voice notes dispatch #1
on space and counter-mapping.
In the spirit of playing with form, I am sending you a voice note dear readers. I have always appreciated the art of a voice note. It allows you to hear the umms and ahhs that litter our speech. It allows you to hear thought in process.
I especially appreciate when my researcher friends send me a note on their thinking. The intentionality of their words. Their fear of not falling into discursive pitfalls. The way they cite through their speech without thinking. It is a fascinating love language of the nerdiest persuasion. It makes me smile.
This day, I was on my way to think about space. I recently picked up “for space” by Doreen Massey. I have been intrigued with space for a long time although I didn’t know what it was. Massey defines spaces as a product of interrelations and ‘stories-so-far’, thus this voice memo is thinking along side that.
It is also thinking with how I am thinking with Black geographies. For me, there is a friction between how much I place myself openly in my theorizing. I have grappled with how much I want to explicitly expose how my position in the world impacts the questions that I ask and if I would like to discuss how are open seams in that appear in how I write and think. I am not one to believe that the same systems that have tried to kill you for centuries deserves all of you — especially when those systems have fashioned a marketplace where one’s being is so “easily” commodified and flattened. Like the loss of the heights and depths on a map, they make us seem easy, tenable, and readable. While we have been taught this flattening is essential to progress, it always seems at a cost.
The Transcript.
Hello friends this week I wanted to do a notes app dispatch from the outside and so we are walking in Tannery Park in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. or so-called Canada and today I wanted to think about space. I've realized that a lot of my work is thinking about space and place what produces them, what annihilates them, and I think the best way to think about space is to be outside. And living in a place that can be so cold and dreary, it is beautiful to stand outside and just take in the land for even a moment and really just be grateful for those who had come before us. Those who are with us and those who will will come.. So I have been interested in black geographies for a really long time, and I think there's always this interesting piece when you're researching or you're really attracted to something and you don't necessarily know why you're attracted to that thing. And I realized being someone of Afro Caribbean and Afro American descent living in a place like Canada. I always felt a place or a sense of placelessness. I always felt like I didn't necessarily belong where I was. And this kind of placelessness made me really interested in the spaces that we create and made me really interested in how we can create different imaginaries to think about how we're existing in the now. And I think this really informs a lot of my work about thinking about black liberation, human liberation, non human liberation, and really leaning into what Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, which is freedom itself is a place. And being an education, there tends to be a placelessness and a spacelessness to education and educating. There's not really an attendance to the land, to histories, to any type of materialities. It's really confined to these imaginaries of the classroom, sometimes of the school, the players are often students and teachers really disconnected from a larger lineage of being. And then if we think with Doreen Massey's work, we understand that space in itself is interrelated, meaning that while the Western humanist man, as Miss Sylvia Winter, would let us, would speaks about, would have us understand space as being something that is linear, something that is constantly being created and can be improved. Like, for example, seeing a first world or second world or third world country that may be one day, they'll become us, maybe one day they will come to this linearity of being and becoming this everlasting hamster wheel of improving and in growth and accumulation onto what we don't really know, but to say that someone else is behind and someone else is coming forward, this kind of imaginary makes it really difficult for us to understand that there are spaces that are co happening altogether and simultaneously. And I think when we begin to think about space in a different way, we then begin to ask a different questions, and even questions of political possibility, when we ask questions about abolition, when we ask questions about socialism, communism, anarchism, a lot of the times the binaries replace it in is within this kind of linear understanding of space. this feeling that we're going to go from one point to another, instead of really the simultaneity, the word, that can occur. Even a more internationalist sense a sense of the word. and also understand that freedom is happening as we speak, right? There's an understanding that there are spaces of liberation that are taking place, that are not necessarily visible. And Katherine McKittrick talks about ungeographic spaces in in Demonic Grounds. And I think about those ungeographic spaces a lot. And I also think about the idea that I come from an ungeographic space that even being within an academy space, my way of being and knowing is very much opaque to the academy. It's very much outside of. And so I guess there comes this understanding of having to grapple with a sense of a spacessness, a placessness, even a timelessness that is really thrust upon you when you decide to refuse the epistemic traditions of the Western humanist canon. But all this is to say, I am sitting here in a beautiful park. I'm looking at a swan right now. It's kind of foggy. There are a lot of sailboats in the distance. People are talking and walking, and the birds are singing, and the air feels so beautiful, and in these moments, in these sacred moments,, I am reminded of the sacredness of life. I'm reminded of the beauty of our ancestors and not just their human ancestors, but our animal and plant ancestors. And I am reminded that this work is not something that has to be done overnight. It doesn't have to be done in this turning of capitalistic vigour, but it can be done in slowness and it can be done with intentionality. I'm just taking time to listen. And so that's what I'm doing here. I have my notebook and I'm going to listen, and I'm going to write, and I'm going to read because I am I have the opportunity to do so and so I hope this day that whatever you choose to do that you do it with a deep breath, with an intentionality, that you are where your feet are, and that you will be blessed. Be well, friends, and I hope you have a great week.
Be well,
G.