Libraries in the margins
01. A place of enunciation
Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: “In reality, who am I?”
Frantz Fanon. In Wretched of the Earth, 1968.
Textbooks say that all research begins with a trigger, a spark that ignites the fuse of interest.
My spark came at a somewhat diffuse moment in the past, when I asked myself who I was and where I stood.
That happened the day I got fed up with being “the poor one”, “the marginal”, “the one from below”, “the subaltern”, “the different one”, “the Other”, and the myriad of other labels I have received throughout the years. And all those that I haven’t received because I don’t meet the requirements to have them attached to my back, but which are floating all around me.
I got fed up, moreover, with being called “rebel”, “lefty”, “revolutionary” or “misfit” every time I complained about some of those words above. Or against all of them. And I got fed up with the damned argumentative fallacy, so deceitful and harmful, stating that if I complain, if I resist and if I criticize — among many other nice activities that I have carried out since I have consciousness, especially class consciousness — it is because I am a resentful bastard who could not have the privileges that “those at the top” have, whoever are those placed in such a curious position.
If I complain, resist, and criticize, it is because the System — that group of individuals who are said to hold the handle of a certain pan or to play with the strings of a few million puppets — is sending to hell the world in which I try to live. And, at the same time, it kept me, for as long as I can remember, relegated to “the margins”.
***
It was on those margins that I learned who I am.
I learned it through education (or the lack of it), exploitation, manipulation, discrimination, xenophobia and aporophobia, contempt for what is different, and all those small daily gestures and grimaces that allow one to become perfectly aware of where one stands.
With experience and over the years, I have discovered that “the margins” is a very wide space that extends far, far beyond this corner where I try to survive. The limits of that space are so, so distant that the people who live near them may seem invisible, inaudible, untraceable….
They may seem (or they may be) that to those who are not on the margins, to those who look in from the outside (or just look out). I know where they are, who they are, and what their struggles and their voices are, even if I am to be convinced that my margin is not as much of a margin as the one over there, and I am told about abyssal lines and shallow limits.
***
“The margins” is the answer that pops up when I ask myself where I am, when I ask myself from where I look at myself, and from where I see the rest of the world.
I find myself on the margins. Which is not the same as being “marginalized” or being “marginal”. I no longer want the labels that others put on me, nor am I going to “appropriate” any of them, a strategy used to get us to accept by hook or by crook what somebody else has foisted on us by force — especially when that “somebody else” neither carry nor appropriate any label at all.
If I am on the margins, it is because there is a “center”. Or an “up there” for those of us who are “down here”. And I get the feeling that this mental (or conceptual) image perpetuates and reproduces differences and hierarchies, and keeps us mentally far away, outside, and at the bottom of a bottomless pit.
That “center”, that “up there”, does not think of us except to “civilize” us or, to update the concept, to “develop” us. And to turn us into consumers, not only of their products but also of their ideas and values. We have been crushed so badly that nowadays we have an imperious need to imitate what is done in the “center” or “up there”, and an equally overwhelming need for approval. Are we worthy, are we “developed” enough, are we doing well, or are we still the lousy, starving, ignorant, good-for-nothing beasts we were always told we were?
The asymmetry of such a “relationship” (if that word can be used, which I honestly doubt), the dependency, the undisguised (but eternally denied, and even ridiculed) colonialism, the oppression, the discrimination, and all the other systemic violence, both epistemic and otherwise, is more than evident. And no, no sociologist, anthropologist, analyst, or researcher needs to come and tell us that. We have been living it forever.
Is there a way to balance the equation? I don’t know, I don’t think I have an answer to such a big, vital, old question. What I do feel is that the first step, a necessary and urgent one, is to begin to identify, point out, mark, answer, debate, reject and eliminate those speeches of dependence, those words used to keep us there where they want us to stay, those unseemly arguments and strategies….
The game is rigged so that we are the eternal losers. However, it is not a Manichean, black-and-white situation. There are many grays, there is room for counterpunching, and for independence, there are trenches and shelters. There is a margin.
Margins, in fact.
And from here, from these margins, perhaps we can contribute elements to understand, appreciate, and (re)construct our spaces, whatever they are called, wherever they are located.
Including, obviously, those which we still call (and I assume we will continue to call) libraries, archives, and museums.
