THE ABYSSAL WOMB, THE FETID WORLD OF COLONIALITY’S CAPTURE
As the heavy sloshing of horses’ hooves grows ever closer, and the wailing of her child grows ever louder, she, an indigenous Kalinago woman fleeing through a mangrove swamp from her white husband’s plantation, makes a choice. Gently, slowly, she submerges the newborn’s head into the silty water. The crying stops, the hooves grow distant, and in that moment of stillness her liberation is secured.
This scene is the climax of Afro-Caribbean director/filmmaker Anne-Sophie Nanki’s short film Here Ends the World We’ve Known, where a heavily pregnant Kalinago woman partners with an African man who has also sought freedom from White settler’s plantations on the Island of Guadeloupe. Set in the 1600s, the film is a historical fiction that directs the viewer’s gaze onto the omitted possibilities of history, and the ugly choices that were surely made by those attempting to survive the collapse of all that they knew.
When I watched this fictive, desperate infanticide, all the air left my own lungs.
Still, what was perhaps most jarring about my encounter with this film, was witnessing the other audience members’ responses to it in the QA session with the director that followed its screening. People cooed about the choice of actors and the technical expertise behind the film’s masterful appearance. Yet, none of them dared to ask about the choice to kill the child, or the mother’s own treachery along the way as she contemplated returning to the world of the white settlers. There was something about her actions that seemed too wicked to them, too unforgivable, too ugly to be questioned aloud. They did not wonder about how her profound grief and guilt shaped her path of defiance. What the woman did was monstrous, and what good was it to ruin a discussion of the film by talking about something we had all seen and all “knew” to be too horrible to discuss.
This film, and the avoidant reaction to it from a largely white, educated audience, spoke to me about the unbearability and the unknowability of Black and Indigenous women’s struggles to survive in the colonized world, to those occupying privileged positions. That there is a willful ignorance that refuses to take seriously the “ugly” and difficult choices that Indigenous and Black women facing extreme violence in the Americas feel they must make. Many paper over the choices made by their “monstrous” agency because the actions of Black and Indigenous women to defy the deaths presented to them is too dissonant with the picture many want to paint of stoic, resolute women who graciously endure torment.
Born out of the “womb abyss”(1), into a state of non-being in the western colonized world, Black women are rendered non-human. I extend the birth of Indigenous women to this abyssal womb, the womb of “western theory”(2), as Joy James would classify it. The abyssal womb is where colonialism and coloniality’s “death ethic”(3), to extract resource and exterminate the “uncivilized,” is germinated into. In this abyssal womb, this fetid womb, Black and Indigenous women are relegated to the status of objects of labor. In such status, Black and Indigenous women are unable to be conceived of, known as, feeling people capable of enacting their own will. And yet, it is precisely because of how Indigenous and Black women go about enacting their will that they become “monsters’” in the eyes of the abyssal womb. In feeling viscerally their subjugation and taking up means of getting free that those privileged in the abyssal womb dare not watch, Black and Indigenous women locate in their affectivity a “monstrous” agency that threatens to un-make the abyssal womb that keeps them captive.
This piece seeks to understand the “monsterdom” of Black and Indigenous women as a politic of refusal, reinvention, and profound love. This is a politic born out of the visceral grief and guilt that moves Indigenous and Black women to rebel against the abyssal womb that attempts to dissolve them, and manifests in actions that while may indeed be ugly, sow the seeds for liberation.
THE BIRTH OF THE END, THE UN-MAKING OF WOMBS IN THE LAND OF DEMONIC DREAMINGS
You were all so shocked by our wailing
You forgot that this was never permanent
“Did they forget or were they too afraid to see?” We had seen into a future too grotesque for you to fathom
It was one where the world knew our Names
Outside of Black Outside of Indigenous
Outside of “the wombed things”
“The outside is never without the inside, the inside entropies to the outside”
Do not run,
Our screams have reached the End of this world
and peeled back all its corners
There is nowhere to hide
“To think, you were all the mask, you were all the abjection you claimed us to be”
Here is the real magic, the one where We survived and carried with us the apocalypse
Grief and guilt are both affects that underpin Indigenous and Black women’s lives in a manner that drives them to action. Black and Indigenous women’s actions from grief and guilt are meant to refashion the world in a manner that they perceive as alleviating harm.
The use of “perceived,” is to soften the consequences of condoning every Black and Indigenous woman’s actions that comes from guilt and grief. Resisting the abyssal womb is perilous, it involves ugly acts that may “free” a soul but destroy a body. And Indigenous and Black women’s practices of infanticide, to ease the guilt of bringing children into a world of genocidal colonialism and enslavement, brings light to monstrosity that holds considerably less levity than what has been previously discussed.
Lamonte Aidoo in his article “Genealogies of Horror: three stories of slave women, motherhood, and murder in the Americas” deliberately highlights that many of the choices Black women made to change the circumstances of the world surrounding them involved them acting in ways those in the abyssal womb may deem monstrous. Aidoo does not chastise the mothers’ actions, but instead acknowledges how the precarity of the abyssal womb brings about the need for grave measures of resistance.
We witness across Aidoo’s article how Black women’s affectivity, grief, and guilt in bringing life into the abyss, brings her into action, albeit one that may raise accusations of true monster status. But in killing their children, they have brought into the world a new kind of possibility, one where those of her womb are protected from being rendered Black and forced into the tortured class in the first place. In the monstrous act of killing one’s own children to give rise to “flourishing,” we find the richest soil to plant the potential of the demonic model Jamaican Philosopher Sylvia Wynter envisioned. The need that grief and guilt bring to Black and Indigenous mothers, to end life to bring about a better one, is surely unintelligible to the abyssal womb’s way of knowing.
We witness across Aidoo’s article how Black women’s affectivity, grief, and guilt in bringing life into the abyss, brings her into action, albeit one that may raise accusations of true monster status. But in killing their children, they have brought into the world a new kind of possibility, one where those of her womb are protected from being rendered Black and forced into the tortured class in the first place. In the monstrous act of killing one’s own children to give rise to “flourishing,” we find the richest soil to plant the potential of the demonic model Jamaican Philosopher Sylvia Wynter envisioned. The need that grief and guilt bring to Black and Indigenous mothers, to end life to bring about a better one, is surely unintelligible to the abyssal womb’s way of knowing.
We witness across Aidoo’s article how Black women’s affectivity, grief, and guilt in bringing life into the abyss, brings her into action, albeit one that may raise accusations of true monster status. But in killing their children, they have brought into the world a new kind of possibility, one where those of her womb are protected from being rendered Black and forced into the tortured class in the first place. In the monstrous act of killing one’s own children to give rise to “flourishing,” we find the richest soil to plant the potential of the demonic model Jamaican Philosopher Sylvia Wynter envisioned. The need that grief and guilt bring to Black and Indigenous mothers, to end life to bring about a better one, is surely unintelligible to the abyssal womb’s way of knowing.
The Un-made womb abyss blooms. It allows for the fully realized Becoming of Black and Indigenous women, as non-captives, who may begin to imagine a world where grief and guilt can finally take the back seat as the institutionalization of Indigenous and Black death and dying fades.
These writings are pieces from Roebke’s full piece, along with endnotes, which can be found here: Motifri.com/unmakingwombs.