Murillo III 1 Cabral the Cartographer “Furthermore, if we accept that national liberation demands a profound muTAtion in the process of development of productive forces, we see that this phenomenon of national liberation necessarily corresponds to a revolution” ---Amílcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory” (my adaptation) “We are justified in regarding the outcome of Equiano‟s experience inthesamelight as he might have— as a f a l l, as a veritable d e s c e n t into the „loss‟ of communicative force” ---Hortense Spillers, “Mama‟s Baby, Papa‟s Maybe” (my adaptation) Zones A pen, or some keys write or type, but in actuality map, the elsewhere—rather, the nowhere—rather the place in excess of placeness or spatiality or naming, that approximates, via poetic abstraction, via abstract poetics, the position of the black, the black position: “There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born” (Fanon, 8). Across time and space— Revise: Across black time and black space—  Murillo III 2 Qualification: If the adjectival—metaphysically, materially—“black” leaves intact even the semantic atoms of either term, the interstices between which reveal the complete inadequacy of “space” and “time” to capture the (psychic, political, ontological) position of blackness— Across black “time” and black “space” black thought and movement mark cartographic and exploratory ventures, attempts to map the unmappable, the violently disfigured position and the vexed zone that frames and demarcates that position and its constitutive elements—vertigo and aphasia (pace Wilderson), psychic and metaphysical spaghettification, and—and attempts to carve out, or, rather, via a critical and imaginative embrace of this zone and position, locate a singularly black region from which “an authentic upheaval”—of the world, of being, of the imagination—might erupt. Black study and black movement are the work of black cartography. The end of the world is a function of black exploration. Orientation Forces collide. Vertiginously tumbling down the unknowable curvature of this zone‟s naked declivity, gaining momentum, forces collide. Amalgamated “productive forces” (Cabral, 95) collide with “narrative energies” manifest as “communicative force” (Spillers, 69) and from the peculiar gravity exuded by this violent nexus emerges a forced and forceful question, in pieces, fragmented, written in a shattered and nonorientable set of glyphs and ciphers. And with no adequate language outside a set of more and more proximal abstractions, the limits of which demand a reading in and from the most singular and blackest dark (read: afropessimism), the question appears at or as some order of an approximation of itself, remains coded in the conceptualizations and tongues of those that tore open the world (pace Brand), who rent space and time, who created this zone, atomized „us‟ and dispersed the metaphysical and psychic atoms  Murillo III 3 „here.‟ „We‟ who tumble in and down the endless void shrouded in its cosmic effluvia— composed of the fumes of burnt flesh, the particulate refuse of flayed skin, the lonely and incomplete currents of impossible thoughts as sparking and broken electrics, and the strange synesthetic particles of imaginative capacity torn from increasingly finite dreamscapes—wear this Mobius question as tattoo and scarification, shifting marks that project into the external ocular overdetermination, and reach deep into the psychic realm carving up, quaking, and tectonically shifting the topographies of memory and imagination, worlds broken and tumbling and adrift in the aether of the zone-made-flesh-made-psychic-space. Forces collide in this zone, outside and beyond the flesh as a metaphysical space, on this flesh and perpetually shift its marks that always mark and only move on a material plane, and through this flesh into the mind where the chunks and drifting pieces of psychic topographies orbit a dense and black singularity. Forces collide and the collision‟s gravitational question is a thread conducting a cosmic current from the metaphysical to the material to the psychic and back, and black nonbeing and bodies and minds—or the particulate remnants thereof—tirelessly fail to orient to it, in a ceaseless process of approximation maintained by the question, a gossamer tether, anchored to black. A question of all three planes—metaphysical, material, psychic—and all their interstices, of liberation, or, perhaps in recognition of the limits of the word and its echoes (e.g. freedom, the Human, White), of revolution, of its schematics and operations, of its possibilities, of its constitutive „after‟ or beyond, repeats, again and again, from the indeterminate edge of modernity‟s tear—the Transatlantic slave trade; rather, the Arab slave trade; rather—where do we look when we try to locate “the end of traceable beginnings?” (Brand, 6)—through the attenuated membrane between „then‟ and separate „then‟s since „then‟ and „now‟ to the „present‟  Murillo III 4 