& Dance Diffuser

            The intention to write my poems and this current text emerged from acknowledging that “I” – myself, is also a possible “I”- reader on the other side. For so long, I remained in silence, carrying a burden that blinded me not valuing or thinking properly on myself. I clearly see the reasons why I kept myself in silence, and how that supressed silence screamed inside me, generating a dubious potential to survive and to kill from inside. This ambiguous “burden-silence” that might protect, might also reaches a level that the sparks grown into blazing flames, and it starts to burn everything inside you, even the paramount memories not related to trauma. “Such silence is the nickname of distortion, of the unknown human factor that a revised public discourse would both undo and reveal” (Spillers, 1987, p.73). To start to touch the Anti-(weapon)-dote Body is to perceive through a spectrum of breaking one’s silence to not coop with power structures that cause such silence in first place. I praise that “it is necessary to scrutinise the truth of what we speak and the truth of that language by which we speak it” (Lorde, 1984, p. 43), to not doubt oneself regarding what one experienced, to not repeat the behavioural pattern that Colonisation triggered, and mostly to not abandon the potential of sharing because exposing the self - traumatic experiences caused by the TRIAD - Colonisation, Capitalism and White Supremacy - is a way to not coop with IT.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. (p.44)

In order to face the TRIAD is necessary to unlearn what IT has been teaching us to do. In order to engage in an unlearning process is necessary to acknowledge and recognise the oppressive power of IT in one’s routine. In order to see clearly how the TRIAD functions to supress one’s daily life is necessary to start questioning values that were created and disseminated by the TRIAD. In order to start questioning is necessary to engage with transgression, which “unlike opposition or reversal, involves hybridization, the mixing of categories and the questioning of the boundaries that separate categories” (Jervis, 1999, 4 apud Jenks, C., 2003, p.93). The unlearning process of the TRIAD mechanisms is a step further to not reproduce IT.

            When one acknowledges the several moments in which reproduces such behavioural patterns by repeating such mechanism in one’s daily life, and then make the decision of not doing so, I call that a fissure in the system which enables to crack the TRIAD from within. The reader might be wondering what precisely means the TRIAD - Colonisation, Capitalism and White Supremacy? I came to define such triangulation mapping socio-political and historical mechanisms that result on behavioural patterns that were repeated throughout the Eurocentric History which unfolds to serve as the main foundation to Western Culture nowadays. It establishes its hegemonic power between Europe and USA above other continents and their countries. The TRIAD strengthen its stability globally by enabling the behavioural repetition of such patterns that feed each vertex of it in a vicious cycle, starting from the Colonisation.

‘The reproduction of the relations of production’ that involves ‘the reproduction of the values and behaviour patterns necessary to maintain the system of hierarchy in its various aspects of gender, class, and race or ethnicity’ (Robertson and Klein, 1983, p. 121 apud Spillers, 1987, p. 79).

The Western Culture find its way to “teaches” globally the repetition on reproducing the Coloniser’s behaviour of exploitation firstly with “the specific purposes of enslavement and colonization” (1987, p.71) resulting on a cycle of “discovery”, and “conquest” of territories around the world through the Atlantic Slave Trade. Afterwards, detached from the Colonisations’ historical moment per se, appropriating further to expand the economy from Mercantilism into Capitalism – exploiting the human being - specifically the marginalised clusters of Natives and Black people for many centuries and from Modernity onwards even women and LGBTQI+, but also everything else such as the planet resources. These patterns reinforce the white race above any other, primarily the heteronormative man digging emphatically what generates nowadays the White Supremacy Culture.

            Although, the feeling of hope might be naive sometimes, the TRIAD modus operandi functions on marking a polarity to ground a mindset on dualism, and binary knowledge, which pretty much writes centuries of not only Western Eurocentric History, but Philosophy, Science, Literature and Arts as well trapped only on this spectrum. This mechanism on how these three power structures relate and function on the TRIAD demonstrate the easy reasoning that follows making easier to reveal it. The Anti-(weapon)-dote Body departs from the Brazilian Native’s perspective which shares from a vision of the "I" in fullness with the collective, the ancestors, the nature, and the space one inhabits, without segregation. The "I" is always in completeness to others within its community and environment. The wise Native’s mindset exalts a perception of the world before the Colonisation movement in the world, thus before the implementation of the TRIAD. The Native’s perspective was kept as valueless by the Coloniser for centuries because its wisdom threatens the Western Philosophy on the same aspect and direction that Derrida - postmodern and poststructuralist French philosopher, asserted his theory on criticising the Western mindset. The Derridean theory implements the fundamental concept of deconstructing from within, which means, "in overturning and displacing a conceptual order and the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated" (Derrida,1892, 329). For the Brazilian Natives, such Symbolic Order never exists in the way of Western hierarchical supremacy, but exists within the community and the environment, on spreading freedom with the same weight of taking responsibility for it, which means taking care of everything that constitutes the human freedom whilst such ecosystem enables the human freedom of living.

