THE FUNAMBULIST Politics of Space and Bodies

UNMAPPING BLACK
TEMPORALITIES
RASHEEDAH PHILLIPS

ON WAITING
SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI

CLOCK TOWERS IN
IRELAND AND PALESTINE
EMILY JACIR

COLONIAL SPACE-TIME
MERYEM-BAHIA ARFAOUI

ASTROLABES IN DJIBOUTI
NASRA ABDULLAHI & MIRIAM HILLAWI ABRAHAM

THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT’S

PARTITION AS A SONIC EVENT
SYMA TARIQ

MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY
MICHAEL ROTHBERG

EXTRAORTHOGRAPHICS
KEVIN BERNARD MOULTRIE DAYE

COVER BY BLACK QUANTUM FUTURISM

ARCHITECTURE & ANTI-BLACKNESS TIMELINE BY WAI THINK TANK

SHORT STORY BY SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI

NEWS FROM THE FRONTS ABOUT
SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE (SOPHIA AZEB), THE COLOMBIAN UPRISING (EDNA MARTINEZ),
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF EELAM (JEYAVISHNI FRANCIS JEYARATNAM & SIMON-PIERRE COFTIER)

36 /// July-August 2021

THEY HAVE CLOCKS,

WE HAVE TIME
WELCOME

BEHIND THE SCENES

Dear subscribers and readers,

I hope that you are all well, despite some more difficult
months we just experienced, in particular for our friends
in India, Colombia, and Palestine.

This 36th issue is finishing the sixth year of publication

of The Funambulist magazine: six years during which
we published a new issue every two months (first by
myself, then joined by a small team), while managing
the logistic, economic, and communication aspects
of such an endeavor. I still take a ridiculous amount of
pleasure doing this every day, but as another crucial
project will require a lot of my time at home, I will take a
parental leave during the elaboration of the next issue THE FUNAMBULIST Politics of Space and Bodies

of the magazine, before coming back if you’ll still have

me. You may think that you will, but this is before I tell
you that the guest editor-in-chief for this next issue will
be Zoé Samudzi! You still want me back?!
UNMAPPING BLACK
TEMPORALITIES
RASHEEDAH PHILLIPS

I am deeply grateful to The Funambulist’s past and ON WAITING

SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI

present team who will take care of the weekly op- CLOCK TOWERS IN
IRELAND AND PALESTINE
EMILY JACIR

erations, as well as assist Zoé in the making of this COLONIAL SPACE-TIME

MERYEM-BAHIA ARFAOUI

ASTROLABES IN DJIBOUTI
September-October issue, which will assuredly be an NASRA ABDULLAHI & MIRIAM HILLAWI ABRAHAM

THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT’S

PARTITION AS A SONIC EVENT
amazing one. SYMA TARIQ

MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY
MICHAEL ROTHBERG

EXTRAORTHOGRAPHICS
KEVIN BERNARD MOULTRIE DAYE

In other news, this past couple of months have seen COVER BY BLACK QUANTUM FUTURISM
ARCHITECTURE & ANTI-BLACKNESS TIMELINE BY WAI THINK TANK

SHORT STORY BY SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI

The Funambulist initiate something that could poten- NEWS FROM THE FRONTS ABOUT
SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE (SOPHIA AZEB), THE COLOMBIAN UPRISING (EDNA MARTINEZ),
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF EELAM (JEYAVISHNI FRANCIS JEYARATNAM & SIMON-PIERRE COFTIER)

