Responsibility to Nothingness
By Aytak Dibavar
How can one be responsible to the silence of a space? How can one acknowledge its hauntings, phantoms, and colonial pasts if they are deemed irrelevant, invisible, void—reduced to nothingness?
In my work, I move through Islamic Sufism and a decolonial feminist reading of quantum physics to queer our understanding of concepts such as silence, absence, and nothingness. (1) In many ways, what has historically been deemed “nothing” (nothing important, nothing relevant, nothing significant) has either been erased, violated, or colonized. We can cull examples like terra nullius, the lands deemed empty and void by a European audience, thereby justifying their colonization. The people to whom these lands belonged were equally considered devoid of “ meaning or value,” and therefore the massacre, displacement, and enslavement of those whose bodies, lives, and lifestyles were justified. Or we can consider the coloniality of knowledge. Bodies of knowledge produced outside of the colonial world have been historically treated as lesser than, offering no significant contribution, and therefore either erased or ignored. And, finally, we can think of the absences and the void that has been (and continues to be) created due to the violent process of colonial and imperial erasure. So, the question that I seek to answer is how can nothingness and void be reworked into a historical archive—one we cannot avoid, turn a blind eye to, or ignore?
We are all responsible and accountable to knowing a space’s silence, shaped by the remnants of its colonial and imperial pasts and presents. Though this quality of absence is invisible or inaudible at times, by no means is it unidentifiable or indeterminate. Its haunting, lingering effect needs to be known.
Nothingness and queering nothingness is very important in my work.
However, centering nothingness in one’s world raises significant ethical and methodological questions: What are the ethics of reworking and reimagining nothingness and void? How can one be responsible and accountable to nothing (e.g., nothingness created by collective amnesia following violent political events and/or colonial and imperial erasures)? How can one write a story when presented with nothing (e.g., lost memories, silences, missing people, absences in archives, dead people)? Questions like these have been emphasized and explored by many decolonial feminist scholars.
However, fulfilling this responsibility requires us to be open, receiving, and accountable, rather than closed, when encountering the silence of a space. It requires us to conjure ghosts from history’s oblivion and move past the forgetfulness and amnesia associated with the afterlives of violence. “Afterlife” does not mean “the-over-and-done-with.” In fact, “the afterlives of an event are often as revealing as the event itself, shedding light on prehistories and futurities; on the multiple trajectories that could have been, and the one that eventually was.” (2) So, to be accountable to the nothingness of a structure is to be responsive to its hauntings.
“To be haunted by a ghost is to remember something you have never lived through, for memory is the past that has never taken the form of present,” writes the literary critic Julian Wolfreys. (3) Ghosts of this memorial past move through the silences and absences embedded in both macro structures and architectures of power such as settler colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, sexism, and imperialism. They also manifest in microstructures of power, such as a monument of a colonizer, the “empty” location of a former residential school, an abandoned factory, or a house in a refugee camp destroyed by a bomb. The micro and macro structures of power are not separate but are entangled: a dynamic, multi-temporal exigency. We all live with these ghosts. They are the spectres of our unspoken colonial past, haunting our existence in the afterlife. Our responsibility is to acknowledge and be accountable to these spectres. (4)
But the haunting of an abstract ghost risks being forgotten.
When the ghosts of our past are nameless and faceless, their pains and sufferings invisible, the haunting is difficult to see. When something remains sublime, not easily graspable by our senses, it is harder to be accountable for it. (5) In Lose Your Mother, American writer, academic, and educator Saidiya Hartman journeys along a slave route from America to Ghana in hopes of finding connections to her ancestral land, retracing the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. (6) She desires to travel to the past, as if it were a country one can return to. (7) This desire is born from the silence that envelopes the topic of slavery, both in society and her home. Her grandparents refused to talk about the subject and her parents and brother actively resist it, choosing not to “dwell in the past.” “The gaps and silences of my family were not unusual,” says Hartman. (8) On her journey, she encounters Ghanaians who are also in denial of slavery, focused on survival: They want to leave the past in the past.