as a violently yet unanswered inquiry. In the broken continuum of black space and time, the question emerges in, as, and from monolithic figures, texts, events, always violently asked, and then violently unasked, in, as and from events, figures, texts. Each instance of its asking a different order of approximation, each desedimentation of each approximation an approximation of approximations spinning around the singularity at the zone‟s center, spinning around blackness. And so „we‟ arrive—as much as „we‟ who must run at light-speed in the ergosphere of this singularity to stay in place and stave off, for a moment, total obliteration—„here,‟ poking through the membrane to „there‟ where a poet who would become one of so many dark monoliths, composes each of his poems as a complex if unwitting approximation of the question of liberation—rather, of revolution, employing a poetics that performs its approximation, both in content and as act of composition and conception, as a function of the imagination. The underthought and near-lost poetry of Amílcar Cabral marks an imaginative instance of the question‟s approximation, that precedes, without mention or claim of an origin or beginning, the radical and violent mobilization of his politics, and the militant tactics of the Partido Africana da Independencia da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC). Forces collide, and the collision is always and everywhere, bleeding through the spatiotemporal membrane attenuated by and in this zone to the pages of Cabral‟s poetry. Zones Dizem que o campo se cobriu de verde Da cor mais bela porque é a cor da esperança Que a terra, agora, é mesmo Cabo Verde. – É a tempestade que virou bonança —Amílcar Cabral, “Regresso” Ilha:  Murillo III 5 teus montes e teus vales não sentiram passar os tempos e ficaram no mundo dos teus sonhos —Amílcar Cabral, “Ilha” Flecks of earth vaguely present in blue expanses; the impression of casual, or forgotten drips of ink against the backdrop of pale blue squares in a grid; sometimes too small to be filled in, the black of the ink wholly occupying the accidental or incidental infinitesimal; black islands, ilhas pretas, located almost by sheer will of the imagination, engulfed in the many colors of the terrestrial and oceanic global markup. Gordon: ““There is Fanon‟s famous reference to the zone of nonbeing—a zone neither of appearance or disappearance… This below-Otherness is the disaster of black existence. It is the Zone of Nonbeing” (Gordon, 10). A state of meaninglessness and arbitrariness situated in the nether of “neither” between appearance and disappearance, slipping from one side to the other through/across “time” and “space” to the staccato rhythm of the oceans that embrace and engulf them, like the dark cargo of ships traveling longitudinal and latitudinal passages. Disastrous. Ilha The shape of the question or its landscape manifests in the vague silhouette of an island imagined behind the mist of so much cosmic effluvia (“Ilha”). A dream‟s miasma encases this island—perhaps Santiago, where the poem might have spilled onto pages; perhaps any of the Bissagos; perhaps a drifting amalgamation of dirt, water, salt, rock, emerald foliage, pain, desolation, life, death, arbitrariness existing splayed across multiple planes, phase shifted by the generalized black rift of the zone into imaginative, mythopoetic creation, metaphysical approximation, and geographical designation—such that time does not move within the fog (lines 1-6, 9, 10). Time attenuates in a process of violent distension because the tear in the world  Murillo III 6 spills its black blood like ink onto the pages of time, the parchment of maps—“This is the afterlife of slavery” (Hartman, 6), ghost both haunted and haunting, the film encasing every gesture, the grammar of every utterance; This is the cyclical murder of “human” bodies, “murdered over over and again” (Spillers, 68) providing the constitutive infinity of a body flesh count to mark the communicative and productive forces forcing time and space for blacks into crisis critimandspaceis; And so it moves in place going lightspeed, black time and space like black bodies running fugitive in the global ergosphere—leaving the rupture of imagination, the murdered being of blackness, and the forced irrelevance of black space(time), to travel the Mobius strip of gratuitous and immeasurable violence, appearing again and again, ceaselessly, in ever shifting transparent disguise. And so an island appears through the mist, a doubled triptych: on the macro level, the “space” phase shifted triply across material, metaphysical, and psychic planes of existence; on the micro, the chimera of sociopolitical desolation (l. 1-6), mythic landscape (l. 7-10, 15-18), and magisterial, if troubled, hope (l. 10-14, 19).  