36 /// July-August 2021

tially affect what we do for good and for the better!
We have indeed placed our 13 out-of-print issues (see
which ones on this issue’s last page) in open access —
including the most recent one, Decolonial Ecologies, as
it sold out within weeks of its release — so that every-
one would get access to it. As we told our subscribers
by writing to them, this is only something we’re able
to do thanks to their support. If this economic support
were to continue with this system in place, we would
fully commit to place each of our next out-of-print is-
sues — several are currently low in stock — in open
access. Once again, I want to say how grateful I am to
these 2,200 (and counting) subscribers, as well as our
punctual readers for being the reason we are able to do
what we do.
I wish you a very pleasurable and inspired summery (for
some), wintery (for others) read!
Léopold Lambert
Paris, on June 18, 2021.
THEY HAVE CLOCKS,
WE HAVE TIME
THE ISSUE’S COVER
EXPLAINED
For an issue dedicated to time, it was difficult to use
anyone but Black Quantum Futurism’s artwork on the
cover, given how much we owe Rasheedah Phillips
and BQF the bases of everything we know about time
and power (read Léopold’s introduction to this issue to
know more). This mixed media collage is entitled Break-
ing the Future Horizon (2018) and is part of the Tempo-
ral Disruptors series. As Rasheedah Phillips explains,
“The Temporal Disruptors is a collection of watches
inspired by and named for the contributions of Black
women scientists, healers, and inventors. The watches
are specially re-crafted by Black Quantum Futurism to
embody the temporal features of Black womanist and
Black quantum futurist time(s).”
 YEARNING FOR REAL
NEWS FROM
THE FRONTS
DEMOCRACY IN COLOMBIA
EDNA MARTINEZ
TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY AMANDA CHARTIER CHAMORRO
El Elegido (The chosen
one). / Artwork by
Edna Martinez (2007) Since April 28, 2021, the Colombian people has
depicting infamous
Colombian president
risen and undertaken a national strike against the
Alvaro Uribe Vélez. Duque’s administration’s neoliberal drastic poli-
cies and its fragilization of the 2016 Peace Accords.
The revolts are being met with extreme violence, as
Edna Martinez tells us in this text.
The Republic of Colombia was founded in 1810. It has
today approximately 50 million inhabitants, and its area
is three times the size of Germany. Because of its loca-
tion between the northern and southern countries of the
American continent, Colombia is of great geopolitical
importance. Its multicultural population is the result of
long, continuous and violent historical processes: expro-
priated Indigenous peoples, European influence mainly
from colonizing Spain, people of African origin brought
as slave labor, and settled mainly on the country’s coasts
2 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
and ports, moreover waves of migration from the Middle
East in search of refuge. All of them have left their mark
on the Colombian population of today.
At its inception, the construction of the Colombian na-
tion-State was influenced by liberal ideas that advocated
the pacification of the population to impose economic
and political structures serving the interests of a minori-
ty, elitist and exclusionary class, historically composed
of families of European descendants. Colombia’s history
has been marked by civil wars in which the opposition,
mostly represented by Indigenous and Afro-Colombian
communities, has been oppressed and forgotten by
the State. In fact, until 30 years ago, Indigenous and Af-
ro-Colombian communities were still politically, socially,
and legally invisible. It was not until the 1991 Constitution
that the State was obliged to include these communities
and their fundamental rights, such as the right to self-de-
termination, as part of the national project while recog-
nizing the enormous cultural and social values they bear.
It is worth taking a close look at the contemporary na-
tional political landscape, which implies grasping the
current Constitution, globalization, and the processes of
transnationalization as fundamental points of reference.
It is imperative to understand the current configurations
inherent to the construction, not without tensions and re-
sistance, of a “modern democratic State.”
On April 28, 2021, amid a spike in Coronavirus infections,
I was in the city where I grew up, Cartagena de Indias,
when the peaceful National Strike led to the largest na-
tionwide protests in the last 70 years. Since that day and
in the little more than a month of daily demonstrations in
the streets, the finance minister, the chancellor, and the
High Commissioner for Peace have resigned. The trigger
for this still ongoing protest was the government’s draft
ironically named Ley de Solidaridad Sostenible (Sustain-
able Solidarity Law) presented to Congress. In reality, it
is a tax reform that mainly aimed to raise additional COP
23 trillion (around USD 6.3 billion) to cover the country’s
expenditure on social programs due to Covid-19. The
most controversial aspect of this draft — aside from its
imposition during a pandemic that has considerably in-
creased the poverty rate of the country (42.5% in 2020)
and to which no short-term solution is seen — is the in-
