Death and Temporality in Against Muerto Rico

Written By Caribbean Philosophy
 

By Pedro Lebrón Ortiz

 

[Christopher Gregory for TIME, 2019]

Certainly, any reflection on Puerto Rican society worth taking seriously must take as its point of departure the undeniable fact that we find ourselves immersed in atmospheric violence, which I believe is produced by the rendering of brutality as a form of life. This brutality has its roots in colonization and enslavement, as well as in their afterlives, and is exacerbated by the neoliberalization of racial capitalism, which in turn gives way to the hyper-specialization of violence subsumed within a neoliberal economic rationality, otherwise known as gore capitalism. [1] The gesture toward an understanding of the archipelago as haunted by the specter of death is rendered explicit immediately by way of Marisol LeBrón’s work, Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua. The title, “Muerto Rico,” itself is a not-so-playful play on words that allows us to think about the processes of subjectivation produced in the nexus of the various vectors of violence emanating from the State – which Marisol’s work on policing explores in detail [2] – and emanating from capital. Through empire and its local servants, intramural violence is produced in the form of suicides, [3] gender-based violence, [4] narcoviolence, [5] among others. In other words, Muerto Rico allows us to think about the processes of subjectivation produced by neoliberal capital as a manifestation of coloniality and its effects on subjugated peoples.

Currently, one of the most salient expressions of the afterlife of colonization and enslavement is debt as a time-fracturing technology. In other words, one can say that debt functions by imbuing the indebted with a new time that is marked as death, which Marisol points out in lesson 3, “Debt is Death, Protest is Life.” Here she states that the protests of the summer of 2019 were “about stopping the violence of austerity and debt being forced upon Puerto Ricans by elites” (41). This understanding of debt as death certainly resonates with the work of philosopher Rocío Zambrana, who in her recently published monograph Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico stated that “To be in debt is to inhabit a space and time of capture, dispossession, expulsion, exploitation” (21). This is a conceptualization of debt that has been put forth in Puerto Rico, most prominently I would say, by la Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, and has guided many of their political programs and actions for the past few years. As militants Shariana Ferrer-Núñez and Zoan Dávila Roldán state in their essay “Nosotras contra la deuda”, “La deuda marca los cuerpos / pueblos desterrándoles, empobreciéndoles, extrayéndoles y robándoles la posibilidad de futuro.” [6]

And this is a fundamental insight that Marisol puts forth in her reflection on the summer of 2019, which resonates with Frantz Fanon’s thought of revolt as a biological exigency. [7] Fanon, who transitioned 60 years ago on December 6th, recognized the way in which fractured time is ultimately bound up with a fundamental will to life. [8] For instance, in Black Skin, White Masks, he stated, in reference to the Indo-Chinese revolution of 1946, that it was not because they “discovered a culture of their own that they revolted. Quite simply this was because it became impossible for them to breathe, in more than one sense of the word” (201). Or as philosopher Michael E. Sawyer beautifully articulates in An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis: “Because the Black Subject is Human the fracturing of a coherent relationship with Time through physical and metaphysical coercion awakens the desire of the aggrieved subject to return themselves to the coherence of Human-ness that is indicated by being properly situated in Time” (vii). In other words, the summer of 2019 could be understood as an expression of the desire of the aggrieved subject, the colonial indebted subject, to return ourselves to the coherence of Human-ness that Sawyer describes, or as Marisol herself states, “there are opportunities for rebirth grounded in a politics of life that emerge as Puerto Ricans resist colonial capitalism’s attempts to deaden and kill” (23). This resonates, in addition, with Caribbean Afro-Colombian poet Dinah Orozco Herrera’s suggestion in Las semillas del Muntú that “Cuando la campana de la muerte repica, la vida responde en coro” (38). To me, this is a crucial aspect of Marisol’s reflection.

The second element of Marisol’s essay which I believe merits reflection is what could be understood as an underlying seventh lesson which informs the entire text. After a brief summary of the aftermath of the events of the summer of 2019, specifically the outrage produced after the uncovering of warehouses full of supplies from around 2017, [9] Marisol states the following: “One of the things that became clear to me as I interrogated my own desires and attachments to the kinds of political mobilizations associated with the Verano Boricua is that we should understand it less as a blueprint to be copied and more as a set of lessons with deep roots and the potential to reshape the future” (18). At the outset of the essay, we bear witness to a thinker in the process of exploring their own consciousness, revealing to the reader the ways in which Marisol’s thought consists precisely in living thought, un sentipensar, always in a dynamic relationship with the human experience.

