Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack
in the concrete
Proving nature’s laws wrong it learned 2 walk
without having feet
Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams
it learned 2 breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else even cared!
-Tupac
In between the crevices of colonial violence lies a place where one can join in repairing and reconstituting subjecthoods forcibly enveloped into the semantic fabric of neocolonialism. Just as the weaving of fabric appears to contain many holes to form the whole (when one examines it closely), colonizers too left holes within the whole of their methods. This is the space of what I would like to identify as the ‘gap’– resting in the gap, the space after a break with the semantic fabric of normativity, allows room for the stretching of new forms of subjectivity. Providing a temporal fallout shelter for minoritized subjects who seek refuge from being defined by their colonial environment, the semantic fabric inscribed on them, the gap runs alongside the lines of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s essay Another View on Totality, Abembe’s Neropolitics and Quijano’s ideas of colonial power. It is the part that totality forgot, it lives because of the blind spots of the colonizer, and is inhabited by indigenous language and embodied knowledge. Appearing as a black hole to the colonizer, it is the space of queerness, of non-definition, non-regulation which changes with time/space just as well.
What is left after the forceful severing of the indigenous? Sovereignty. What is left after sovereignty? How can a flower bloom in the crack of all that asphalt? There, in the between is the gap, the space, the extra room that confounds the confines, housing the un-mappable, illegible body, the gap is where one goes when one disidentifies with the fabric of the colonizer. It is what inspires the act to inscribe oneself, it is the mind space of the wak’as who created a frame, “that re-actualizes the gestures, motives, and semantic practices, which decipher and penetrate through the crevices of colonial violence, rearticulating that which is deranged, joining forces to repair the “pierced fishing net” that the cosmos became for the peoples of the Andes.”(Cusicanqui, 2)
The gap allows repair, it is where the breaking or fracturing took place and is an imaginative realm of healing from this rupture.
Mbembe remembers Fanon’s description of the spatialization of colonial occupation, “For him, colonial occupation entails first and foremost a division of space into compartments. It involves the setting of boundaries and internal frontiers epitomized by barracks and police stations; it is regulated by the language of pure force, immediate presence, and frequent and direct action; and it is premised on the principle of reciprocal exclusivity.”(Mbembe, 26)What can survive amidst this kind of brutality? In between these divisions and internal frontiers are people who live crouching in the gap, they are labeled as disposable but continue to want to live. This desire to continue, the dreamscape of a life worth living is the space of the gap; to have the capacity to imagine a refusal of the inscription of disposability altogether.
In Quijano’s Colonially of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America there is attention given to the primary model of powers which facilitate Eurocentrism into being, one axis they mark contains the ability to name and categorize people around the concept of race.(Quijano,182-183) It is the centering of the European as ideal, one that remains constitutive in producing social relations, and perpetuating structures of control, is what allows for these divisions to exist. To refuse to identify with this process of naming, strips the colonizer of the power to formulate one’s body as lesser than, as disposable. It is this breaking with Eurocentrism and the refusal to be pinned down by Eurocentric thought, there is the shelter, the crawl space of the gap I seek to imagine.
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. "The Potosí Principle: Another View of Totality." Decolonial Gesture 11. no. 1: 2014. Accessed 29 Sep 2018. Quijano, Aníbal. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America" Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. 181-222. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2008. Mbembe, Achille. "Necropolitics." Public Culture 15. no. 1: 2003. Accessed 29 Sep 2018.