tention to reduce the minimum amount to declare taxes:
from 2022, people with an income of more than COP 2.4
million per month (about USD 663) would have to de-
clare income taxes. The trade and labor unions immedi-
ately rejected this measure since the minimum monthly
wage is equivalent to USD 248. This measure would also
tax fundamental consumer goods and funeral services,
among others, amid a period of the global health crisis
that has hit average citizens hard. By doing so, the gov-
ernment demonstrated once again its ignorance about
the reality and the needs of the people.
One month after the protests began, on May 28, 2021,
the NGO Temblores reported the following numbers:
1,133 victims of physical violence, 43 homicides alleged-
ly committed by the security forces, 1,445 house arrests
without warrants against demonstrators, 648 violent inter-
ventions in the framework of peaceful protests, 47 victims
of ocular aggressions, 175 cases of gunshots, 22 cases
of sexual violence, and six victims of gender-based vi-
olence. In the city of Cali, the epicenter of the protests,
mobilizations of Indigenous people, the large Afro-Co-
lombian population, and peasant farmers from the north
of Cauca and the south of the country have converged.
It is precisely here, where the protests have been most
concentrated, that the president decided to carry out a
maximum military deployment. The numbers of victims
varies according to the reporting entity, but the magni-
tude of abuses against demonstrators, journalists, and
civilians, in general, is terrifying. Recorded videos circu-
lating on social networks show not only security forces,
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
but also civilians shooting weapons at other civilians in
the presence of the police. This has generated great dis-
tress and indignation of great national and international
resonance, leading to the request for an immediate visit
by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IA-
CHR). Nevertheless, at the time I write these lines (June
1, 2021), this visit has not taken place because the Co-
lombian government has not allowed it.
The response of Ivan Duque’s government was to be ex-
pected; he came to power as president promoting his
attachment to the neoliberal and far right-wing political
project of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, former president between
2002 and 2010, and senator of the Congress until last
year. Uribe represents an unprecedented political phe-
nomenon in Colombia: he keeps broad popular support
despite several cases of corruption, human rights viola-
tions, stigmatization of the opposition, illegal wiretapping
of the Colombian Supreme Court of Justice, links with “THE MAIN SLOGAN OF
illegal groups such as paramilitaries and drug traffick- URIBE’S POLICY HAS
BEEN THE SEGURIDAD
ers, extrajudicial executions as the scandal of the “falses DEMOCRÁTICA (DEM-
positives” — a series of murders of civilians by military OCRATIC SECURITY),
WHICH EMERGED
forces, to be presented to the authorities and to the FROM THE PLAN
public opinion as guerrilla-members killed in combat — COLOMBIA (1999), A BI-
LATERAL AGREEMENT
among other crimes.
BETWEEN COLOMBIA
AND THE UNITED
STATES TO FUEL THE
The main slogan of Uribe’s policy has been the Seguri-
INTERNATIONAL WAR
dad Democrática (Democratic Security), which emerged ON TERRORISM.”
from the Plan Colombia (1999), a bilateral agreement be-
tween Colombia and the United States to fuel the inter-
national war on terrorism. Democratic Security is based
on the idea of “security for sovereignty” that considers
terrorism as an existential and State problem, thus justi-
fying the annihilation of any suspects threatening that se-
curity. This national policy aggravated the serious human
rights crisis and consolidated an authoritarian regime,
which, far from ending the internal conflict, responsable
for a long history of violence, and far from stopping drug
traffic or illegal groups, has leveraged and reinforced the
collaboration between military forces and paramilitary
groups. The demobilization of the latter occurred with
“IN THE CITY OF CALI,
the State’s support and pardon, in exchange for informa- THE EPICENTER
tion or extradition to the United States. In this regard, it is OF THE PROTESTS,
MOBILIZATIONS OF
worthy to remember Operation Orion (2002) when Presi- INDIGENOUS PEOPLE,
dent Uribe — after only two months in office — ordered a THE LARGE AFRO-CO-
LOMBIAN POPULA-
state of commotion and a military offensive in Medellín to
TION, AND PEASANT
attack the guerrillas supposedly established in the city’s FARMERS FROM THE
comunas (slums). This offensive, operated by the army, NORTH OF CAUCA
AND THE SOUTH OF
police, air force, and paramilitary groups, resulted in a THE COUNTRY HAVE
crossfire that left hundreds wounded, civilians tortured, CONVERGED.”
arbitrary detentions, and established the control of para-
militaries groups in the area.
During the Juan Manuel Santos administration, the
Colombian State and guerrilla organization the Revo-
lutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed in
2016 a historic peace agreement on which all hopes
were put for ending the violence in the country. This
agreement included specific initiatives to, among oth-
ers, prevent crimes against human rights defenders.
3

