Out of Order
A prose poem in conversation with Robert F Williams' "Negroes with Guns", J Sakai's "Settlers", Edward Benton-Banai's "Mishomis Book", and M E O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi's "Everything for Everyone"; after the work of Dr Matthew E Henry, particularly “oh God! please stop!!”
This piece will be a part of a character performance prepared for the Shady Pines Festival. In that performance, it comes from a character known as the Visitor, a traveler from the future who has come to the past to understand their ancestors and their world, to report on how they could be so cruel. The Visitor prefaces this work like this:
The scientists of my homeland have this time-travel thing pretty well figured out, enough that in my native tongue, Ba-thumirai, we talk about time with tenses I doubt you'd understand. If something has happened, but won't happen, and will happen, and is happening, you gotta conjugate for that.
Still, if you do enough spelunking through the crevices of possibility, you hit your head more than a few times. It gets hard to remember which way is up, or down, or in, or out, or whether home is a dream or a feeling or some kind of injury. Everything gets out of order. Everything is-
The year is 1961 and Robert F Williams walks in a picket line that closes a swimming pool. The picket agitates for a new pool, abiding segregation, to keep children from drowning in creeks. The year is 2026 and Danez Smith is at a mic, laughing, "I don't need white people asking if I've ever heard of racism." They laugh about how many people at an event "definitely would have owned slaves."
The year is 2043 and Connor Stephens goes to fight in the Middle East for the last gasping shards of White Empire. In 2050 -- sounds right -- he returns to the rez where he grew up. Spitting distance from Wind River, fascist enclaves hangar dozens of birds, drones and planes that his wartime augs cannot help but describe like high-signal static, so dense he wishes it could just be noise, that he could turn it off, that he could silence the buggy augs that the wartime put in him, but the wartime isn't over, and the augs will only come out when they fall from his corpse after it rots away. The year is 1946 and Williams returns from war to Monroe, North Carolina, to find his home striving, squirming, under the boot of the same pale cruelty as when he left.
It is 1968 -- sounds right -- and a young New Afrikan brother selling things on the sidewalk says to J Sakai, "I already know everything about the White Man, and he knows nothing about me." In transcription, J Sakai capitalizes "the White Man" because it is a proper noun, like the name of a god, not a living person but a great spirit shadowing the land, blotting out the life-giving sun. Sakai adds that imperialist history is not incomplete; it is not true at all. The White Man does not even know himself.
It is 2047, or 48, or 52, or 1492, and the New Nation seizes a Minuteman facility north of Fargo. It blows open the illusion, makes clear like daybreak that the settler project has failed; a new White Man tears out the throat of the old one, insisting on the illusion. Oil flows from the shorn neck, but there are no facilities left to process it. Everything is out of order, and the New Nation has nothing but illusions to guide it. The White Man does not even know himself.
It is 1961 and the pool is closed. A line of feet march with signs in memory of children floating lifeless, when they might have yet lived for want of a lifeguard. White men fire upon the protesters, hitting the trees over their heads, seeding terror, feeding on it. A policeman says, "I don't hear anything." It is 2024 and someone I don't know anymore tells me, "You were right before, and about the other thing, but I hope you're not right this time."
I do not say this so that you will say I am right. I do not say this to win a debate or seem upstanding morally or intellectually. There is no seeming that I pursue, no seeming less real than the augs in Stephens' head, than the mines he disarmed in 'ran, than the rifle Williams puts in a cop's face or the service weapon another cop shoves in Williams' face or the pistol a seventeen-year-old points at him as if to say checkmate; no less real than the prophet of the Seventh Fire describing a New People not settler nor native but both and neither whose hard task may lead to eternal brotherhood, written in a book of stories for children in the settler's tongue. I do not want to seem right. Call me out. Tell me I'm wrong, so we can do better. We can do better or-
It is 2045 and Connor Stephens witnesses refugee caravans crossing a defoliated Persia under the sparkling lights of USAF bombs bursting, the beauty of Farsi turned all to screams. It is 1830 and the Indian Removal Act creates a trail of tears. It is 1930 and striking Mexicans vanish by the tens of thousands, deported by the settler to a land reserved for the Mexica's descendants and neighbors by a seething peace whose name is, "Pray we do not come any closer."
It is 2026 and Danez Smith laughs, "I don't need to be reminded of racism." I sit in the audience and wonder who does. Who might, in being reminded, or in having forgotten, be moved to shift the future we share. It is all out of order. The past cannot change, the future is not known, yet they flow fluid like pus and bile oozing from infections, scabbing and bursting and scabbing and bursting, blood crusting around a knife Malcom X points out in his back, the cause of a wound that will take more to heal than just removing the knife.
It is a beautiful day, someday -- sounds right -- and the settler is dead; the White Man has long ceased to be. I am eating an apple on a bench in the cemetery where we buried him, the great spirit of him that shadowed the land. The invasive worms that could not reasonably be evicted have turned him into the soil that the orchards soak in on rainy days, transforming cruelty into simple sugars. It is all out of order. I am already there. It is just a daydream. It glints for an instant in the barrel of the gun Williams points at a lyncher, and the lyncher flinches, and a man who would have died of torture is taken home alive.