Murillo III 7 “Ilha” exceeds the capacities of naming, marks the attempt to locate ground, which is an attempt to approximate an orientation—to the question, broken as it might be; to the zone, unimaginable as its physics might be—within the confines of the symbolic (pace Spillers) and metaphysical orders disastrously afforded to the blacks that “live” there. To the blacks that “live” qua each particulate remnant of this zone‟s spaghettification of black being and thought tumbling in ceaseless vertigo in arbitrary relation to each other there. To the blacks that “love” there, “love” manifest here in the move, witting or unwitting, made in passing or with decided effort, or both and or neither, to memorialize and mythologize an enshrouded space in a strange temporality—black “space,” black “time”—to maternalize this double-triptych creation, not as an escape, not as an overzealous and false transcendence from the zone, but as an attempt to stop spinning, or embrace spinning as a constitutive facet of the “disaster of black existence;” or as an attempt to approximate some semblance of an orientation to the zone as or via an acceptance of its totality—its mythic landscape, the strange temporality, its desolation and confinement, and. Cabral begins to shape the silhouette of an imaginative spacetime, like so many seeking reprieve in the mere possibility of the existence of ground, of terra. Feet “on solid ground, and far above the clouds” (Black Star, l. 24) at once, tethered by the thread of a gravitational question running from the black singularity central to the zone, through the particulate cloud of black being‟s refuse, and to some terrestrialized imaginative spacetime, Cabral seems to seek to grip the gravity (of the question, of the black position), to intensify its force, so that the ground, Ilha, comes clearer into view, closer, begins to take shape in the imagination. Haunted by a postponed question of revolution projected backward to the poetry that precedes its more direct invocation in organized, militant politics, the invocation of Ilha grasps at this gravity by locating it, or by formulating it, or by mapping it, in the vague and mythic double-triptych of an imaginative  Murillo III 8 spacetime. The question‟s ugly and broken glyphs with debris unable to be accounted for in its form, “here,” becomes a question of revolutionizing the imagination, or dramatically upheaving (at least) the psychic plane of the zone, of giving birth to a paradigm shift by both discovering, with even the most finite clarity, what constitutes the spactime, Ilha‟s, silhouette, and by mapping the black position “there” in an approximation manifest in an attempt to orient to the spatiotemporal ground Ilha marks. Fertile ground, from which, or “where an authentic upheaval can be born;” Ilha, a mother land, naked and forgotten, a silhouette of a maybe-something. A grandmother land, land of the grandmother, rain beating its gates with the news of verdant growth the color of hope (“Regresso”). Comingling with the desire for ocular confirmation of the rain aurally relaying the imagined of ilha‟s silhouette—the shift from “venha ouvir comigo / o bater da chuva lá no seu portão” (l. 1-2), to “chegue-se a portão” (l. 15), from „come and listen‟ to „approach/arrive at/reach‟ relative to the gate and the rain‟s message beaten there, which is a semantic and lexical shift that moves from aural consolidation (of the pitter- patter of the rain‟s message) to visual (and sensory, in general) confirmation (arrival at the gate to confirm what has been spoken and written there—comingling with this shift and the childlike desire in beckoning the old one, the grandmother, is the poetic performance of imaginative confabulation in the form of a hope, or at least a need to properly frame what begins to look like hope. The color of hope, green, emerging as a thought transferred from rain to Cabral and in transit to Granny, becomes an additional feature of the spacetime that peeks through the cosmic effluvia of the zone from which this poetic cartography attains any semblance of coherence as a project. Pulsating, rich emerald like a flashing fog light on a dock across the water, where love is or could be, the spacetime grows inferentially, element by element, shifting and changing like bloodred soil to verdant gardens, or storms to calm.  Murillo III 9 Synesthetic petrichor in the rain‟s wake is a spectral pregnancy behind the generalized stench of the zone‟s miasma; something borne there, the unbearable ready—maybe, possibly, possibly maybe—to be born, there. The mother/grandmother terra, glimpsed in the specificity of ilha‟s imaginative geographic fleck, adrift in the oceanic darkened with the atomized flesh of the countless and nameless lost, alchemically transmutes nonorientability into orientation, tempestade into bonança, birthing an unbearable upheaval—or, rather, at the very least bearing the possibility of birthing the unbearable—that might always too soon—for the rain‟s fall to enrich an arid declivity—or too late (pace Fanon)—for the message the rain leaves to be much more than an echo, a faded mark, and a smell. A revolution of the imagination absent the