The question, as a form, courts: wide-spanning and invitational, it provides the grounds for voicing provisional answers and desires, variously. The works that comprise this issue of Reckoning provoke essential questions for our current historical conjuncture, questions which defy the treacherous narrows of business-as-usual and open instead toward livable futures at once wily and strange—futures filled with the surprises that come of persistence, of life-thrum, prevailing in spite of everything.
How are we to “link fingers in the dark” (following Kelsey Day); what do we do at the checkpoints, when everything goes wrong (querying after Joanna Streetly)? How do we carry the ravages of the past into urgent articulation with our planetary present? What does that carriage—of word and idea; of nightmare-begotten dreams—look like and hold? Where do its lines break, and what wastelands can it be machined into navigating? How do we multiply the tongues of refutation and ignite material practices that collectivize, that make places built against destruction and for flourishing?
Alongside my fellow readers and editors, I have sought, in this issue, to bring together writing that provokes such lines of questioning. In turn, the writers included here have helped me to ask and re-ask the question of militancy, and what it might—or ought—look like on the page.
I tend to agree with the great documentarian, Muriel Rukeyser: we must “walk in the river of crisis toward the real.” Yet a profound recalibration of pace is in order. Amidst the ongoing genocide of Palestinian peoples, we must run, together, gathering the truth up in our hands and hurling it against the barricades to thought itself, which the state of Israel—backed by the death-fund of US empire—has thrown up to obscure the reality of this gruesome moment of flagrant, unblushing human sacrifice.
From Palestine to the abysmal failure of climate talks at COP28, the planet is ablaze with injustice. Even so, in the face of the anti-life operations of empire, menacing extractivism, and the killing racial logics of global capitalism, other stories are bursting forth; sites of resistance are erupting and lines of solidarity are being forged. I am grateful that Reckoning 8 houses some of these stories—counter-behemoths to the fire-spiting behemoths of the now, which would render land, lives, and languages alike moribund (per Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe’s conjurings).
This issue insists that we can, indeed, must, be fierce and uncompromising, on and off the page. That we must retain and seize the right to dissent from planetary collapse, enacting, instead, the inevitability of resistance, that dear and dearly fruiting tree, its luminous stones sweetly enfleshed with fuel for the hurling.
December 27, 2023
Occupied Lenape Territory of so-called Philadelphia, Pennsylvania