The World is Burning.

Wake up!

We are living in a world full of questions and no answers but perhaps solutions are not necessary for the problems we are facing. After leaving the planet in February 2022- I was appalled to find out that it meant to return to Earth. 

Death is life’s only guarantee. In a world full of chaos, change, and beauty, death is a space of release. A potion to the remedy of existence. Death is as moving as life itself. As vivid as the dreams that we fail to remember when we wake. 

Death is a natural occurrence but since the end of 2023 we as humans have entered a world where genocide has become pluralised. We are no longer speaking about the loss of life but rather the continuous onslaught on the sacred balance between life and death. We have received the ICJ’s verdict on Gaza, it has not changed the lives of the Palestinians. It has not halted the murders or the bombs. It is important to remember this verdict does not decide our futures, it only details Western civilization’s current stance on justice. The most important verdict is the one living in our hearts. As you read this, children in Sudan, Congo, and Palestine are screaming for the world to wake up. 

This wondrous, precious life belongs to us all, in sacred measure. Thus we all need to take on the responsibility of the Anthropocene. We need to acknowledge the influence and impact that the human species is having on the climate, land, environment, sentient life, organisms, and atmosphere. Western Civilisation and the W.H.I.T.E ¹ imagination is dedicated to “exterminate the brutes” ². They will not be satisfied until all those who fight for liberation- are as dead as their moral code and belief systems.  

So many of us do not have a home³ in this socio-political game called Western civilization. The world made by “Imperialist White Supremacist Hetronomative Ableist Capitalist Patriarchy”⁴ is the world that so many of us know and accept. The colonial structures that operate a world which is reliant upon raping, killing, and pillaging Black and Brown bodies for their success terrifies me. So many of us accept the consistent dehumanization of particular bodies as normality. As a black trans neurodivergent autistic shapeshifting time-traveling trickster- normal was never something I fit into. I never understood what felt simple and conventional to other humans. My inability to disguise apprehension towards the status quo often left me ostracized.  As I grew up and traveled the world, it occurred to me that normality is simply what the community can hold. Normal is simply what the majority of persons in one particular space are willing to accept and thus I ask myself “What “normal” conditions have we normalised that allow us to exist in such a world?” 

Worlds consist of stories, ideas, and forces of nature that exist as knowledge productions, dogmas, myths, and the organisms/species that live in, around, and through them. The legitimacy of a world is maintained by the citizens and individuals that make it up. We are living in a burning world. We are living in a world that hopes to normalize genocide and denies the onslaught of collective grief that has entered our lives since COVID-19. We are living in a world that refuses to accept responsibility for its atrocious actions and crimes. I am not surprised but I am appalled that it could be recorded, streamed, and blasted into each of our hands and we could still choose indifference. Western society parades a binary-based moral code that moves at the wills and wants of numerical currency or the dead dogmas created by rich white men. I no longer accept a world that normalizes Black pain and bombs innocent people. This is not a world that I want to live in. 

In February 2022, I spent a month in space. I can not explain space travel and neither do I wish to. I can not explain what it means to go to parts of the universe that can not be physically reached but I can tell you, I am not the first. Black creatives and mystics such as Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, and Octavia Butler have explored this with phrases such as “Space is the Place” and “Destiny…to take root among the stars.”⁵ I hope my art is an expression of all the things that I can not explain. I did not retreat, I did not run, I let go. I let go of the only world I knew, in order to redefine it. It should not be a radical statement to say that I am free but in the current construction of our world, it is. Leaving the world was easy as I was never truly part of the world. As a black person, I have never fully been included in the definition of human and thus this allows for a “particular epistemic and ontological mobility”.⁶ Sylvia Wynter helps us understand that Man is a European invention used to alienate and separate white bodies from the global majority. As Toni Morrison teaches us: “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”.⁷ And I chose to let go of this Man symbol and its manufactured history. 

The master’s tool will not dismantle the master’s house⁸ and thus my tool is fire and new seeds of thought. I will not be satisfied until everything has been burnt and we are co-creating new foundations. James Baldwin stated that “Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”⁹ I know that many of us want to make a difference. I know that we are tired. I know that many feel hopeless. I know that I am not alone in my disgust and anger. I also know that many of us are afraid of the change required. 

Facing our fear is fundamental to liberation. Fear preserves the order of many things and one of them is the numerous systems of oppression that utilize violence like bees do pollen. Change occurs every single day. The world where “Imperialist White Supremacist Hetronomative Ableist Capitalist Patriarchy” is not the leading imagination space is a world that many of us can’t imagine. W.H.I.T.E history teaches us that it has always existed but this is not true. Mythology and history are separated by belief and W.H.I.T.E believes in the eradication of bodies that they deem “savage”, “barbaric” or “terrorist” to name a few and it has consistently operated under this belief. Western civilization is afraid of dying but unfolds death upon many all while legitimizing the use of the “other”. 

The worlds we want to bring in require remembering, destroying, uprooting, and creating new possibilities, unseen and unheard but these worlds have always been felt. Worlds are born every day, destroying worlds is a bit harder. Worlds are stories and stories never die- but we can co-create new narratives and delegitimize and destroy old narratives and conceptions of self. 

