In June 2018, Lou Cornum gave a lecture for “Future Perfect” at Data & Society Research Institute in New York. In it, they drew links between several geographies and their peoples, who have been affected by the slow and accelerated deaths of uranium and the atomic bomb. They insisted more particularly in the parallel between the history of Dene workers of Port Radium and that of their own Diné elders—despite being geographically distant, Dene and Diné (Navajo) people share an Athabaskan language—who were subjected to similar deathly radiation. Through this commonality, they coined the manifesto notion of “Irradiated International” that links communities and nations evoked throughout this issue. As such, it was important for us to include an excerpt (the final third) of Lou’s lecture in it.
The weapon of mass destruction is the nation. The United States of America for one. But also the very notion of nation itself.
Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia.
Niger. Russia. Namibia. Uzbekistan. China. The United States.
These are the nations mining the most uranium, all connected by histories of competing empires and lines of radioactive commerce.
Where can you imagine pain? Where can you register it? Where can you see violation? What lines demarcate your concern?
What happens when people across great swaths of time and space witness if not together then in tandem?
I will myself to radiate outwards, to exceed the constraint of a national body, of a closed border body, to meld with a mutant consciousness and deform what deforms me.
The work to do: Making visible, Making felt, Making it stop. I don’t yet know the chain reaction that links these acts. There is no reversal reaction to take away the death and slow death already enacted by leaky waste sites and test site winds. The irradiated international are here, everywhere. In the nodes and lines linking this uncollected collective is the invisible power of radiation itself, radiation made otherwise. In their poem “Infected Sunset,” Demian DinéYazhi writes from Navajo lands: “I talk to the uranium beneath my body/It tell me it is lonesome/it is warmblooded and resilient/it is angry and it has been violated/and in this way it is just as angry as an Indian.” How do you journey to the uranium and ask for forgiveness? There is no way to undo the violation but perhaps there are shared trajectories for our anger.
There must be a way to think about earth and land and being that would make the idea of nuclear weapons impossible. And to think of the waters as well. Soon the extractors plan to plumb the ocean for their deadly matters. Four billion tons of uranium is in the seas. It does not ask to be made solid. Fred Moten, who grew up in Las Vegas near the Nevada test site and recalls the charged air after a nuclear detonation, wonders and asks us to wonder what “complex disarticulations and rearticulations of space and subjectivity…” are possible and create possibility beyond the “spatial obsessions of empire” (Black and Blur, 2017). I ask these questions in the form of how to claim land without slipping into property and borders, so that the irradiated international can protect themselves from harm without reproducing harm for others. I turn to a rearticulation of the invisible lines of radiation that demarcated a vast network but one perhaps of transformed suffering. How might we take back the world and hold it differently? Revolutionary subjects, the potential of the irradiated international, are containers of energy. Decolonization is a reorganization of matter. A new geography is coming cut by empire’s geometry but now shaped into something else.
In the French Caribbean, one of the central laboratories of modern death, speaking from where the land meets the sea in Martinique, Édouard Glissant writes in Poetics of Relation about two kinds of science, or more precisely two directions for science to take. There is the arrow-like science of discovery-as-conquest. What we might call empire science.
Up here
in these hills
they will find the rocks
rocks with veins of green and yellow and black.
They will lay the final pattern with these rocks
they will lay it across the world
and explode everything.
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977).
After the empirical, what can be seen (radiation, and by extension the irradiated international, is you recall invisible, until it’s not.) The arrow like science is the penetrating practice that says it is neutral good to dig up radioactive materials and see how much they can annihilate. The science of observation. And in the notebook where these observations are recorded, say in the Bikini Atoll there is no note for the people relocated to another island while the test is conducted and ferried back to a home that is no longer home.
The other direction Glissant describes is a science of inquiry. Rather than an arrow, this science takes the circular shape of wholeness. The science of inquiry is experimental, processive, meditative. This is a science that might note and record, as indigenous peoples globally have done, the presence of the radiated yellow dirt but chose a different relationship to this substance than one of extraction. At the end of this section on science Glissant states, “the highest point of knowledge is poetics.” How do we share knowledge with each other and to what ends? This is about a science fit to the measure of a world we want, one we can actually live more than a half-life in. Deleuze and Guattari call something similar by the name of nomadic science, a practice of seeking wonders and posing problems, outside the science of the state, outside the science of sovereign categories. Britt Russert reformulates this as “fugitive science,” forms of apprehension that operate on lines of flight carried out by black and native practitioners to understand their place and future in the world outside the distorted view of empiricism.
These other practices of science help me think what has so far been sputtering or overindulgent attempts to consider categories of nature, the social, the political and the human all together. Wynter also reiterates Cesaire’s conception of a science of the word, a science of human systems. There are the tribal ways of knowing, diffuse and different across all continents, systems of observation and the practice of being-with the non-human that do not speak the name of science but perhaps as stories or ceremonies or a blockade or an encampment against extraction. All these alternative and speculative traditions of science that have not yet been but have also always been are a study of how and why certain beings and forms can live together, which formations create life, which conditions make more combinations of more life possible.
These projects speak with the irradiated international against a science that studies how to kill, how to hoard and how to manage such that others live longer only to die more alone. All these forms of knowing are forms of becoming. They speak the poetics of an exuberant proliferation of experience that insists on eternal inquiry and constant creation.
The irradiated international goes beyond what anthropologist Barbara Rose Johnston calls the radiogenic communities. It goes beyond solidarity. We must think outside the community. Outside the limits of what you can care for. Imagine a solidarity that does not have to be solid. But diffuse. As widespread and impersonal as violence, as radiation. Because it does not seem that seeing the world in its entirety has done much to mitigate the violence. What does it take to feel the world in its entirety? Or is this not the answer at all? To act not just through connections but across breaks.
In her 2017 essay on “settler atmospherics,” Kristen Simmons of the Southern Paiute states the project of the US settler empire is “to place indigenous nations and bodies into suspension.” Yet despite all the precarities of this displacement, she writes that “those in suspension arc toward one another—becoming-open in an atmosphere of violence.” In our shared state of porosity there is “potential, exposure, and entanglement all at once…and we develop capacities to feel one another otherwise.”
In the future for those whose future was taken away: I seek a materialism without teleology, a materialism of matters unseen and chaotic. More than one southwest tribe had prophecies about the yellow strains in the rock, the ore that never had to be a weapon, but that these see-ers knew would be dug up and laid in lethal planetary designs. Now it is the irradiated international whose power I prophesize and who I ask to prophesize with me: a world reorganized and the practices and poetics to live with it. ■