Tiny Violences

The Extractive Economy of Biting

Image | Getty

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Listing Tiny Violences is a way I process the microtraumas of my lived experience. This week they are thematic and somewhat chronological but don’t bet on that. Let me know what you think in the comments.

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My eyes did a double blink when I read an essay by a colleague that feels like something I have written before, recently. The tension swimming through my body from the subsequent lamenting when I recognize that my form and my tone and my lyrical cadence have been stolen, and poorly interpolated.

• The feeling of rage

  • Then the impulse to suppress the rage

• The reasoning

  • We all borrow and are inspired by one another

  • I am not the first person to write a list

• The feeling of rage

  • Heightened by the rationale of my inner critique, the part of me that wants to negate my conscious logic

• Asking, Am I gaslighting myself?

  • Yes.

• The desire to seek validation

  • Feeling guilty about it, but doing it anyway

  • Fighting the impulse against intimacy; by revealing an uglier emotional reaction

• Seeking confirmation from those in my community

  • Thankfully, being affirmed by other discerning minds

• Smothering the urge to have a confrontation

  • Rationalizing why a confrontation would create little value

    • Knowing the confrontation will not be worth the energy

      • Perhaps he might feign obtuseness on the history of the practice of exploiting the labor of Black women for commercial gain

      • Not wanting to have to prove my argument

      • Or perhaps he is obtuse to his mimicry and just operating with the limited imagination of the white power structure

• My mentor says, “you are not your forms”

  • Knowing this yet I still do not feeling comforted by the prescience of its phrasing

    • The hesitancy to share the source of that particular tension

      • Then what am I?

        • A writer and…

• The soothing words of my peers

  • “You will never run out of ideas”

  • “…No one in the culture you’re creating is even going to read that, but I understand why it’s annoying as fuck.”

  • “Not to diminish anything you’re feeling, at all. It just means something to me that you struggle through the work at times and yet, even the uninspiring copycats know you got it.”

• Asking again, Am I gaslighting myself?

  • No, not anymore.

• Acceptance of the (some of the) facts:

  • Imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal conspirators and their extractive economy build upon a narrative a false urgency.  It is one of scarcity, and arbitrarily racialized hierarchies of power. It functions with the goal of exorbitant profiteering while beguilingly usurping limited resources from the planet and its inhabitants to no known end.

  • I’ve descended from a lineage of people who were codified as property, labored, tortured, and experimented on for profit.

  • During the time of my ancestors’ captivity, they were able to imagine and intact a reciprocal economy of culture that amassed unlimited social wealth and spiritual accords.

    • This rigorous invention and reinvention have since been exploited and distilled for profit, namely from those outside of the originating culture.

      • This act of capitalization is now a culture in and of itself.

My eyes do a double blink again when I read an essay by another colleague whose latest missive is eerily similar in form, tone, and photography to something I have written before, recently.

• Unsubscribing

  • I’ve seen this show before and I can no longer afford the distraction.

• Readying to clapback if the opportunity arises.

  • Cuz I’m tired and I’m raging.

Let me know how you recognize or cite those who inspire you, or how you handle people stealing your style.

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