In order to heal, sometimes it is best to forget. Vivienne Romana, a Guadeloupian psychotherapist, once said that slavery remained a secret de famille, a familial secret, a ghost presence within Creole families, for three reasons: First, they wanted to teach their children survival without actually telling them the traumatic reasons behind why they needed this skill. Second, they didn’t want to burden them with the pain of the past. Lastly, the dehumanization techniques used by colonizers paved the way for their isolation and silence. (9)
I research silences and absences. Visible, communicable, uncategorizable silences, or absences that are beyond theorization. Loud, bold, messy, and untranslatable silences. Silences that have taught me how to resist more than any words or speeches. Absences caused by political violence, trauma, dislocation, forgotten memories, or maybe unforgotten, but unspeakable memories. Absences that are part of our everyday assemblages. As someone whose whole life has been molded and shaped by silence and absence, I’d like to understand what they are. What do they signify, and/or how do they work politically? The challenge of researching these topics is that it requires us to look away from the tangible, documented world. How can we map the location of silence/absence? How can we create a new method that moves beyond and challenges the conventional? And most importantly, how do we avoid categorizing or creating another mould while doing that? These and many more questions shape the basis of my research, where I explore methodologies that allow us to write silence and absence without writing them.
“Why did they [our grandparents, our parents] remain silent about slavery?” Romana asked during the Day of Reflection on the devoir de mmoire among the Antillean, Guyanese, and Reunionnais communities. This is not about collective amnesia, stated Romana. We cannot talk about the collective amnesia among post-slavery communities, for amnesia must be preceded by knowledge. There has been no teaching about slavery in French schools, and therefore no shared symbolized historical knowledge. Slavery remained a secret de famille whose existence, like any other family secret, operated as a ghost or a living skeleton in an open cupboard. (10)
The spectre must die before we can move on, claims Frantz Fanon, a French West Indian p sychiatrist and decolonial philosopher. We are never free as long as we are bound to the devoir de mémoire, the duty of memory. (11) In fact, the devoir de mémoire is nothing but a burden on the shoulders of our present, a ghost who’s being only weighs us down and prevents us from moving forward and imagining a future where no one is a slave to slavery. Therefore, celebrating these spectres does nothing but defeat the idea that a better future is possible. Fanon feared that the duty of memory was too big a burden, and that an independent person, a freed person, should be able to be their own self, undefined by the spectres of the past. (12)
For Hartman however, the silences and absences need to be heard. Calling the gaps in archival documents and vanishing testimonies by formerly enslaved people a “non-history,” Hartman attempts “to fill in the blank spaces of the historical record and to represent the lives of those deemed unworthy of remembering.” (13) But then an important question in writing silences and absences remains: “How does one write a story about an encounter with nothing?” (14) Slavery has erased personal histories and “made the past a mystery, unknown and unspeakable.” (15)
To Hartman, accountability is feeling the scale of this tragedy and understanding its lingering impact on the bodies of the people whose lives need to be remembered, even though their stories remain nameless in many accounts. Haunting is in fact a call to accountability, which begins the moment when these ghosts get the recognition they deserve.
The material reality of a past experience is unquestionable; it exists and its impact lingers. However, our interpretation of that material reality is threaded through not only the present, but also an entangled past, present, future in all their material realities and possibilities. Therefore, rather than trying to categorize or fixate on a meaning attributed to past moments of encounter, I seek to understand how the memories of the past (trans-generational/trans-historical) lodge themselves to our bodies, buildings, and structures through prolonged silences and absences, and how such experiences haunt us in our day-to-day lives, sometimes directly but often obliquely. (16) It is the haunting of the past, “the over-and-done with,” the blind spots in our familial/local/trans-local histories/stories and their connection to the political that I am concerned about in my search for nothingness.
