When one slapped one’s child in anger the recoil in the heart reverberated through heaven and became part of the pain of the universe.
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Concepción, one of two volcanoes which form the island Ometepe, Nicaragua last erupted on 16 May 2024. My father showed videos of black ash billowing from its vent; though it was impossible for me to comprehend the eruption’s magnitude, because I (still) had yet to see that part of home for myself.
My grandmother wanted to sell land she inherited before fleeing to Costa Rica, then Australia. I forgot what her reason was, I (still) cannot ask her fluently myself. I inferred; she felt an urgency to access its liquidity, clinging onto whatever market value her fraction of home was worth. She now sends money home to her siblings after receiving Centrelink payments.
The communists are taking the land and selling it, my father relayed to me; but as I pursued the social sciences, I became desensitised to the turbulences of diaspora rhetoric. Perhaps there was no fundamental difference to the way I thought, as I lost patience for a politics other than mine. Daniel Ortega wants to turn the country’s flag red and black; my grandmother insisted this news was true. Indeed, she (still) resists, ornamenting her flat with plateware and napkins in blue and white. They have, in fact, become her favourite colours. And in broken English, she speaks of parallels between our modern world and the Book of Revelation. I use these reflections as points of departure.
Critical theorists in the social sciences have maintained a nostalgic notion of praxis. There is ultimate desire for theory to materialise as practice; in Max Ajl’s words concerning Palestine, ‘intellectual production for national liberation’. I do not content this power of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial synthesis. But from the position of diaspora, there is only an artificial concept of liberation available through a normative, economic presupposition. This limitation extends to my father, and his mother. There is incoherence to liberation if the reciprocal constructs of race and gender are maintained in post-capitalist reality. Although we have not met such an economic occasion, movements toward it stumble from the incoherence.
Deconstructing a conservative ideology, formulated by nostalgia; fear of the future; instantaneous misinformation; a war-torn consciousness, requires attention beyond a class dialectic. Eradicating material contradictions could not, alone, constitute an authentic healing process. An intersectional proposition must address the alignment of self to foreign values when forced into a new condition of life. If we maintain that theory only finds purpose when our lives put it into motion, then, (in Judith Butler’s words) our precarious bodies demarcate this conjuncture. The body as ontology is a social phenomenon; maintaining Butler’s thesis, being vulnerable by definition.
Nicaraguan socialist revolution—which overthrew the intergenerational Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and prompted United States (para)military interference until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—collateralised Nicaraguan bodies; into what this period denotes as proxy. My matrilineal family of a separate continent, to whom I owe my surname Nguyễn, shared this conditioning. In both spheres, my people warded off puppet regimes through guerrilla resistance. But the consciences of my grandparents from either side are caught in a contradictory American–sentimentalism paradigm, despite being violently displaced by that state. Perhaps only with retrospect can I identify, thus critique, the artificially sequenced; propagandised defences of America in their logic; given that war has lived through me just discursively.
As I gather that life is precarious, the very circumstance which induces my Abuelita’s fear of the colours red and black, thus her assurance in blue and white, is vulnerability. The condition of resistance is vulnerability at its climax; lives become wielded by an ideology dependent on an accurate self-conceptualisation—aware of bodies as threatened from returning whence they came—tying purpose into the lands called home. She does not fear communism, she fears a loss of self, through a loss of space and memory—she fears non-existence.
Maintaining Butler’s thesis, these contemplations circulate around a notion of ‘grievability’ in context of war. When existing bodies; a person’s essence; enter the oppressive transition into collateral, we (observers of war) learn to differentiate. As Butler writes, “An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.” So, by accepting the epistemology of nationalism at this limitation, lives are not just variably grievable in a discursive sense. Rather, “we are talking about affective responses that are highly regulated by regimes of power and sometimes subject to explicit censorship.”
My Abuelita evidences this synthesis; a life’s grievability is determined by a material distribution of power, which reinforces itself through violence. Here, we observe the inner logic afforded to, what Gayatri Spivak called the ‘subaltern’, in response to the systematic reduction of their bodies as collateral. The framing of Nicaraguan independence today as communist thus evil, attempts to reconfigure the historical placement of Nicaraguan people from collateral; as proxy; towards the centre of an Americanised sympathy–paradigm. Because what unfolds before me, as I had witnessed Concepción erupt not through an English-speaking media, but a WhatsApp message transmitted from Ometepe—what is conferred onto me as I learn of the United States’ contempt towards public international law in Nicaragua v. United States (1984)—are mounds of evidence which place Nicaraguan people at the periphery of the grievable paradigm; beyond such scope, their lives were indeed non-existent.
If I am to contribute towards a theory for which an authentic healing process of intergenerational war–trauma occurs, then I must reiterate the inter-situational condition of her fear; anti-colonial notions require cross-reference. Thus, I consider Edward Said’s critique of Zionism’s collateralisation of Palestinians resonant with Butler’s framing: “Epistemologically the name of, and of course the very presence of bodies, in Palestine are—because Palestine carries so heavy an imaginative and doctrinal freight—transmuted from a reality into a nonreality, from a presence into an absence.” To accomplish the praxis of ‘national liberation’, diasporic bodies must re appear into the realm of existence; of vulnerability, and our role as later generations is to reconfigure this ‘ontology of the body’ into one always critical of neo-colonial state powers and their synthetic narratives of restoring old nationalisms.
What I have proposed is a revised deconstruction of ‘knowledge production for national liberation’, whereby the reactionary placement of oppressed (subaltern) self within conservatism is explained as traumatic (causation). Basing this inquiry on the epistemology of ‘grievability’, in an ontological context of the body as a ‘social phenomenon’; ‘vulnerable by definition’, a fear of communism, thus, one’s diasporic association with a nonsensical conservative nationalism, is deduced from the more embedded traumatisation of the war-torn body as collateralised. If this psychoanalytic framework is employed, our (we, children of diaspora) collective movements towards ‘national liberation’ include a necessary healing process in local acts of praxis. The passive nostalgia for an artificially autonomous nation—a distant place feared of return—becomes reconfigured, through an authentic process of resistance against our deduction into collateral by colonial actors. Here, we formulate a theory of ‘national liberation’ with the diaspora assured of an active position.