            Freedom is not a word that the TRIAD appreciates. One can clearly see that on how the TRIAD carve out its “omniscient” role dictating a mindset to perceive the planet from the impossibility to think everything else in between polarities, prioritising exploitation in every degree and not offering space for a fluid thinking which does not stick in no polarity or hierarchy. When the European Colonisers “discovered” (only for oneself) that there were other skin colours and shades, they have taken the freedom to write History from the White-civilised Eurocentric perspective, marginalising the “other” skin colours, living systems and cultures as subalterns. The European gaze centres that everything beyond Europe is different and strange implementing as consequence a selfish and hypocritical study of “other”.

This aspect of the search is rendered problematic and that observations of a field of manners and its related sociometries are an outgrowth of the industry of the "exterior other" [Todorov 3], called "anthropology" later on. (Spillers, 1987, p.61)

Even though an extensively interesting knowledge emerged through maturing this area of studies, how it was created poses a crucial scheme of hierarchy: one as subject has the right to observe to study and “use” the other whist the object of study has no right to say or even be listened on such behavioural manner once the “other” is perceived as inferior-subaltern-savage.

            Hortense Spillers - Black feminist scholar and literacy critic, makes an analysis on the conditions and socio-political implications of the captive body – slave – during the Colonisations to the remnants on such captive body nowadays. “The beasts of burden” – the slaves were approached taking the flesh as the primary contact, barrier and visible frontier considering race and ethnicity (p.79). The flesh is understood and used as the main medium of “mechanisms of torture” in which

lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh create the distance between what I would designate a cultural vestibularity and the culture (1987, p.67)

Spillers clarifies that the captivity body is associated to the “flesh” regarding “this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, (..) registered the wounding” (p.67) which the European Colonisers caused marking their mindset and perception in the world. Spillers elucidates the distinction that the Black people enslaved, murdered, and/or raped – and I emphasise the Native one as well – in relation to the Coloniser is “the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions” (p.67). I expand that to the Anti-(weapon)-dote Body seeks to combat, what I call, the Coloniser’s gaze nowadays which not necessarily will be related to Europeans but mainly to the behavioural pattern that stems from.

            The Anti-(weapon)-dote Body exalts the burden one’s live, highlighting that “no amount of money will be able to give back to the spirits the value of their dead ancestors” (Kopenawa; Albert, 2015, p. 355). The Anti-(weapon)-dote Body is always in relation to the other, it is in submersion and emersion from the self-reflection to society-reflection. The Anti-(weapon)-dote Body intersects with enfleshment sharing from the spectrum of “this body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside” (Spillers, 1987, p.67). I write that to engage with Anti-(weapon)-dote Body is a deep process in re-(dis)-covering oneself and the relations to the power structures that shaped one’s experiences. I write that practicing the critical thinking through diffractions is to dissect the levels and layers on how the TRIAD: Colonisation, Capitalism and White Supremacy affects one’s life. I write down, here, in this line that the Anti-(weapon)-dote Body does not stick to neither only the anti-weapon idea against the pitfalls by the TRIAD, nor the antidote for the burden that one has lived so far. It is conjointly both and simultaneously throughout one’s lifetime. It is one's body in its wholeness without excluding no experience and unveiling on which aspect the TRIAD has rooted each one of those precise traumatic experiences.

            I prioritise in the actual time that all have their silenced burden, regardless of gender, race, religion, and social class. Obviously, it is exactly regarding gender, race, religion, and social class that the TRIAD “EDUCATED” ME TO TREAT PEOPLE on seeking the hierarchical difference of not valuing what is different from the “I”, only marginalising even further. Still, I am no one to judge, compare, or act as the TRIAD EXPECT ME TO TREAT PEOPLE. The Anti-(weapon)-dote Body exalt what have been marginalised for centuries, overturning the colonial gaze. The Anti-(weapon)-dote MEANS to awake from the numbness that the TRIAD PUNCHED YOU. The Anti-(weapon)-dote is inside all of us, uniquely into one's singularity. The Anti-(weapon)-dote Body creates fissures from where it goes through, seeding that the burden one has lived reflects on what the TRIAD has been subjugating. The Anti-(weapon)-dote Body is only the beginning to UNLEARN the TRIAD BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS. The Anti-(weapon)-dote Body is the tool to begin with the “transformation of silence into language and [in which] action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger”. (Lorde, 1984, p. 42). Still “there are so many silences to be broken” (p.44),

Until I pay the white debts

Until I heal in healing others

Until I transform rage in pride

Until I launch the Sensitive Vector

Until I find harmony in the collision

Until I create the fissure against the TRIAD

Launching THE SENSITIVE VECTOR is not about AGENCY.

Agency TRAPS US IN THE SELF to individually take control over actions and consequences. The FISSURE is about connecting us to engage in togetherness – the simple act(ing) of listening OTHER is an antidote against the TRIAD.

EMAMCIPATE one’s COUNCIOUS to revoke the TRIAD mindset, the colonial gaze, the Supremacy of all kinds.

LET THE GENTLE FIRE COME OUT TO SPEAK OUT

UNTIL I REPAIR THE HISTORICAL AND SOCIO-POLITICAL wounds.

Remember to REMEMBER oneself.

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