“The century that trusted in the future” started to dissolve in 1977, says Franco “Bifo” Berardi.1 Since then society has fragmented to the point that it has become un-recomposable. Recomposition means people finding a common ground for understanding and acting together for a common goal. “Human beings perform productive actions, but they are not conscious actors of what they are doing, and seem unable to join their feelings and thought in a common space of consciousness.”2 Since we are unable to act together, the future has become something that happens to us. A kind of unavoidable catastrophe that we cannot oppose in any way.
Utopias turned into something of yore. Even in the leftist movement, “revolution” has ceased to be something to be taken seriously. Revolution is unpossible [sic] to imagine today.
Kerry James Marshall, born in 1955, is a member of the last generation that trusted in the future. In the New York Public Library I saw Keeping the Culture, his futuristic depiction of a Black family on a spaceship outside of the solar system. The interior of the ship is decorated with African art. They are uprooted from their birthplace yet at home in their identity. Whether this is Marshall keeping the flame alive for the future or reminiscing about what could have been, I don’t know.
Still thinking about the future, I noticed the photocopy of Zoe Leonard’s typewritten poem. It was also about the future. But apparently from a member of my generation: the one that lost its trust in the future. She’s questioning why the future she wants is unpossible [sic].
Here’s the full text:
I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of. two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down torest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harrassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth
and attitude, someone who has eatenthat nastyhospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and, been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.
“I want to know why this isn’t possible.” Me too. The chances of someone who has a CV like the one above being more competent than any of the clowns in charge of our governments are crazy high. Yet it’s impossible to even imagine a Black dyke as president now. She could only be the leader people needed, not the president they wanted. The collective subject that would’ve made her leadership possible could only stem from a catastrophe. “The catastrophe is exactly the point where a new landscape is going to be revealed. … Poetry and therapy (thera-poetry) will be the forces leading to the creation of a cognitarian self-consciousness: not a political party, not the organization of interests, but the reactivation of the cognitarian sensibility.”3