If we were to reflect on Marisol the philosopher, if you will, what is revealed is a thinker who is warning against the fetishization of their thought, which would transform it into a theoretical formulation that attempts, in vain, to explain the irreducible multiplicity of experience itself. In this sense, when Marisol warns that the summer of 2019 should not be understood “as a blueprint to be copied,” it seems to me that what we can glean from that warning is a move away from an ensnaring of the summer protests within an archaeo-teleological framing. To do so would only blur our vision and cause us to view those protests from a certain theoretical point of view. This would result in a specific theory of revolt or revolution, a false dichotomous relationship between the two, and, finally, an imposition of the kind of political organizing or activism implied as necessary by such a theoretical conception. In other words, Marisol pushes us away from the disciplining of the human experience, which would strip away the revolutionary immanence of those protests which lies precisely in the fact that we are always already capable of them. We are always members of the “masterless Caribbean.” [10]

Relatedly, to connect this with historian Jorell Meléndez-Badillo’s ruminations on the archive, [11] and guided by Marisol’s warning, how do we think of moments like the summer protests without subsuming them to an archaeo-teleological understanding of history? How can we move away from understanding those moments as a supposed “rupture” followed by the establishment of a new archē, which would enact what Angela Davis critiqued as “historical closures?” [12] How do we rid ourselves of desires for archaeo-teleocratic origins? Put differently, how do we think of social change without reifying modernity’s temporal schema and its “sacred mystery of the root?” [13] In other words, how do we think about revolt without monumentalizing it?

One way is shown through the reflections Marisol produced in the heat of the moment, where a mixture of anxiety, stress, and potentially a little sleep deprivation was faced by every Puerto Rican in the archipelago and its diasporas who waited for what’s his face to finally fucking resign already. The implicit lesson Marisol has offered reminds us of the futility and danger of trying to discipline human experience through our own theoretical investments. For whom would have thought that one of the most vocal threats to women’s and LGBTQ rights in Puerto Rico’s Senate today, in essence, was also a product of the summer protests? It must be noted that Joanne Rodríguez Veve, senator-at-large for the conservative religious party Proyecto Dignidad, has been spearheading legislation and espousing rhetoric that threaten gender-based liberation efforts. Proyecto Dignidad was founded on March 24, 2019 and the summer protests undoubtedly served as fertile grounds for them to gather support. [14] To the surprise of many, Rodríguez Veve managed to earn more votes than every other candidate except for María De Lourdes Santiago Negrón from the Partido Independentista de Puerto Rico (PIP). In other words, by monumentalizing moments like the summer of 2019 in Puerto Rico, we miss dialectical undercurrents which we must remain attuned to living in the grip of death.

Notes

A previous version of this text was read at the book presentation for Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua (Cabo Rojo: Editora Educación Emergente, 2021) by Marisol LeBrón, celebrated on December 8, 2021, via Zoom. The panel consisted of a delightful and generous conversation between Rocío Zambrana, Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, the author and me, with wonderful moderation by Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, the editor and translator of the text. The presentation also included the participation of Colectivo Babilla, who provided live translation and interpretation. You can watch the recording of that conversation here.

References

  • Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 2008. 

  • Ferrer-Núñez, Shariana and Zoan Dávila Roldán. “Nosotras contra la deuda” ¿Quién Le Debe a Quién? Eds. Silvia Federici, Verónica Gago, and Luci Cavallero. Buenos Aires: Fundación Rosa Luxemburgo/Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2021.

  • LeBrón, Marisol. Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua. Toa Baja, Puerto Rico: Editora Educación Emergente, 2021. 

  • Orozco-Herrera, Dinah. Las semillas del Muntú. New York: Nueva York Poetry Press, 2019. 

  • Sawyer, Michael. An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 

  • Zambrana, Rocío. Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 

Pedro Lebrón Ortiz is a former mechanic, practicing engineer, and independent writer who is preoccupied with the legacies of colonization and enslavement, and the logics of decolonization and liberation. Pedro is the author of Filosofía del cimarronaje (Cabo Rojo: Editora Educación Emergente, 2020), which was awarded the first honorable mention for the Essay Prize 2021 by PEN Club Puerto Rico. Together with Dr. Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, he is co-editing a special issue of the journal Diálogos, the journal of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras, on African and Afro-Diasporic Thought. Pedro lives, thinks, and writes from Bo. Aceitunas, Moca, Puerto Rico. You can hit him up via email (plebron.upr@gmail.com) or Twitter (@plebronortiz).

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