Y la muerte del pueblo fue como siempre ha sido:
como
si no muriera nadie, nada,
como si fueran piedras las que caen
sobre la
tierra, o agua sobre el agua.
Pablo Neruda, Canto General 1
INTRODUCTION
In my Disability Intersectional Agency and Latinx Identity I elevated Ezequiel’s counterstory.2 Ezequiel was not his real name. His full name was Esio Jose Bustamante Molina.3 Esio was a blind brown catatonic friend of mine whose 1975 disappearance from our boarding school for the blind in the global south was never explained. To this day, I have no idea what happened to him. He became another desaparecido; the term used in Latin America to designate the many folks who experienced political repression and whose bodies were never found. Their ultimate destinies were never disclosed.4
Through Esio’s counterstory, I argue that the disappearance of mad and neurodivergent individuals has the same political status as those thousands of desaparecidos which proliferated throughout Southern and Central American dictatorships in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s under the watchful imperial eye of the corresponding US administrations of those decades. One of the anonymous reviewers for this piece put it quite poignantly: although institutionalizing settings for mad people originated in France, their proliferation and refinement in the colonies that later formed the USA as well as USA’s everyday life in urban settings and throughout its extensive and complex imperial grip was probably greater than that observed anywhere else in the global North. As the work of my colleague Chantal Figueroa shows, in the global South, the institutionalizing manifestations of this imperial grip are absolutely sinister, and in many ways tied to the very contours of nation building and intersectional oppression that keep authoritarian regimes in place.5 My core point is that as blatant violations of human rights, the disappearance and forced institutionalization of mad and neurodivergent masses of often unknown individuals must be regarded as intrinsically political, deserving the greatest indignation and collective mobilization. Methodologically, my purpose is to revisit and interrogate the politics of knowledge in these mad desaparecido events. I thus elevate critical interpretations of the testimonial as decolonial mad/neurodivergent justice for the present and future generations of pan-disability and cross-coalitional endeavors in both Global North and Global South contexts.6 Esio’s counterstory excavations serve to pursue a reimagining and figurative politics of counternarrative devices. The article must thus be read as an invitation to decolonize rigidified methods while linking at the same time with pan-disability, neurodivergent, and mad justice intersectional enactments.
My driving questions are as follows: What does it take for these transversal/horizontal links of decoloniality to be possible? How do decolonizing methodologies of counterstory-telling and justice-centered activism afford and preclude protopian intersectional pan-disability/ neurodivergent/mad futures?7 How can one transcend these oppressive dimensions? How can one preempt their present and future occurrence through agentic empowerment paradigms which no longer privilege global north versus global south politics of debility and disablement? To what extent can one enrich and disrupt them through mad-centric mind-body paradigms?
I want to tap into the synergy of relations. In doing so, I want to impact what systems theorists are now calling “exo”-level dimensions of organizational and policy ecosystems.8 Tapping into these exo-level dimensions is key because their overarching sense of distant and abstract spheres of power make all these interlocking oppressive and exploitative relations viable, especially in today’s interconnected/high tech environments. Thus, I want us to blend the most radical kind of scholarly and the most dynamic and agentic modes of activism. I am thinking here of an activism that is not bound by rigidified organizational or slogan-based dimensions of discourse/ideology.
Counterstories have a unique kind of transgressive power which can very well translate into mad methodologies. They can serve as both theory-building and protopian tools. They are particularly helpful in connection to LatDisCrit disability/mad justice undertakings such as those concerning Esio’s sociopolitical ethos as a desaparecido. My theoretical coining and development of LatDisCrit rests on the counternarrative attributes of testimonial counterstories. I am convinced that testimonial counterstories can give a revolutionary impetus to mad justice pursuits as part of a broader pan-disability and decolonial cross-coalitional movement building agenda.9 LatDisCrit combines two main bodies of literature. On the one hand it rests on LatCrit theory whose genealogy links back to critical race theory (CRT) with a focus on the oppressive racialization of Latinx groups.10 On the other hand, LatDisCrit’s conceptualization as an intersectional disability justice framework rests on DisCrit which also elevates CRT in an intersectional anti-oppressive exploration of ways to combat ableism, especially within educational settings.11
The section that follows is devoted to understanding counterstories under this light. Next, I will dive into pan-disability/neurodivergent/mad justice as a modality of decolonial intersectionality, or intersectional decoloniality. In so doing, I emphasize knowledges born out of anti-ableist agentic intersectionality struggles.12 My concluding remarks highlight the cross-coalitional power of using this particular mode of knowledge creation and distribution for hybrid modes of scholarship and activism. I will show how this blending approach to scholarship and activism rests not only on counternarrative mechanisms but also on what Caribbean poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant calls opacity’s poetic relationality.13 In short, this poetic sense of relational opacity challenges the objectivizing attempts at providing rationalist accounts of reality which in their apparent transparency mask the complex entanglements of all the relations at stake. Instead, I along with Glissant advocate for a poetic engagement with the often incomprehensible richness of mad funds of knowledge whose testimonial counterstories open up without necessarily falling on the linear rationalistic trap of transparency-based discourses.