monolithic mark of the majuscule “r” always premature, or past term, and both, straddles infinity and nothingness, tangibility and spectrality, in the liminal space of a faintly green silhouette in a thick and miasmatic blackness. Zones “No fundo de mim mesmo eu sinto qualquer coisa que fere minha came, que me dilacera et tortura… …qualquer coisa estranha (talvez seja ilusao), qualquer coisa estranha que eu tenho nao sei onde, que faz sangrar meu corpo” —Amílcar Cabral, “No fundo de mim mesmo” Something. Some strange, imagined thing quakes somewhere in the psychic zone of the zone, ripping and rending black flesh within and without from within. Something. Constitutively resistant to mapping, to fixing to some position in the infinite and immeasurable somewheres that compose the non-grid of the zone of nonbeing‟s topography, something adrift in the oceanic liminal, floating, perhaps imagined, perhaps. Something marks and wounds, marks with wounds, the flesh of the inner—something like  Murillo III 10 the silhouetteness of a silhouette, the unknowable distance between an ever vertiginous „here‟ and „there,‟ the ceaseless hearsay of a speaking emerald fog-light emerging into and descending out of view—writes, and was always already written by, the undecipherable hieroglyphics of the flesh of the outer; something scribbled into the liminal space between zero and infinity; something. It draws blood, and sketches in glyphs and ciphers an image in the poetic articulation of a question that is only an approximation. Its force poses, is perhaps produced by, but certainly poses its approximate question to, a collision of forces that forced its cartographer to tumble in the wherever of the zone. Something, in its either/neither „here‟ nor „there‟ indeterminate existence, tantalizing; something the color of a hope insatiable and resistant to confirmation; something to which spaghettified black objects can, possibly, maybe, orient; something a poet hopes is really in the way of things. Gravity A poetic revolutionary scribes a speech to the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966 entitled “The Weapon of Theory,” that theorizes revolution, sending an aural and lexical ripple through time and space to be decoded and deciphered. A schematic account of the machinations of the possibility of revolution in motion, its catalysts, its central motivations, its constituencies, Cabral marks a critical erasure of time and space (of history) for blacks— specifically those captivated by the emerald glow of Cape Verdean and Guinean liberation from Portuguese colonial domination—that is constitutive to the loss of productive forces, which are “the essential determining [elements] in the content and form of class struggle” (Cabral, 95). These forces must undergo a “profound mutation” to precipitate in a crisis that frames and allows for revolution to occur, or to even be thought or spoken of as possibility.  Murillo III 11 There is an attenuated spatiotemporal membrane, the byproduct of the tear in the world, the metaphysical, historical and psychic rift, here, between there above and there below, and everywhere else. A marked woman wields a pen as a surgical knife; a marked woman dissects the world‟s “symbolic order” (Spillers, 68) and reveals its machinations. Hortense Spillers locates the origin of the order, the grammar, as a non-origin somewhere in the vast expanse of the spatiotemporal rupture marked, or approximated, by the initiation of captivity and mutilation, wherever and whenever that exists. Currents of narrative energy derived from the power afforded (and denied) by the symbolic order sculpt the historical, the psychic, the metaphysical, name it, “name” it, and mark on and as the flesh of the black, the slave, the undecipherable hieroglyphics of unimaginable physical, psychological and psychic, and ontological shatter, via a repeated enactment of force—gratuitous violence on the level of the flesh; atomization of meaning at the level of episteme. Narrative energies materialize as communicative force that moves and shifts the ciphers and glyphs that comprise the possibilities for thought and imagination, reinforcing the symbolic order‟s domination via the constitutive and repeated murder (atomization) of black being, at every level—“over and over again”—“over and over again”—and “over and over”— The force scars and tattoos the echoes and actualities of brutality onto and as black flesh, as blackness; this force mutilates time and space via the permanence of unwanted scarification and illegible tattoos; this force broke and continues to break even the possibility of reading the flesh‟s narrative, in conjunction with the fact that “we know it happened” (70, emphasis mine). Perhaps they see each other without looking, a sight in the form of metaphysical and psychic resonance, manifest in the finitude of a similar reorganization of the broken glyphs and ciphers, into forces that hurtle toward each other across the thin membrane between them.  