yet) been built. City planners dedicate these streets to allocate resources for future access, to officially record them as public. Paper roads are especially common in rural areas in New Zealand, where they are often never built. They exist, always, in the future.

But we are not designated planners, so we turn to desire paths, to the streets we make not with concrete but by walking. It is only occasionally, after snowfall, or when I’m particularly tired, or emboldened, that I allow myself to ignore the paved paths and create my own. The Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, “se hace camino al andar,” or “you make the way by walking.” In grass, it takes as few as 15 passages over time to create a new trail. 

I work with poetry not as a means of transcription or dissemination, but as a way to help to delineate the lines of what once stood here, and where we wish to go, and to do so in systematic ways, always in conversation, thinking together. I would like to think together about how to pay attention to palimpsests, to what has been displaced, to who or what should be here, even if they don’t fit along institutional lines. And imagine and articulate and create paths of desire, that speak to our everyday lives, rather than reifying hierarchies of power. To become legible claims-making citizens without being tamed into taxable subjects by the state, or other people’s data points.

When I am struggling in my work on democracy and social movements, I turn to my long lists of notes, quotations, observations, to those I respect most for conversations and collaborations. I turn to you, who have extended both a hand and a question as acts of generosity. I turn to and for poetry, as a different of mode of inquiry, as an ecology of care. Poetry is an unflattening; it is a grasping in the dark recesses of collective knowledge I did not know we held, could hold, for what can be. We trace our collective footsteps. We map the shape of our disobedience.