However, Human Rights Watch has stated Colombia as
“INDEPENDENT
MEDIA SPEAK OUT the country in Latin America with the highest number of
DESPITE CENSOR- human rights defenders executed (more than 450, since
SHIP, AND IN DOING
SO BUILD NETWORKS
2016), among which Indigenous leaders represent a
OF SOLIDARITY WITH disproportionately high percentage. Indeed, accord-
TRANSNATIONAL
ing to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights
STRUGGLES AND
TRANSNATIONAL (OHCHR), approximately 16% of all human rights de-
RESISTANCE PRO-
fenders assassinated since 2016 were Indigenous lead-
CESSES.”
ers, when only 4.4% of Colombia’s current population is
Indigenous. The armed conflict that takes place mainly
in rural areas of the country and ancestral territories of
Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities has re-
sulted in forced displacement, which, in turn, generates
a complex process of relocation and deterritorialization.
However, these processes are not new; they date back
to the conquest and the colony.
During the 20th century, there were two moments in
which social and political violence has emerged with
greater intensity: on the one hand, the period known as
La Violencia (The Violence) in the middle of the centu-
ry, characterized by armed confrontations between the
liberal and conservative parties and stressed by the as-
sassination of the political leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán in
1948; on the other hand, the wave of violence that re-
emerged in the mid-1980s and extends to the present
day. In both moments, the number of deaths and human
rights violations has been indescribably elevated.
Unfortunately, in a country with very high rates of impu-
nity, the numbers released by Temblores on May 28,
2021 do not surprise us. The shadow of Uribe is still
present; although the protests have managed to over-
throw the draft of the so-called “Sustainable Solidarity
Law,” as well as the health and education reforms, they
“THE SHADOW OF go beyond and reveal the indignation, which has been
URIBE IS STILL
PRESENT; ALTHOUGH
intensified by the urgency of defending the fundamental
THE PROTESTS HAVE rights enshrined in the Constitution, such as the rights to
MANAGED TO OVER-
protest, to life, and land.
THROW THE DRAFT
OF THE SO-CALLED
“SUSTAINABLE
It is the first time in history that extremely violent meth-
SOLIDARITY LAW,” AS
WELL AS THE HEALTH ods by the State, so far carried out with impunity in rural
AND EDUCATION areas, have been perpetrated in the cities and recorded
REFORMS, THEY GO
BEYOND AND REVEAL and spread through live videos or influencer’s channels.
THE INDIGNATION...” The information about current protests, held in a country
where the right to free expression has been threatened
for decades, is circulating at a national and international
level. Especially now, facing the distressing nature of the
circulating videos and the present crisis in the country,
the media are putting internationally the spotlight on Co-
lombia. They support and send messages of encour-
agement and solidarity to the people who are gather-
ing vehemently and creating meeting spaces (such as
4 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
ON SOLIDARITY, IN SOLIDARITY
NEWS FROM
THE FRONTS
SOPHIA AZEB
Puerto Resistencia) which, now more than ever, are an
oasis in the middle of this dystopia.
There is a widespread interest in coming out of the numb-
ness in which Colombia’s traditional media have kept the
population in complicity with the government. Indepen-
dent media speak out despite censorship, and in doing
so build networks of solidarity with transnational struggles
and transnational resistance processes. For example, on
May 22, I curated a 24-hour lineup, broadcast through RA-
DIO ALHARA (Palestine), during which artists, musicians,
and DJs expressed solidarity from Colombia to Palestine.
This initiative was born as a call for international support to
the Palestinian people, who experience dynamics of hu-
man rights violations very similar to ours. As in Colombia,
the crimes against Palestinians are deeply rooted in the
neoliberal colonizing expansion project disrespecting hu-
man rights, subjugating citizens to the power of others, not
