As the Palaces Burn: A World on Fire
As fires roar through Maui (claiming 93 lives and counting), we must reflect on a world that is warming at an unprecedented and explosive rate. Before reviewing the data linked to climate change, it is important to revisit the role of biopolitics in the genocidal advancement of extractive capitalism and settler-colonialism. I have previously referred to these theories when discussing the vigilante lynching of Jordan Neely and my work on the born-dead—it isn’t that these changes in climate patterns have gone unnoticed (this shift has been observed since the 1960s); it is that the areas primarily affected have been home to Black diasporic and indigenous peoples (lives that are not worth being lived or fully realized in the eyes of the unmarked). Why would hypercapitalists cease production and sacrifice financial gain/agency in the name of saving nothing more than accumulated masses of non-white flesh? Things are getting hotter and hotter; it seems unlikely that this pattern will be staunched or slowed. Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, reporting via Yale Climate Connections, state the following concerning the steady rise in surface air temperatures:
“Globally analyzed surface air temperatures continue to hover at levels warmer than anything found in analysis extending back to 1979, possibly reflecting conditions that haven’t occurred before in human history.”
We are being burned alive: Not only have rising record temperatures been cited, but also an uptick in the number of tornadoes and hurricanes. I am reminded of my stay in Matanzas, Cuba in the summer of 2018, where I was unable to visit several museums due to flooding and destruction linked to recent hurricanes. What was a minor and distant inconvenience for me, was the siphoning of the lifeblood for the local community. What does the Global North care about developing neighborhoods being decimated by storms throughout the Caribbean? Those aren’t white bodies. Those aren’t lives worth saving. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts an “increased . . . likelihood of an above-normal Atlantic hurricane season to 60%.”
Still image from Teatro Sauto overlooking Matanzas, Cuba.
As temperatures and storms ravage communities of color, bodies already deemed void of biopower, what makes you think these changes will not affect you? We are all too comfortable in our air conditioned homes and apartments, but this does not decelerate the towers of smoke billowing out from this pyre-like bonfire that is now our Earth and massive graveyard. There are no futures here (but there have never been futures for the born-dead). I am not interested in those hypothesizing what will come in 100 years (I do not think modern civilization will exist by then); the world we are living in is already on the precipice of being uninhabitable (and has already been deemed uninhabitable and “third world” to those who look like me). What do you think the next twenty years will entail in terms of climate change? I am not fearful—why would I be afraid? I was already dead when my mother was born. I am content in my kingdom built atop hollowed-out bones. I hail from the Necropolis (the City of the Dead). I—just like many others—have always been one with the shadows of the night (the murky underpinnings of the subterranean have always been home to me); it is you who must readjust to the ways of the subaltern. It is you who must forfeit everything based in the mirage of capital. It is you who will suffer like I have always suffered. I will see you in Hell.
