[ACTION #4] MASSLESS COUNTERPOETICS

“I’m in no hurry, I’m not choking, I’m not destroyed, I’m not buried, I’m not surrounded, I’m not destroyed, I’m breathing.” [Christophe Tarkos]   May-June 1886. La Vogue magazine publishes Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. The poem “Démocratie” [written after the suppression of the Paris Commune] details the stifling colonialism, the unreasonable demands of capitalist conditions [the ice-cold laws of traders], & the slaughter of the revolts that logically follow. June 1872. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels report on how the Pope, the French right [including the neoliberals] & the German police are all busy hunting down the “spectre of…

M. NourbeSe Philip | from ‘ZONG!’

Zong! attempts to not-tell the story that must be told yet can’t be told – the story of the Zong massacre in 1781 in which the captain of the eponymous slave ship throws overboard some 150 enslaved Africans in order to collect payment of insurance monies. Through fragments of words and phrases a contrapuntal rhythm of word and silence is created as the story untells itself. Multilingual, multiethnic and multiracial, the globalised universe of the slave ship is a space of extreme contraction and restriction, it is rule-bound and closely girded and guarded by the law and religion. It is…

riots and/or poetics [5/2020]

the high degree of social danger inherent in the choice of implements and the method of execution / expropriations and searches proletarian fires and corruption of the public good kidnappings and sequestering of persons beatings wounds / sufficient evidence of guilt can be inferred from the laws as formulated in the index books / carried out in houses and adjacent rooms in the middle of the night / 1) the copious documentation seized or acquired above all those parts that celebrate and program the violence and the armed struggle / the final goal being the general overthrow of the existing…