GNOSIS AND TRANSGRESSIVE METHODOLOGIES: ON THE POWER OF COUNTERSTORIES
Walter Mignolo establishes a core distinction between gnoseology and epistemology.14 Mignolo points out that epistemology’s scope is narrower and more constraining. It only deals with existing/accepted spheres of knowledge and ways of knowing. Gnoseology is much broader and more flexible, encompassing not only existing knowledges but also sensing mechanisms. It thus opens the door to unknown futures and possibilities that enact what Mignolo elsewhere calls delinking, that is, proactive breaks with Eurocentric and ableist epistemologies.15 These epistemologies are problematic because they involve modes of knowing which tend to be disguised under disciplinary systematicity and objective scientificity, excluding all other wisdom-seeking pursuits.
To be sure, disability, madness, and neurodiversity are by definition delinked from these rationalist epistemologies obsessed with scientificity. This is particularly so when it comes to the individual and interdependent knowledges that get borne out of mad and disabled people’s struggles. Theirs are destituted/marginalized knowledges. Their deep sense of destitution operates through modernity’s self-imposed sense of normality.16 That much is clear in the work of European centered scholars such as Michel Foucault.17 There are things that Foucault does not tell us due to his European prism. This particular kind of normality control, which forged the new epistemology of madness in modern times from the 17th century onward, was, like many other emerging hierarchical knowledges, preempted by what Mignolo, following Quijano, calls the colonial matrix of power (CMP).18
Here is something else that I find very striking. There are hierarchical layers of normality within disabled manifestations of spacetime. Esio’s presence within the school for the blind I attended was “normal” until it stopped being so. I mean, while he was another blind individual there, he was not breaking normative expectations within that kind of total institution, to use Goffman’s famous construct.19 Esio was not very talkative, but he was a great friend. He was probably three or four years older than me. I vividly remember his routine of simulating that he ran a radio station. He did so every night before going to sleep. He called it Radio Esio, and it included his simulation of music, announcements, and so forth.
The version of Esio’s fluency with the normality of that particular kind of total institution is fixed in my mind as part of the space where the boarding school was located. It was an old house. It was so old that bats were not uncommon on its inner walls. It had a central patio area. I guess bats nested inside some of the wall cracks since the walls were not made of concrete but a thicker kind of adobe construction material typical of very old houses in that portion of Venezuela’s Andean region.
By the latter part of 1974, the boarding school had been moved into a larger, rather fancy, rented space with an expansive range of personnel options, apart from the limited teaching staff with which we were familiar in the older place. This was financially possible because that year, as part of the global energy crisis, Venezuela started being institutionally and socio-politically marked by an oil money boom that lasted till the early 1980s when, due to foreign debt dynamics controlled through IMF imposed constraints, its currency was devaluated and many things were scaled back to what at the time would be designated under the nomenclature of third-world or underdeveloped nations proportions. As a poor, disabled, and Mestix person, my own high school and university education would not have been possible otherwise. For Esio and I, the 1974 boarding school changes meant having to interact on an everyday basis with a lot of folks who felt like strangers to most of us, the kids who had inhabited the older space. The contours of that process of institutional transformation within the boarding school for the blind Esio and I attended would deserve another full article. For the sake of the present discussion, I want to emphasize that within that new space Esio started getting lost, somehow fading into a form of what today might be called neurodivergent spacetime whose complex manifestations have only become evident to me in retrospect. He was no longer another blind guy within the panoptic parameters of that type of crip context; yet I did not realize the transformative alchemy of what was taking place.
No matter how much I try, I cannot pinpoint when or how things started to change for Esio and myself as a witness of that strange process. What I do remember is that, at a given point, Esio had turned catatonic. He remained in a single place for hours, standing there, not in full silence, but mumbling something that I could never figure out. One day, he was no longer there. He was gone forever. Nobody seemed to have missed his presence because his hyper visible absence, his sempiternal invisibility was already reining way before Esio was physically gone. As Price would say, “disabled people are both hyper visible and invisible, our experiences and needs garishly obvious yet somehow obscure at the same time.”20 In academic spaces this is probably a new thing to say. But the truth is that this has been clear to disabled folks in a general although dramatic sense for a very long time. What is definitely worth noting in conjunction to Esio’s counterstory is that the reality of madness within other disabled spaces is superlative, in part because of artificial hierarchies among various kinds of disability categories.
