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Cabral the Cartographer

“Furthermore, if we accept that national liberationdemands

a profound muTAtionin the process of development of

productive forces,we see that this phenomenon of national liberation

necessarily corresponds to arevolution”

---Amílcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory” (my adaptation)

“We are justifiedin regarding the outcomeof Equiano’s experienceinthesamelight as he might have—as a f

a l

l, as a veritable d es ce nt

into the ‘loss’ ofcommunicative 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

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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—

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

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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,

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atomized ‘us’ and dispersed the metaphysical and psychic atoms

‘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

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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’ 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

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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.

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Zones

Dizem que o campo se cobriu de verdeDa 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:teus montes e teus valesnão sentiram passar os tempose 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

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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 spills its black

blood like ink onto the pages of time, the parchment of maps

—“This is the afterlife of slavery” (Hartman, 6), ghost

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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

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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).

“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

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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

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formulating it, or by mapping it, in the vague and mythic double-

triptych of an imaginative 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

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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.

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,

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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 mesmoeu 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”

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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 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

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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

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precipitate in a crisis that frames and allows for revolution to

occur, or to even be thought or spoken of as possibility.

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.

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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.

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

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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

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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, 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

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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

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against perpetuity of vertigo and mutilation.

Zones

But to the Door of No Returnwhich is illuminated in the consciousness of

Blacksin 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,returnwas, 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

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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 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

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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

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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 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

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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

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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 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.

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