The ghosts of our pasts are therefore a memory in need of being remembered.
And memory lingers in fractured places, entangled in the silences and erasures often imposed by the micro and macro structures of power, quietly existing, waiting to erupt in an afterlife. Nothingness, in this case, is a memory we are unable to remember because it exists with no tactile trace. Nothingness is a memory that is threaded through the silence of the structures that shape us. Remembering makes visible what is absent and exposes the fractures in these structures, causing disruption. Inspired by Jasbir Puar, queer theorist and professor of women and gender studies at Rutgers University and their work on Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, (17) Akta Kaushal compares the nothingness induced by the politics of colonial erasure to phantom limb syndrome, in which one knows/feels the presence of their absent limb by being attuned to the void that is left in the body. (18) Similarly, we can hear the murmuring of nothingness or the ghosts of our colonial past by being attuned to the location of their erasure in the current structures of power, macro or micro.
But still the question that Hartman asks remains. What would it take to hear the murmuring of nothingness? To be attuned to the void? “How does one write a story about an encounter with nothing?” (19)
“There are different ways in which nothingness speaks,” claims Karen Barad, professor of feminist science theory and history of consciousness. (20) For Barad, what is considered a void, absence, or nothing, such as forgotten memories or absences in archives, might be a way to disrupt all the matters that are entangled with and manifest in the afterlife of violence. Such absence or nothingness produces haunting. (21) The speaking of nothingness can be traced on the bodies of people/communities that are subjected to it.
Our responsibility is to listen to their nothingness: their absence and their silence.
And to listen means to be in relation to the hauntings we encounter, even if in a “breaking moment,” (22) Leane Betasamosake Simpson explains. Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist, reminds us that to listen is to be responsible to toxic histories where “past collapses on present.” (23) To be responsible is to honour the relations that exist, that connect and tie us all together. Therefore, to be in relation means to be responsible, to be accountable and to be responsive to not just what is being shared with us but also to what remains absent and silent. It also means to remember that which was supposed to remain forgotten, a past memory without a trace—the absence, the haunting, the void, and the nothingness.
For nothing is fixed,
forever, forever, forever,
it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
--James Baldwin, For Nothing is Fixed
Endnotes
(1) Quantum physics is a vast field of knowledge with multiple different interpretations of its principles and theories. In my work, I engage with Karen Barad’s interpretation of quantum physics. Please see Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
(2) Sara Salem, The Afterlives of Colonialism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1.
(3) Julian Wolfreys, Deconstruction – Derrida (London: Macmillan Education, 1998), 49.
(4) Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
(5) Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid.
(8) Ibid., 273.
(9) Viviane Romana quoted in Francoise Verges, “I Am Not The Slave Of Slavery,” in Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony C. Alessandrini (London: Taylor & Francis, 1998), 272.
(10) Ibid.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Ibid.
(13) Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 18.
(14) Ibid.
(15) Ibid., 14.
(16) Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
(17) Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
(18) Akta Kaushal, “Structural Political Economy: Re-thinking the Weight of Structures in the Enduringly Colonial Present,” International Studies 18/Organization Annual Convention, April 2021.
(19) Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 18.
(20) Karen Barad, “Troubling Time And E/Cologies Of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, And Facing The Incalculable.” New Formations 92 (2017): 56–86(31).
(21) Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters.
(22) Leane Betasamosake Simpson, The Accident Of Being Lost, Songs And Stories (Astoria, 2017), 39.
(23) Ibid, 78.
Bio
Aytak Dibavar is an assistant professor in the Gender and Social Justice Program at McMaster University. Their life, work, and research are entangled with feminist, queer, decolonial, and anti-racist knowledge production and teaching practices. Their current research provides a decolonial feminist reading of silence through the pairing of Islamic Sufi traditions with quantum field theory in an effort to understand the effects that silence and absence have on the intergenerational transmission of political trauma.