Now, coming back to the transgressive power of counterstories, it is important to underscore the following: the performativity of Esio’s counterstory within this article is aimed to operate within the fluid methodological spacetime contours of gnosis. In other words, I want to place it beyond the confined “discipline” of epistemologies. Thus, my framing of Esio’s counterstory intentionally delinks from epistemological, disciplinary walls. For instance, it is not a sociological analysis, in the classical Eurocentric sense of this particular discipline. It is not even framed as part of the so-called sociological imagination as Mills used the concept more than half a century ago.21 It is an un-disciplined, unsystematic form of knowledge which resides in the sentipensante (simultaneous feeling/thinking/relating) realm of gnosis.22
Counterstories are body-minded enactments of theory. As one of my editors insightfully points out, the opposite is also true. Theories are formalizations and modes of colonization of our bodymind counterstories as disabled and mad folks, especially disabled and mad folks of color. For this very reason, it is imperative to elevate the gnosis/decolonizing power of counterstories beyond mere narrative devices as vignettes are typically seen within traditional qualitative methodologies. Following the CRT tradition, I have cultivated counterstories as part of my decolonial engagement with what I call LatDisCrit.23 LatDisCrit takes a step further the epistemology of relationality embedded in disciplinary feminist disability approaches. I do so by underscoring the racialized power of counterstories in connection to sentipensante ways of knowing and in connection to the need to transgress established normative impositions. Sentipensante approaches to sensing and interpreting reality are important because they privilege the relational and affective dimensions of knowing, linking them to how and why one thinks in a given way within a particular context or situational set of oppressive factors.24 Counterstories are thus intrinsic to the way knowing itself takes place, that is, in a never-ending process, percolating one’s layers of wisdom resulting from struggle and marginalization. For disabled, mad, and neurodivergent folks, especially folks of color, counterstories represent a device uniquely enriched by powerful funds of knowledge.25 In other words, counterstories are metatheoretical analytical tools that bring about bodymind modes of anti-ableist and antiracist relationality. Many Chicanx and Latinx authors use the word testimonios to allude to counterstories, making clear that testimonios are “theory in the flesh,” instead of abstract, rationalistic devices whose sense of futurity is trapped within the walls of epistemological disciplinarity and justice-preempting modes of normalcy.26
PAN-DISABILITY, NEURODIVERGENT AND MAD JUSTICE: TOWARD AGENTIC DECOLONIAL INTERSECTIONALITIES
My framing of Esio’s counterstory calls for fugitive justice. It calls for a crip spacetime marked by genuine interdependent modalities of freedom. However, for mad and disabled groups, especially those experiencing intersectional racialized and gendered types of oppression, their reality is marked by relations of power that negate these prospects. This is why various thinkers interrogate the citizenship status contours of disabled folks, something that gets exacerbated in global south contexts for mad individuals such as Esio.27 One is forced to wonder, how can such a quest become a tangible possibility in a colonized world where normative impositions chain bodymind futures?
Mad, neurodivergent, and disabled realities are not meant to become part of the colonial interiority of dominant oppressive paradigms. That is not the kind of futurity they seek. Their quest for justice is a quest for horizontality, a quest for recognizing the wisdom embedded in their intersectional subaltern knowledges.28 Therefore, sentipensante modalities of Mad/ neurodivergent/disabled justice with and by all marginalized beings, e.g., racialized, gendered, underclass, etc., involves futures where feeling and thinking differently do not lead to disappearing. Most significantly, it presumes their rightful presence.29 This is a notion that does not require steps toward “inclusion” as a matter of equity because invisibility and hypervisibility are no longer the norm for their everyday experiences. Invoking the counternarrative and poetic power of rightful presence in these futurities goes beyond merely trying to address matters of credibility or superficial modes of recognition. Its ethos is closer to abolition and fugitive struggles.30 These struggles are tied to the most radical dismantling of the colonial matrix of power which sustains institutionalizing ideologies and practices. It encompasses apparently benign entities like the boarding school for the blind where Esio and I were confined for years.
I must confess that writing this article has been emotionally difficult. However, when I interrogate my own dubious engagement with these emotions, I realize that this kind of struggle is at the core of sentipensante practices of crip authorship.31 Part of my difficulty seems to derive from an impossible attempt to “interpret” emotions and memories of the time with Esio. Recordar, the verb in Spanish for remembering has a direct etymological connection to its Latin root. It literally means passing through one’s heart once again. That kind of affective process cannot be interpreted in a purely epistemological, non-emotional sense. The process calls instead for poetic, counternarrative and creatively agentic (not often pain-free) efforts that elevate rather than hide away from the transformative power of these emotions. For me the very act of telling Esio’s counterstory becomes a liberatory act. It not only honors his presence even and especially after his forced ethos as a desaparecido. It embraces at once the political and emotional legacy of our encounter, our trans-disabled engagement which even today does not cease to amaze me and to challenge me to deepen cross-coalitional engagements beyond my comfort zone.
