“Past tense, future perfect” is a combination of words oft-used by author Zadie Smither in her 1999 novel White Teeth about immigrant identities and dehumanization in late 20th century London. Something between past and future is a desiring, unrepresented present. This gap is widened by the the physicality of “tense” versus the grammatical association of “future perfect”. Between dealing with the internalized trauma of colonization and having to conform to westernized knowledge systems lies a reality of bodies existing con trauma in the present.

I wonder about triggers. From “botanical colonization” (Smith, 65)  to weaponized disease interventions (Smith, 65) I question how anyone with internalized memories of oppression ever learns to trust again. Though as Intzin, who so bravely shared his own “fucking” trigger, the one that “shook his very being” (4) explains, it is sometimes the trigger that prompts consciousness.

 

Many of the readings this week discuss crevice knowledge, the remote control that is always without fail between the seat cushions, except the physical body is the source. Mignolo, for example, recommends sourcing knowledge from contact zones through a strategic rubbing up against bordering ideologies (498). Like feeding pigeons, with their internalized and regurgitated food, ideas about colonization have also taken on a bodily life, running, as Cusicanqui says, “like rivers, from south to the north” (104). Grosfuguel helps synthesize the ways in which the soul (83), a reliable carrier of trauma, plays a leading role in the staging of the four major genocides/epistemocides (77).

So what can we do with our political bodies to resist? Can we hold one another accountable for “learned ignorance”  (Santos, 188) and attempt to replace it with solidarity (Santos, 188)? Via “unlearning” mentioned by Santos (188) and “de-linking” explained by Mignolo (461), we can imagine the significance of rewiring the brain, psychologically shredding the pathways or “mental structures” (Cusicanqui, 97) physically rejecting the urge to make everyone but ourselves happy (Intzin, 9).