Murillo III 12 Forces collide. Communicative and productive forces collide to produce a gravitational question that bursts outward toward thinking the project of revolution, of revolution at the level of the imagination, in the realm of the psychic. A tension, a resistance: Cabral‟s poetry hints at the emergence of a version of the communicative force Spillers names four decades later and an ocean away, manifest in the cartographic project of establishing and adding detail to the silhouette of an imaginative space that is entrenched in, but that might produce the emergence of an “authentic upheaval” from, this metaphysical/psychic/material zone of nonbeing; yet, what he writes and speaks before the Cuban audience between the „thens‟ of his poetry appears inflected by an overtly Marxist conceptualization of revolution framed as class struggle, and an Anti- Colonial conceptualization of revolution framed as a project of national liberation, “productive forces” having the flavor of explicit materiality, being thought as one of two elements of “the mode of production”—the other being the “pattern of ownership” (95). “Resolution:” Cabral‟s poetry, the notion of productive force (and that of ownership), and the demand that the possibility and success of revolution must, in Cabral‟s conceptualization, manifest in and through “the development of revolutionary consciousness” (110), coalesce into an expansion outward— from, perhaps, Cabral‟s more explicit intent, and from the strictly material essence of “productive forces”—into a question of what precisely is being produced, or would need be produced (“revolutionary consciousness”) and the planes of existence over which this force passes (from historical, to psychic, and to metaphysical). The communicative force lost, or never-having-been-had, by those banished to the zone by the symbolic order and its communicative force, parallels the productive force lost, or never- having-been-had, in the erasure of history and the overwriting of consciousness Cabral seeks to mutate into reclamation. Forces collide, and the question becomes a question of mutating them,  Murillo III 13 alchemically transmuting them, reorienting them such that the possibility of orientation within the zone becomes a possibility; of developing revolutionary consciousness, of revolutionizing psychic space, of upheaving the imagination to produce authentic upheavals of different orders (militant, armed struggle, in Cabral‟s case). Forces collide, and the question of revolutionizing, or blackening, the imagination rains a message down on the blood-stained gate, and begins to reveal the shape and color of a silhouette of what might be able to be. The gravitational wave radiating from the collision produces a desire for a psychic revolution as much as a material one, and the mutation of force manifests in the poetry of Cabral and the formation of ilha as a silhouette of the possibility of imaginative upheaval. The grounding of the possibility of the existence of upheaval‟s possibility, the coming in and out of view of the emerald green through the blackest miasma, the gravitational force‟s thread, all provide a means of possibly, maybe, possibly maybe orienting the atomized black flesh/psyche/being relative to something—something that wounds, and or reveals wounds that never close(d); something that straddles, like black being, the cosmic divide between infinity and nothingness; something at all, that provides a potentially tangible, imaginative, maternal locus from which an “authentic upheaval can be born.” Initiating the critical act of mutation in relation to the gravity manifest in these colliding forces, a poet writes of ilha, a mythopoetic imaginative spacetime, an approximation, an attempt at orientation, a performance of black cartography within and against perpetuity of vertigo and mutilation. Zones But to the Door of No Return which is illuminated in the consciousness of  Murillo III 14 Blacks in the Diaspora there are no maps. This door is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location. It is also perhaps a psychic destination. Since the leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried. There is, as it says no way in; no return. —Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return (my adaptation) The door to the other world, the one to which this one, this zone, poses crisis, both products of the tear, the rupture that marks the threshold; the door that phase shifts across planes of existence, psychic, metaphysical, and material; the door that, maybe, need be, may be, unearthed, plucked from the interstice of silhouette, and brought into the fold of the multidimensional topography of something, something confirmed to „be‟ on the order of—in the way of—things, transmuted via alchemical mutation from at-best-liminality to at-best- possibility. The shape of something, just there, the color of hope emergent not as an undoing of the zone, as a reopening of the door, or even as the location of the