recognizing ancestral values, and prioritizing the develop-
ment of mega-projects by various transnational compa-
nies with interests in the exploitation of the region’s natural
and mineral resources.
Colombia’s cities are densely populated, partially due to
the eight million displaced people violently forced to leave
their homelands because of the internal conflict. Our de-
mocracy doesn’t guarantee the full exercise of the funda-
mental rights of communities; on the contrary, the State
continues to “justify” its “democracy” according to the
terms of Democratic Security. After so many days of road
Protest in solidarity
blockades and confrontations between protesters and the
with Palestine in
security forces, people are tired; but we must continue New York on May 13, When thinking of solidarity, in particular when it comes Somewhat in awe, he anxiously explained that he is Pales-
to resist and turn this historic moment, embodied in the 2021. / Photo by Luigi
to Black and Palestinian solidarities (but not exclusive- tinian, but he had to get to work, and so he could not come
Morris.
unprecedented demonstrations at a national level, into an ly), Sophia Azeb is always someone we want to hear with us. I assured him: “Don’t worry, my friend. We will go for
opportunity allowing active citizens to exercise democracy from. Here is a small text we commission from her after you too.” His eyes welled up. Then he grinned.
from democracy itself. Otherwise, we will succumb and these few months of demonstration of worldwide soli-
continue to be immersed not in “hundred years of soli- darity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. As thousands of Chicagoans (and many of our suburban
tude” — to quote the title of Gabriel García Márquez — but relatives) marched down State Street that same afternoon,
in the two hundred years of State neglect that have char- “I walk a street where no one is walking. I remember that two women in hijabs — either tourists or distant locals, who
acterized our reality since the “independence” of 1810. before, I had walked a street no one had walked. And I in either case had stumbled upon a massive demonstration
remember that someone who was not with me had said...” by happenstance — were delighted, cheering us on. A third
Fortunately, we are not alone any more. The interest of Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, 1987. woman with them was comparatively stark in her silence
an awakening youth to take responsibility for our political and stillness, until I noticed she was quietly crying and shak-
processes and history seems, finally, to be crystallizing As I waited for a train to downtown Chicago this past May ing her head in wonder. She found herself there with us too.
into the long-awaited opportunity to transform a country 16, an Arab man gazed wide-eyed at the dozens of peo-
so tormented by State violence. ■ ple donning keffiyehs who surrounded him on the platform. I think a lot about these moments, these flutters of slow real-
He turned to ask me: “Do you know what this means?” ization and recognition, common to any who has made the
Edna Martinez was born in Colombia and lives and gestured toward my own red-and-white-checked kef- decision to congregate with others to issue the call and de-
between Berlin and Cartagena de Indias. She is a fiyeh, which had been my late grandfather’s, and which I mand for justice: for Palestine, for Black lives, for Indigenous
photographer and a media artist who explores au- resolvedly (secretly) determined to look after soon after he sovereignty, for the abolition of policing, prisons, imperial
tobiographical routes engaging with ideas of iden- had passed. I informed the man that these people on the wars, and imperial borders. I think about how all people
tity, migration, displacement, and resistance. She platform, like myself, were all going to raise our voices to- who endure the violence of these injustices can feel abso-
is also a DJ, curator, and radio host. gether for Gaza, for Palestine, and for Palestinian liberation. lutely and totally alone and helpless in their pain, even when
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 5
 that pain (and the catastrophes we bear) are deliberately
and collectively distributed among us, and sometimes by
