The Brooklyn Rail

I am answering from where I am right now, very much in my body. I just arrived from dancing all night, and it feels right, because the body stores things. I can feel it giving me the words. We tend to think preparation means planning, but dancing prepares you too. It is a release, an essential one. I get so many ideas when I dance. The body processes things.

I’m in Colombia, surrounded by communities invested in collectivity—working together to undo the empire and its colonial legacies. So when I think about radicality, I’m infused by these ideas and these energies, and it turns out to be something quite simple: to sustain a practice. Radical is to hold something, protect it, nurture it in the face of the brutal undoing of possibility. To maintain possibility, and especially collective possibility, feels radical to me right now. There is a level of unfinishedness that comes with a practice. Sustaining unfinishedness, sustaining not knowing what the practice will lead to, but still doing it.

Yesterday I shared a panel with the brilliant Dominican travesti¹ writer Mikaelah Drullard Márquez, who powerfully challenges the empire with her practice. People asked us: what are the strategies, the tools—how do we act radically while living inside an unsustainable reality? No one has a single answer, because the answer comes from the territory, from the context. It is not abstract. It is a matter of practice—and practice is already the answer.

What can we do? Practice and sustain that. The scale of the political problems we face is immense, but there is something radical about doing the small work of holding a practice across brutality, across genocide, across the impossible, across this liminal stage of the world as we know it. So I’m less interested in the radical as the one who goes to the root of the problem heroically, and more as the one who sustains a practice that can cross this stage of late liberal capitalism, this alien deep capitalism that relates to the earth in such an extractive way.

There is something radical about holding a practice that will not solve the problem, but that might take us across it. I don’t believe in many things. I’m not particularly optimistic. I don’t necessarily believe things will get better. But I believe in practice. I know how practice sustains a body, how practice sustains a community. Our practices matter because of the practices that came before us. They are the reason why we are still here.

I think a lot about this through a memory of a quilombo I visited in Brazil, the Kalunga territory. Quilombos are communities of former fugitive enslaved people, built and preserved in impossible conditions. When I was there, everything was teaching me to look at the ground. You walk looking at your steps. You think about how food is produced, how food is cooked, how water is held. Everything keeps you at ground level. You still dream, you still imagine, you still have spirituality, but you never leave the ground. That experience really shaped my refusal to leave the planet.

During COVID, this community closed itself off to the outside world to protect the elders. Tourism was how they made money, and they cut it off. They were persecuted for that decision, pressured to reopen. But they remained closed. An elder told me: “we had no money, but we had everything else we needed.” They survived because they had sustained a practice for a long time, enduring slavery, enduring the formation of the nation-state, enduring capitalism’s many configurations. They didn’t know what would happen next, but they trusted that the practice would give them what they needed when they needed it.

For me, that is radicality. Not reaction. Reaction still speaks the same language as what it opposes. What I’m interested in is endurance, staying, remaining. To stay tender in the face of a destructive system like capitalism is radical. Thinking long-term is radical, even when the future itself feels undone. Maybe it’s not even about the future. Maybe the seed planted now is already the tree.