Whispered Stories for Forgetting One’s Name
By Rafael Mondragón Velázquez

1.
A soft voice cuts through the silence of enclosure. A whisper that calls us to patience. In the midst of the distress of this time of death, the whisper is the voice that vibrates, skin that speaks to skin, incarnated thought that breathes and, in its breath, spurs on experience: it calls us to stop doing two or three things at the same time. This is a warning to the reader: the piece you’re about to watch is 30 minutes long, so you’re going to have learn to be with it in another way.

This is a whisper that institutes the dense time of secrets, the “between-two” of intimacy that allows us to take shelter from the harsh absolute Outside from which we have been uprooted, living in the prison of our screens, devices and indignity. Three people I was close to died today and the video’s whispered voice accompanies me in this time of death. I think of the pain carried by those who will watch this piece during its brief virtual exhibition in a Mexican museum. Pain for those who have left us, as well as for the crisis of a way of life, a civilizational project in check (a way of reproducing life, work, education, connections with others). A new world that isn’t being born, and an old one that refuses to die… I imagine that, in these circumstances, listening to this voice also means participating in a medicinal knowledge in which the memory of myth is evoked to make the unobserved pain of racism thinkable.

I’m reminded of something that Paul Gilroy said recently regarding the work of Frantz Fanon, who was a doctor. “In Fanon every argument about violence, every single comment on violence is framed or qualified by an argument about healing”. [1] I’m reminded that the creator of this piece was also educated as a psychiatrist. Grada Kilomba began by reflecting on mourning, trauma and the construction of the capacity to confront violence. As if involuntarily, she thus became an artist. The confluence between their respective journeys makes me think of the ways in which this whisper can foster a reflection on health and the potency of life, on how we can take care of ourselves in all our vulnerability in order to collectively confront this time of death, on what type of civilizational project we want to build in the aftermath.

2.
Some would say that Grada Kilomba’s work is an avant-garde combination of academic research, oral narrative and the performing arts. It could also be said—and I believe this would be more accurate—that Kilomba updates an ancient tradition, that of the griots and Chadian gos that keep memory alive through stories in which the experiences of those present become thinkable, recovering their ambiguity and profundity.

Here, the modern (and colonial) opposition between tradition and progress is dismantled in favor of a more complex understanding of time, experience and collectivity. As the voice says: I feel that there is nothing new I can say, which is why I want to tell an old story; we all know everything already, we just tend to forget it… Bringing to mind that forgotten remnant can allow the word to emerge from the pain of the present and make it thinkable, something that can be laughed at. Neither modern nor postmodern, but transmodern, as Enrique Dussel has called this complex of knowledges and historical experiences from other times, concealed by colonial modernity yet nevertheless persisting into the present, inviting us to imagine another civilizational project.

In Illusions Vol. I, Narcissus and Echo, there is a great deal of laughter. In the intellectual tradition in which this piece intervenes, there is a relationship between thinking, laughing and healing, as well as between philosophy, the art of storytelling and the public staging of the body. And between telling, listening and transforming (and being transformed)—as the Kenyan thinker Peter Wasamba once wrote, a tale is not a tale until it has been told, it has not been told until it has been heard and, as it changes once it has been heard, a tale is not a tale until it has been changed (and, I would add, until it changes us).

For all of these reasons, one could say that Grada Kilomba is a philosopher who reflects through fictions narrated in whispers. With the support of a crew of actors, these whispers give rise to tableaus: illustrations that repeat what has been narrated with minor interventions, accents and punctuation, little touches of humor, parodies of the text being read. The familiar tale is told through numbered vignettes that are woven with the logic of poetry: juxtaposition, analogy, repetition, expansion.

The tale is repeated twice, first as narration and then as reflection. But this reflection neither exhausts the tale nor reveals its hidden meaning: each return constructs a new variation that adds something, evokes a different feeling, contradicts something, provides a commentary or proposes a new direction. In the same way, this new reading of the ancient myth is not presented as a definitive clarification or exposition. It is simply a situated, incarnated return that adds something, evokes a different feeling, contradicts something, provides a commentary, punctuates, indicates a new path. Before the illusion of a knowledge that is identical to itself (and before the principles of a supposedly universal reason, such as the laws of the excluded third, identity and noncontradiction), this philosophy expressed in story presents a knowledge that is understood as pulse, vibration and variation, in close connection to life.

3.
Now that postcolonialism has become an academic fashion that gives one access to grants, jobs and circuits of visibility in the global North, Illusions Vol. I, Narcissus and Echo invites us to participate in decolonization as a permanent, unconcluded task that is incumbent upon our own subjectivity as well as on culture, society and history. It is a reflection on love, solitude and the capacity to recognize the other as having value, which obliges us to accept our own unfinished condition. Grada Kilomba tells us that the curse of Narcissus condemns him to only love that which can never love him back: his own reflected image, which he tries to find in others in a fruitless attempt to hold on to something that fades away right when he’s about to touch it. This curse is connected to his inability to love or to recognize others as objects of love: the only way he can love others is to see in them what he (thinks he) is. Narcissus is thus a prisoner of a limited self-image, foreign to that force of love through which a radical other interpellates us, making us forget our own name, becoming truly alive, being a stranger even to ourselves, knowing nothing of the past or the future, overcoming the neurotic limitations through which each individual closes in on themselves.

Echo, on the other hand, is condemned to seek out the love of Narcissus without being recognized as a distinct being, and in her attempt to claim that love, starts to empty herself of her own voice, becoming a diffuse reverberation. Hating herself, she tries to imitate him, increasingly committing herself to a pact of impossible, perverse love in which the condition for deserving the love of Narcissus is the ever-more-radical erasure of herself, of her words, her history, her body: an impossible and therefore infinite task that will make love into the agonizing pursuit of becoming an authentic being.

Is this not how the intellectual elites of Africa and Latin America have conceived of themselves for centuries? Is this not how they have conceived of their countries? Incomplete historic communities that anxiously follow the path of progress, industrialization and civilization, always about to “become” something true, something other than what they are; cleansing our population of the last remnants of barbarism, wiping away the stain that keeps us from being the desired image of Europe. Grada Kilomba uses the relationship between Echo and Narcissus to create a metaphor for the white, patriarchal society in which we live, the persistence of a colonial wound. But it also allows her to present an observation about what is unfinished in each one of us, that which we call “love”: that excess which goes beyond morality; the most opaque moment of one’s own experiences, in which each person becomes an enigma to themselves; that profoundly personal, non-transferrable and uncommunicable space that, at the same time, is crossed through by the social, the political and the historical.

Healing our relationship with love is important in this time of death in which the construction of another civilizational project further involves the construction of a new ethics and politics of affect. It’s also a question of celebrating that ambiguous, complex remnant through which we encounter that which we believe to be different than us, and with their help, overcome fear, self-hatred and guilt, forgetting our own name, divesting ourselves of the certainties learned in the colonial experience and collectively opening ourselves up to the political experience of imagining a more dignified future. We welcome all pieces, exhibitions and museographic projects that contribute to this task.


[1] See the complete conversation in this link