Nova & Lotus

This is not a case-study, not decolonial. That I wield a colonial language to resist colonial violence is hardly subversive—that irony has a popular poetic luster, but it is not my formal nor aesthetic choice. I am convinced that as a deliberate lens such a choice would ultimately protect and facilitate the structures that fail me, wait upon my failure, or even, at last, fell me. Am I liberated if I convinced my masters in their tongue to free me? With their manners of speech, conventions of thought and knowledge-making? From platforms I was afforded only by complicity with or contribution to their empire? Marginalized identities can hardly exist, much less be liberated, without arguing their value to concentrated power. It is no longer, was perhaps never, revolutionary to advocate by representation. At long last, my identity and its representation become one volume in the imperial catalog. I am as speechless as I am defiant. It is my faith that when you realize my writing has no aim, no contribution, you will join me in my endless coming and going. I myself have not arrived. Take my hand. Trust me. There is a chance we will discover each other, despite insurmountable distance—I am a being of desire, therefore a being of words, a being who looks for her body and looks for the body of the other. This, Nicole Brossard continues, is the whole history of writing. Instead of viewing an instant in the lens of eternity, we can glimpse eternity in the lens of an instant. We can meet in this moment, a garden in the heart of the city. Perhaps our resistance begins in this invisible stillness, despite our constant orbit around a world perpetually restless, perpetually defining, complicating, exalting itself—ravenously laboring to annex the lunar, the other. I do not want representation. I am approaching, now, a different kind of representation: not visibility, but vision. This is my gamble: I trust your vision, I trust in mine. I believe our communion, the attempted collision of our optics in an imaginative space both idle and dynamic, is the beginning of revolution. But to posture past the beginning, we must relinquish the need for arrival, which is the final border at which all empires composed of borders collapse. I dare say we replace it with the desire for play—is that irresponsible? Whatever. Thank you for reading my book—I want to welcome you to a distant and familiar world. I have two dear friends I’d love for you to meet.