Indigiqueer Feelings

It’s been a while since I wrote about FEELINGS.

I have big ones and nagging ones and feelings that don’t let go of me.

Sometimes you don’t have the feelings—they have you.

The feeling of losing grip of reality—not in any objective sense, but of the sense that lumbering through life with a moral compass and a sense of care is somehow no longer real.

The feeling of starting to read and stopping because I can’t focus. The feeling of seeing other people suffer.

The feeling of seeing other people not care about the suffering of others.

The feeling of wanting to take back some sense of freedom amidst the ongoing crackdown on freedoms in the name of ‘freedom’.

The feeling of freedom, I pause, what the fuck. What a twisted logic.

I think about the books I want to write and the things I want to do. I think about the things I don’t want to do. The responsibilities and obligations the enmeshments that make up my life. I think about how those ligatures are what make me who I am. I think about belonging. The feeling of being part of someone else. Being with. Being in relation.

What does it feel like to see flashes of violence on a phone screen, and swipe to a different image? What does the algorithm think of my feelings? Does the algorithm have feelings? Can the algorithm predict my guilt?

What about the feeling of joy? Have you had it recently? Have you been in the park with the dog, reading while he tries to chew grass behind you? And has that not been joyful? And have you not for a moment, thought that this is ok? This moment. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the sound of spring leaves rustling. Has the moment not been joyful? And I think it has, but is that wrong, now?

The now of it is a feeling, too. Is now the right time to feel joy, pain, love, brutality, shame, desire, intimacy, tenderness. The now. And I think about the now, and I wonder if the now, the urgency of the now, the emergency of the now, is another feeling on top of the feelings, but one that colors, imbues, affective life with an indeterminacy that is not of the now, but of the future. The future because the emergency of the now is meant to relieve pressure now, as well as provide a possible future for the people suffering, now. I think of Gaza and I think of Trump’s silly invitation of white Afrikaners to the US, calling that a genocide. Calling that a genocide. And having the gall to say that what they are experiencing deserves special dispensation from the ‘pause’ of refugee claims. A pause that is of course not a pause, but a policy of white supremacy. Of course I know this. I know the structural underpinnings that allow a colonial president to offer colonial refuge to colonizers. I know this. But what does it feel like to see THAT on the screen and know that it is political theater, know that it is not ‘real’ in any objective sense? Disbelief? Or at least, to see this and know it is not a real issuance of policy, but rather a distraction from the deportations and the disappearances, and the bombing of children in Gaza. Disbelief? A refusal to call the bombing of children a genocide, but an almost giddy pursuit of naming white people in Africa as subject to a genocide. Disbelief?