“The world is made of stories and we enact the ones we believe…”
The Story begins with maps, transgressions of truth, and conviction in the superiority of one.
It begins 500 years ago with off-kilter centers of the world, peripheries in darkness, and an invisible indefatigable line. It begins with fervent belief in this first li(n)e, nec plus ultra, or nothing further beyond.
It begins with this divinely ordained border splitting the world into two parts: habitable and uninhabitable. Temperate, torrid. Rational, behaviorally aberrant. Redeemable… not.
It begins with another line also—that between hemispheres. With land imagined as underwater on the opposite side of the world, the Story begins with its miraculous elevation within the bounds of the line—in defiance of physical law and as evidence of God’s favor on this place and people. It begins with this divinely ordained order of things.
The Story begins with the crossing of the first line.
It begins in 1434 when Gil Eanes sails—survives—beyond Cape Bojador and keeps going. It begins with the kingdoms of Portugal and Castile seeking an authority to bolster their claims to land and calling upon the church; when Pope Nicholas V issues Romanus Pontifex, a papal bull granting the Portuguese a monopoly on trade with Africans and authorizing the enslavement of non-Europeans.
It begins with its imperative to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed.” It begins with boundless imagination dissolving myriad worlds into one flock, populating land beyond their center of the Earth with idolators. It begins with that word among many: infidel, pagan, heathen, and the actions they incite on the basis of a new universal logic.
It begins with the directive “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
It begins in 1456 when Alvise Cadamosto reaches the Gambia River, miles beyond Cape Bojador. It begins in 1488 when Bartolomeu Dias sails around the southernmost tip of a continent, propelled by the possibility of wealth and a future no one has ever seen.
It begins too, with the crossing of the second.
With the 1492 discovery of that true soldier of Christ inflamed with zeal for the salvation of souls and with fervor of faith. Of an antipode unsubmerged, existent.
It begins with the issuance of Inter Caetera in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI. With the directive “to find and expropriate, in the name of the state, any territories occupied by non-Christians that could be militarily conquered.”
It begins with the peculiar interaction of empirically sound habitation and terra nullius, nobody’s land. With the derivation of property rights and sovereignty, or dominium, from God’s grace. With an insistence that habitation [of a particular sort by a particular people] does not equate to said rights given their disgrace in the eyes of a particular God.
It begins with body placed beneath mind, the embodied made irrational, the spirit invisible.
It begins with a different answer to the question: How do we know? With a God’s eye view, a universal subject with uncanny similarity to its creators. With a method presumed objective that relegate questions that it cannot verify to the realm of myth and folklore.
It begins with whispering suspicions about the cosmic authority that had claimed the submergence of the other side of the world. So the Story continues with a different authority, subjugation and superiority on a necessarily different premise. A hierarchy no longer on the basis of idolatry, but on the basis of being, enshrined by physiognomy, heredity, and shade.
It begins again with centers of light and peripheries in darkness, with the Enlightened bestowing a new defining characteristic of what it means to be human. It begins with the forced evaporation of divine spirit from land and sea, with the valorized alienation of humans from all that surrounds, feeds, sustains us.
It begins with a rationality that turns the face of life slightly, eyes oriented elsewhere, the present and process disappeared. It begins with the exportation of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884, with the demand that the universal flock adhere. With the importation of this time in places where it unfolds otherwise. With life made impossible without these harbingers of productivity allegiant to this place called the future no one has ever seen.
It begins with one’s calibration with this ticking creation as a marker of civilization. With associating a failure to keep time with an inability to keep up with time, punctuality a proxy for a people’s progress. It continues with changes to words that uphold the idea that certain people are behind in time somehow: primitive tucking in inhuman, uncivilized burying primitive, undeveloped breathing easy—for now.
It begins with unchanged doctrines and papal apology tours, with chief justices reifying dispossession, always. Johnson v. M’Intosh, 1823, City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, 2005…
It begins with anthropology, “the science of men in another time.” With interpreters and field notes, quaint commentary on values alongside a measuring stick of rationality, a perverse fascination with othering.