us. “Maybe our solidarity marches for Palestine, in Chicago
and London and Amman and Khartoum and everywhere
“IT IS NOT THE OVER-
LAPPING CONDI-
we are and everywhere we wish to be, won’t achieve any
TIONS AND EFFECTS immediate relief, any tangible victories,” I think. That help-
OF CATASTROPHE
lessness emerges as often from burnout as it does to in-
THAT WILL DRIVE US
TO FULLY RECOG- spire the initial drive to action. But with each grand, ebullient,
NIZE ONE ANOTHER,
tense, emotional meeting, we also open up the world a little
BUT INSTEAD OUR
STEADFAST JOURNEY for one another. We are able to prove to ourselves: we are
TO END IT.” not alone. We have come together here for you too.
Within the spectacle of the manif, the march, the protest, the
rally: there are always new faces, new and giddy and moved
and feeling impossibly small, lost within a sea of other peo-
ple, some familiar and many more having been temporarily
estranged, but who are once more present and intentional
and deliberate in building relation again. The anonymity we
feel upon wading into that sea quickly fades: each chant
picked up and echoed, each jostle from the bodies of the
people around you followed by a curt nod or quick smile of
apology and recognition, an invitation to take up space in
this project of taking back space from the State, the police,
the settler. Our solidarity in these moments is brief and affec-
tive, often uneven and just as often insufficient, and yet still
marks a step on the road towards a ceaseless practice of
revolutionary commitment that Aimé Césaire mused must
be always “enriched by all that is particular.” A solidarity of
particulars, rather than sameness, is comprised of much
more than these moments of and opportunities for mutual
recognition in the thrum of a demonstration or a picket line
or a barricade. Yet, still, these moments are not solely sym-
“HOW WE THINK bolic of the work required to forge the road ahead. Coming
OF OURSELVES AS together, moving together, builds towards the currents that
PALESTINIANS, IN
THE EFFORT TO collide to swell the crashing waves of the overlapping and
ANALOGIZE OUR particular struggles that will result in our total and collective
OWN MOVEMENT FOR
LIBERATION, HAS
liberation. All of us, together: “none of us are free until all of
SOMETIMES COME us are,” as the saying (and I suppose, Emma Lazarus) goes.
AT THE COST OF
RECOGNIZING OUR
MULTIPLICITY AND In response to the Twitter hashtag, ‫ةرح_اهنأك_درغ‬#, or the call
THE UNEVENNESS
to tweet as though Palestine is (and we are) free, Palestin-
OF THE STAKES OF
THE WORLDMAKING ians from every curve of this Earth set the scenes not only of
EMANCIPATORY their return, but also their ability to move. To pick an orange
PROJECTS OCCUR-
RING SIMULTANEOUS- from a tree in Jaffa. To soak in the sea in Gaza. To watch
LY, IN OTHER SPACES the sunset in Haifa. To place our grandmothers’ keys in the
AND IN OTHER WAYS”
locks of our homes in Lifta, Ramleh, Nablus, Akka, Safad.
To take a train, a bus, a car, a ferry, from place to place, with-
out checkpoints, without papers, without pause. To move
from memory to living memory, breathing the lifeworlds we
have inherited back into where they belong and where they
will find their fellows once more and thrive from it.
These itineraries, assembled from future narratives and ar-
chives of the past, moved me too. With my students, I have
6 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
always asked us to imagine decolonization as the promise
of a future that colonized peoples are imagining together
in the midst of anticolonial struggle. Decolonization is that
phenomenon that Frantz Fanon positioned as “a program
of complete disorder” that evolves with us, through us. De-
colonization is movement, it keeps us in motion, it is collec-
tive and collaborative, and it is a horizon always in sight of
our commitments to the liberation of one another, of all of us
together. “The last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonial
solidarity is a form of relation that takes shape through our
shared movement. It is not the overlapping conditions and
effects of catastrophe that will drive us to fully recognize one
another, but instead our steadfast journey to end it. Solidari-