In order to destroy a world, we must be willing to change. 

Upheave. Uproot. Remember. 

New possibilities of self are required in order to weaken the oppressive structures called Western civilisation. Toni Cade Bambara writes “Revolution begins with the self, in the self…. We’d better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouth don’t win the war.¹⁰” We need to dream beyond what is possible, for possibility lives in the hands of those who are unafraid to break into what can not be imagined. The poets. The mystics. The artists. The revolutionaries. The tired. The hungry. The courageous. The unseen. If we are afraid to change- we are afraid to recreate and reimagine. We are afraid to fight for those who are dying, for those who are asking for help, for those who need us. Your normal will not be sustained. The empire is crumbling. Its rotten heart must be pulled out. The war will not simply stay across the shores because violence is never contained and in this late stage of capitalism- violence is everywhere. Grief is everywhere. The denial is within everyone for as long as we are not interrupting colonial and oppressive structures, we are participating within them. 

When leaving Planet Earth, I had to merge with what was beyond my control. I had to choose my change. I had to merge with my dreams. Audre Lorde writes “The white fathers told us: I think therefore I am.“ The Black mother within each of us- the poet- whispers in our dreams: I feel therefore I can be free.¹¹” I had to let go off the deep-rooted colonial thought that at my most powerful- I am most dangerous. Many systems of oppression have benefitted from me being afraid of myself. I set fire to the person that I wanted to be in 2020, an academic who researched Vulnerability as Ambiguity¹² and existed within institutions that educated me in the understanding that my freedom could be defined and my existence explained. I set fire to myself and what did not dance and rejoice was what needed to be shed. Many things needed to die in order for new worlds to be born within me, new possibilities. When we are asking for justice and liberation for Palestinian people we are asking for a new world. My liberating action looks like fire setting, seed planting, and curious inquiry into unknown possibilities. The unknown possibility of new worlds and the incomprehensible nature of the self are one of the few things I can trust.

The world is burning. Death is everywhere. In her Nobel Prize speech in 1993, Toni Morrison stated that “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.¹³” The world we once knew, no longer exists. We can’t go back to “normal”. Those who need to maintain the status quo are willing to kill for it, they are refusing the grief and perpetrating violence in order to maintain it. The circus is on fire. We stare longingly believing that we are part of the show rather than spectators born inside of the  tent. We must accept the parts of ourselves that died. We must shed in order to bloom. We must merge with what is being born. We must escape. We must flee.

Our burning world requires your action. Freedom will not be placed into your hands. Your chains will not be broken against your will. Your imagination is being held captive. You are the prisoner with the key. I am scared but I am also scared of what happens if we do nothing. I know that changing and dying is not comfortable but it is necessary. Set fire to what does not choose you in fullness. Make new homes on the abandoned lands of possibility, hope and care but mostly importantly choose a life that allows you to change. Choose a world that allows us to dream. Choose a world that allows us to live. 

1.  Intergalactic Algorithm: We Hide Inherited Trauma Effectively (W.H.I.T.E) is the understanding that particular bodies educated within imperial and colonised belief systems are prone to denial and hiding in order to maintain such belief systems. Intergalactic Algorithm is a language co-created by the Unknown and Day Eve Komet. It is best understood as patterns of existence in harmonic values. ↩︎
2. “Exterminate All the Brutes | Raoul Peck’S Statement of Intent | HBO.” HBO. April 6, 2021. Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ4r3Qdrqmo. ↩︎
3.  Intergalactic Algorithm: Home is a feeling- a vibration that always arrives with you. It is certain in energy and is always seeking your comfort. This can look like a physical space, a book, a song, a collection of persons or an imagined space of possibility that moves you forward.  ↩︎
4. Pegoda Andrew Jospeh, “ Notes on the Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist (Heteronormative Ableist Theistic) Patriarchy.” Medium, February 2, 2021. https://medium.com/the-left-gazette/notes-on-the-imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-heteronormative-ableist-theistic-patriarchy-c7dc3c291b18. ↩︎
5. Butler, Octavia E, “Parable of the Sower”. London, England: Headline Book Publishing. ↩︎
6. Brown Jayna, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke University Press Books, 2021).   ↩︎
7. Morrison Toni, Song of Solomon (London: Vintage, 2016). ↩︎
8.  Lorde Audre, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (London, England: Penguin Classics, 2018). ↩︎
9.  Baldwin James, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear”, The New York Times Book Review, 1962. ↩︎
10. Bambara Toni Cade, The Black Woman : an Anthology (New York: Washington Square Press, 2005). ↩︎
11. Lorde Audre, Sister Outsider : Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY :Crossing Press, 1984).  ↩︎
12. M, Day, “Vulnerability Ambiguity” (Unpublished MA Thesis) (2018, University of Bern, University of Vienna) Vulnerability is an enduring human condition. It cannot be limited to particular bodies and groups but rather it is the ability to be open to the world; despite the atrocities that one may face in it. This understanding explores feelings as knowledge. ↩︎
13.  Morrison Toni, “Nobel Lecutre”, December 7, 1993, Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy, Stockholm, Sweden, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/.  ↩︎