It begins with sisters adorned in white enforcing a story of dominion and entitlement, framed as truth. With headmasters, canes, punishments for existing otherwise. With twin institutions made gatekeepers of knowledge, establishing the boundaries of what can be known and how and in what language. It begins with distorted simplifications, words given new meaning, wor(l)ds lost in translation, others banished, buried.
It begins with a tradition of education distanced in relevance from life itself. With a model of achievement based on individual wealth accumulation and infinite progress. It begins with a model colony peppered with evolué and assimilée, elite shells closer to this future. It begins with the carte d’immatriculation, the hard-won product of home visits and examination of silverware, observance of meal time norms, and facility in French.
It begins with a three letter word that simplifies the richness of tripartite Creator Spirits and origin stories made fables.
It begins with the camera as an objective truth. With camera settings and white balance, with the Laval Decree, illustrating the force of cinema. It begins with beneficence and moral outrage that shifts us into the same reality with a different name.
It continues with independence, the Year of Freedom, nations holding fast to their boundaries, less changed than having stayed the same. It begins with fabricated hunger strikes in the wake of murder, state department documents littered with “assassination of fill-in-the-blank,” a “stable, western-oriented government in the heart of Africa” under the guise of aid and beneficence. It begins with dismemberment, acid, teeth of fathers thrust as reconciliation sixty years after the deed. It begins with Soete’s words “We did things an animal wouldn’t do.”
It begins with invasions and coordinated coups in places that threaten this future of infinite profit, fruit corporations and state, United (see: Guatemala in 1954). It begins with lots of rustling, costume changes and new names (The United Fruit Company now operates under the name Chiquita Brands International), curtains closing while the act goes on.
With global institutions and conditionalities, policies that exacerbate the problem they proclaim to solve. With grand international conservation plans to “protect” thirty per cents of the Earth’s biodiversity—which of course begs the question from whom, as concession permits to extractive industries in protected areas have at times been granted shortly after.
It begins with poison packaged in sleek white squeeze bottles, giant billboards advertising this miracle cosmetic made to Enlighten. With bills that make an existence beyond binaries a felony.
It begins with disrupted cycles of seed saving and starvation as political weapons, with the illusion that vegetables are birthed in the produce section of the grocery store, the violence of the global agroindustry papered over with plastic wrap.
It begins with cages, badges that sanction violence and monetize punishment. With violence against sovereign peoples who refuse to fall neatly into the national fold. With terming a massacre a nonviolent struggle, a colony the more cordial, territory. It begins with fellowship found between two groups of occupying settlers and bipartisan policy reflecting shared interest and logic—unchanging whether red or blue (or blue and white).
It begins with curriculums and schools that churn out believers in a world as it is instead of how it came to be, echoing the insistence that this is all normal, possibility foreclosed, a world otherwise made near impossible to see.
It begins with the link between shine—the incredible, amazing, awesome, marvelous gifts that the Story allows for—and shadow, its twin necessity made near imperceptible, categorized as bumps in the seamless Story that can be fixed with more of it.
The Story begins with tropical storms, coastal erosion, and poisoned water—symptoms of progress and a particular rationality. It begins with reform, superficial solutions, adding “a sprinkle of spinach to a bowl of cyanide.” This deadly Story asks us to revere, to participate with gusto in the march towards a future that will never come. To one that requires suffering, calamity, and destruction if we are to insist on trying to bring it into being.
But it is made unsteady with a question. It is pushed off-kilter with the knowledge that no matter how imperceivable, miniature, invisible, inconspicuous, ordinary a line might seem, it obscures. Whether the line is etched across maps, humanity, or time, upon deeper inspection one finds an abyss in which life is not only made possible but probable. In which lies spirit and present as a process of creating [and acting with accountability towards] both future and past. In which lies possibility, other stories, and (an) entirely different world(s). ■