Adhering to their own time and ways of doing things, my ancestors sent me a poem in a dream at the end of graduate school that disassembled my experiences of (dis)placement, knowledge production and violence within the academy.
Neither here nor there
Yet now and here
Nazali áwa (I am here), Ozali áwa (You are here), Tozali áwa (We are here)
The ancestors whisper
And they cry out – reminding
And they nudge, prompt, provoke
And they ground, stoke
Settle in common and comfort-in-between
This is your (un)belonging, they say
Take hold, go places
Be in the world, be
As the re-searching never dies
In this here and now
Neither here nor there
The re-searching survives
In (dis)placed bodies
By (dis)placed bodies
For (dis)placed bodies
The de-cluttering of institutional violence I experienced during my master’s is ongoing. However, I want to situate this piece in ‘re-searching’ my (dis)placement and its relationship to the destructiveness of ‘producing’ and ‘consuming’ ‘knowledge’. I want to unpack a constant question I ask myself, “Where is my place when/if I am participating in the production and consumption of my own unhumaning?”
When I first asked this question, it caused me to spiral deeper and deeper within interrogations of placelessness and the relevancy of research to (dis)placement.
