#the trauma this year carries is incommensurable

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Sending all my thoughts and all my support to my followers tonight. Especially those with so much to grieve and so little room given to express their anger and pain.

[fatehbaz]

This version of the Necrocene does not so much partake of the apocalypticism [...] but rather puts the focus on feminist, trans [...] interventions that redirect Anthropocene extremities of deep past and ostensibly still-remote futures to the present pressures of thinking and feeling with the turbulent unpredictabilities of mixed affects and entangled agencies, with the enwrapping of the wildly incommensurate, and the ruptures of [...] demands for reparation and revolution on the part of those entities, those forms of life, bare life, and not-life, and ways of being and becoming for whom the ostensibly privileges of the status of the human have never constituted refuge, those for whom the imperatives to sustain and reproduce life have, rather, been the terms of slow death, and those whose very form or lack of privileged form is rendered unlivable, killable, and not even registered as loss, as grievable losses or deaths that count. Necrocene puts pressure on the burning questions: What makes diverse forms of earthly trauma matter? What connects forms of earthly, planetary trauma held apart? [...]

[T]he founding paternal gestures of dispossession and possession take the form of scenes of displacement, of making diasporic in scenes of scattering seed:

“With the materializing metaphor of planting scattered seed, that is, the practices of agriculture and landscaping [...], to plant was  to produce colonies and to generate subjects to sustain them.” However, such ostensibly founding scenes [...] as devices of biopower and necropower set the stage for other possibilities [...].

Take the migratory declaration carved into the wooden sign at the entrance to the Transgender Memorial Garden in St. Louis, Missouri, planted by members of the Metro Trans Umbrella Group and dedicated October 18, 2015, to those lives lost worldwide to anti-trans violence:

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

This digital dia-spor moves across hand-carved signs, T-shirts for the Transgender Day of Rememberance, painted signs [...], and posters carried at marches in Mexico City in the name of Ayotzinapa (shorthand for the forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School near Tixtla, Guerrero who were disappeared after their bus was attacked by municipal police and other armed men while en route to demonstrations in Mexico City).

The activist meme (popularized by the Zapatistas in the 1990s in its Spanish form “Quisieron enterrarnos, pero no sabian que eramos semilla”) was adapted from a two-line poem in which Dinos Christianopoulos -- a Greek writer of homoerotic verse with the outlaw blues quality and seediness of the “rembetiko” or “rebetiko” of underground music -- adapts the ancient story of Cadmus who sowed an army of warriors from the magical seeds of dragon’s teeth to mine the [...] classical myth to raise an army of the dead against the heterosexism of claims to the natural: “What didn’t you do to bury me, but you forgot that I was a seed.”

The planting of a version of these words on the site of the Transgender Memorial Garden in St. Louis, Missouri, carries a particular charge due to its proximity to Ferguson where the protests surrounding the police murder of Michael Brown in 2014 were pivotal in galvanizing what has become the Black L!ves M@tter movement as, while 2016 was the deadliest year on record for trans people (with 2017 set to exceed it), most murdered trans people are women of color.

The promiscuous popularity of this clarion call of the discarded and buried that turn out to be seeds risks erasing important differences with blanket generalizations that we are all mortal while foreclosing any reckoning with loss as loss by covering over the space of loss with signs of life that bear the promise of resurgence and resurrection.

At the same time, however, rather than a covering over of pain and loss or the segregation of loss into not just discrete and marginalized but also uncounted losses, the landscape of the discarded and buried as unanticipated seed renders the Necrocene not as inert past or a foreclosed future but a roiling compost of a present which is mined not just by the military-pharmaco-agro-industrial complex but also by the discarded, discounted, and buried of stigmatic, agitating difference that refuses assimilation [...].

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Jill H. Casid. “Necrolandscaping: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Necrocene.” In: Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape. 2018.