Decolonial Exhumation, or the Future Where No One Is Home: Writing Abuse at the Trans-Queer-Feminist Intersection of Tropical Archipelagic Thinking

Abstract

These poems are taken from an autobiographical book project on same-sex intimate partner abuse entitled SUNNY that interrogates how the conjoint forces of heterosexualism, racial classification, and capitalism—understood as Eurocentric—position the lives of queer people at the margins, or what Maria Lugones calls “coloniality of gender.” In these poems, the future is maternal, “the streaming touch of oil on burnt skin,” hopeful, yet is “still about our body, except only its ruination” or “a hill’s destruction.” Written at the trans-queer-feminist intersection of tropical archipelagic thinking, the future here is a metaphor of “elsewhere” or, in the words of Paul Carter, “a place not here but consisting of many (incommensurable) places reached from here…in the archipelago” (2019, p. 117; 2013). By interweaving a fictionalised version of my own victimisation and that of other victims of gendered violence, this archipelagic poetics of wounding not only carves out a space for a queer narrative of victimisation that is systematically erased and insufficiently represented in mainstream analyses of gender-based violence, but also maps out linkages of grief and solidarity amongst tropical bodies at the margins. In writing these poems, I framed a method of writing called “decolonial exhumation,” which is a creative practice of writing and experimentation that struggles for a narration of the pained and miserable present, but one that does not evade histories of multiple and intersectional oppressions. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” and also informed by the work of plant evolutionary biologist Banu Subramaniam, decolonial exhumation is a creative mission to develop an epistemology and aesthetics that celebrates the fragmentary, lost, partial, incomplete, and perpetually unrecoverable. It is a trans-queer-feminist political response to the legacies of colonialism and empire, and the durable inequalities that cannot otherwise be fully understood without any reckoning of the colonial past and striving for a tropical future “elsewhere.”