This realization has in turn brought me back to a piece I had read a few years ago in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.32 In it, Bayliss uses ideas from Deleuze and Guattari. Bayliss’ aim is to show how modernity’s rationalistic modes of epistemological engagement through its empiricist treatment of the senses as subsidiary to rational thinking killed the possibility of non-rational engagements with marginalized dimensions of identity such as disability. Bayliss’ solution stresses the affective, non-rationalist power of relational poetics. Relational poetics operates as a way to free us from this kind of ableist rationalism with its narrow range of expressive and non-relational mechanisms. In this regard, I am particularly attracted to the way Caribbean poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant models the exercise of such an engagement with relational poetics. As he puts it:
"Being is relation": but Relation is safe from the idea of Being.
The idea of relation does not limit Relation, nor does it fit outside of it.
The idea of relation does not preexist (Relation).
Someone who thinks Relation thinks by means of it,
just as does someone who thinks he is safe from it.
Relation contaminates, sweetens, as a principle, or as flower dust.
Relation enferals, lying in wait for equivalence.
That which would preexist (Relation) is vacuity of Being-as-Being.
Being-as-Being is not opaque but self-important.33
Crucially, contrary to the non-relational linear nature of empiricist rationalism and all the other epistemologies of modernity, in Glissant’s poetics of relation the idea of opacity acquires paramount significance. “The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence.”34
Hence, extrapolating this power of relational opacity, I realize that my poetic connection with Esio transcended the narrow limits of ableist linear rationalism. Moreover, I realize that adopting this innovative trans-mad relational epistemology frees me from messianic temptations/ responsibilities, as well as from the kinds of perpetual hierarchies that these approaches to being involve. In other words, my role as counterstory teller is not to give presence to Esio’s absence in the boarding school for the blind. Both of us were equally prisoners of total institutional arrangements there in exchange for our education. But how would Esio’s catatonic “education” be justified under that pseudo-logic of imprisonment? Was Esio not already institutionalized there in ways which involve disappearance of being even before they took him who knows where? Something in my inner being tells me that Esio probably passed away soon after this final disappearance. But one needs to realize that one of the most terrifying dimensions of the reality of desaparecidos is the unknowing yet absolute certainty of finality, of indignity, of innumerable spheres so horrifying as to be impossible to name or even imagine in a somewhat articulate manner.
Most significantly, my role as counterstory teller is poetically relational and does not depend on narrating the aspects of this counterstory which I do not and perhaps cannot know. In this regard I am as eager as any other reader to know what ultimately happened. Yet, the truth is that such an ambiguous but profoundly relational engagement frees me to adopt a genuinely sentipensante stance, one which gives me space to mourn, to let my soul scream, to be angry, sad, and beyond. This does not betray my gnosis-based task; quite on the contrary, it elevates and dignifies it through inexpressible relational poetic ingredients of sentipensante collective action which transcend the writing of this essay.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
My framing of Esio’s counterstory reveals that mad counterstory-telling embodies Mignolo’s conceptualization of delinking. Yet, most importantly for my cross-coalitional purposes, it allows for non-rationalist approaches toward a relational poetics of being together even in situations which one cannot understand or articulate beyond sentipensante forms of expressivity or reflective silence.
These unique qualities in mad sentipensante counterstory-telling make it epistemologically valuable. Its value involves articulating knowledges borne of the struggle against atrocious injustices such as those involved in forced desapariciones and intransigent remainders of institutionalizing practices against mad, neurodivergent, and pan-disability actors. As such, they empower us to embrace and enact a hybrid kind of collective action. This kind of collective action does not need to rest on rationalistic tactics toward the strategic enhancement of rightful presence, even in situations of absence and foretold manifestations of social death.35 Counterstories and the poetic relation of epistemic opacity forge a hopeful space of cross-coalitional freedom. The present essay is thus offered as an invitational appetizer for mad and neurodivergent activists and scholars to explore such a sentipensante mode of epistemic innovation. My hope is that, by doing so, they would learn to harvest the relational power of not having to be tied to the linear, often isolating chains of purely analytical/empiricist epistemologies. As we all know, their spirit and their analytical consequences are so often linked to unintended and at times intentional ableist and anti-mad enforcements of so-called scientific rationalism.