key or axe necessary to produce an opening, or embody the capacity to open, if returning remains an intention—since there is no return when spacetime melts, attenuates, breaks, and produces atomizations or spaghettifications beyond any hope of repair—but as the location of an imaginative (psychic) destination from which an “authentic upheaval” maybe, possibly, possibly maybe, might, could, emerge. The door is a double door, or a door that appears doubly. Violent specter of unnamable loss marking the “tear in the world…the end of traceable beginnings” (Brand, 4-5), countless  Murillo III 15 bodies severed, “humanity” murdered over and over again, ceaseless and arbitrary doom inscribed and rewritten on and as black flesh; the point of violent entry into perpetual and brutal passage, in which the door, a mark of the possibility of origin and beginning, exists as nothing more than fantasy begotten in the cosmic cargo hold of the vessel—this door. Phantasmatic fantasy coded as hope, possibility (of the possibility) of return, or, more accurately, of entry elsewhere, entry as upheaval of the zone‟s dark, a violent (re)opening “toward a new humanism” (Fanon, 40); the point of emergence for revolution, on all three orders—material/historical, psychic/imaginative, metaphysical/spiritual—and their interstices—this door. A double door, (re)opening psychic (and (meta)physical) wounds in direct conjunction with opening into the possibility of upheaval, (re)opening wounds into the possibility of upheaval, an emerald light emitting from its silhouette somewhere, possibly, maybe, possibly maybe, in the depths of miasmatic cosmic effluvia. The door reappears, synesthetically echoes into ilha across the membrane of spacetime stretched thin, “here,” in the hold, in the zone, where „we‟ vertiginously un-be in the totalizing umbra, “here,” with hopes of maps and approximations, and imaginative ground to which „we‟ might begin to hope to travel. No-where In the middle of nowhere, or somewhere in nowhere, the no-where of the imaginative spacetime of a door, of ilha, of something, glows emerald green, or grows blacker than the black expanse enshrouding it, or from which it begins to emerge, the beginning of the possibility of the beginning of upheaval somewhere in the nowhere of the beginning where we must always begin (pace Spillers)—to fantasize, to recognize fantasy as such, to embrace the phantasmatic necessity of fantasy, coded into imaginative „capacity‟—that beginning that is nothing but a rupture, a  Murillo III 16 break, a tear. An element of the work of black study and black movement is the work of black cartography, mapping, or approximating, the black position, its relation—as an amalgamation of violently dispersed black fragments produced by violent and catastrophic (physical, psychic, metaphysical) spaghettification)—to the unknowable shape and physics of the declivity of the zone; another is an approach to the ground of even the possibility of an “authentic upheaval,” a dramatic paradigm shift, an alchemical mutation of the forces that tore, or participated with unnamed others in tearing, the world, tore existence, into two, a total (re)orientation, an opening, in a way that allows the conceptualization of the monolithic “revolution,” or Revolution, to attain (new, or even „real‟) meaning. An instantiation of this double work is the call to achieve “revolutionary consciousness,” to revolutionize the imagination, not so that „we‟ leap from a position of near-total obliteration, banishment, and nothingness, to reassembly, reentrance, and thinglyness, but so that „we‟ might begin to imagine, with greater clarity, the maybe- somethingness of the door, or of ilha, its contours, its details, the ground it locates, the map it allows to be conceived, the blanks in the map that demand exploration; so that „we‟ might imaginatively formulate a question levied at the capacity to even think revolution, so that „we‟ might approach, or approximate with greater accuracy, really thinking „revolution‟ at all. Perhaps this is central among the unwitting or witting, either to whatever degree, contributions—should that be the limit of our measure, the significance of this intervention (and it should not)—of Cabral‟s poetry to theorizations of revolution, not in contradistinction, but in explosive relation to the explicit materiality of his oft-cited speeches and rallying cries, expanding beyond the ease of tasting the class-based-struggle flavor of what words his militant politics dish out, and into the abstraction that pre- and re-figures his theorizations, mutates and  Murillo III 17 transmutes them, alchemically producing a critical reorientation to what „revolution‟ might, possibly, maybe, possibly maybe, begin to begin to look like; the shape of the door, the serpentine move and weave of its grain; the contour of its coast, the detail of its terrain. A faint green glow in the miasma, or blacker than the black of the cosmic effluvia that engulfs, or something.