ty is not made from analogy, though it may often begin that
way. Solidarity endures from total commitment.
The solidarities we build and enact are not inevitable. To
assume any political coherence among the colonized re-
flects a desire for stasis of our political thought and liber-
atory action. We are not static, unmoving. We are in mo-
tion. Our commitments to one another (within and beyond
the movement for Palestinian liberation) may reveal many
more fissures than similarities. These commitments should
reveal more fissures than similarities. These impasses are
generative. If we move within and explore the contours of
these impasses, we more effectively counter and compli-
cate the stagnancy of sameness as constructing the bonds
between us: that hollow impulse of analogy.
Black and Palestinian and Black Palestinian solidarity ef-
forts, for instance, are living and evolving and recurring
practices of freedom making. They are perpetually in mo-
tion, not yet fully realized, and insist on the right of refusal to
be fully recognizable. Mutual recognition within Black and
Palestinian and Black Palestinian solidarity work refuses to
be intelligible by way of a photograph or a story featuring
racial distinction and shared endurance of violence as ev-
idence of its reality: this is the discourse of analogy, and it
is violence too. The limits of analogy are not solely interper-
sonal, not only intracommunal, nor wholly structural: the lim-
its are in the very language we speak, in the very ways we
have deputized ourselves to articulate and render legible
our Palestinianness. How we think of ourselves as Palestin-
ians, in the effort to analogize our own movement for liber-
ation, has sometimes come at the cost of recognizing our
multiplicity and the unevenness of the stakes of the world-
making emancipatory projects occurring simultaneously, in
other spaces and in other ways. The systems of power we
seek to dismantle are capillary, not arterial. So too are we
and our methods of undoing them.
An essential task in our striving for solidarity must then take
place within the impasses among Palestinians ourselves; a
broadening sense of how we are Palestinian, a commitment
to renewing our own bonds without flattening our particular-
ities, and a devotion to moving in many directions at once.
And so in our resistances, past and present and future,
movement functions as both a beacon of and as the site(s)
of struggle. The Great March of Return began on Land
Day, March 30, 2018, and was intended to proceed weekly
until Nakba Day, on May 15. But Gazans could not stop
moving toward the artificial boundary that kept them from
their homes and their relations. The edifice of the siege
and the occupation must be demolished. The movement
continued on for 18 months, and Palestinians from Haifa
to Bethlehem and Ramallah moved with them. Only a few
weeks ago, hundreds of Palestinians from occupied 1948
territories disembarked their cars and buses, having been
blocked by Israeli authorities, determined to walk their way
into Jerusalem in spite of the State. To spite the State!
Are these solidarity marches too? Even when we (Palestin-
ians) come together for ourselves (Palestinians) upon our
own land (Palestine)? I think so. For the movement to combat
the forced expulsion of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah,
and all that has followed, has firmly demonstrated that a cen-
tral aspect of our resistance is both a burden and a gift: the
demand to continuously recommit ourselves to ourselves.
The demand to find a way of moving toward liberation togeth-
er, without fear of needing to take a few steps back.
We must always move in solidarity with ourselves too. It
had not left us, our commitments to one another, as Pales-
tinians, but it had been, and continues to be, an ongoing
struggle to maintain those commitments in the face of the
myriad geographic and structural fractures imposed upon
us, within us. The occupation does not only dispossess us
of our homes, our land, our olive trees and orange groves,
but also our own ability to see and to recognize one
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
Examples of tweets
envisioning a future
free Palestine under
the hashtag ‫_درغ‬
‫ةرح_اهنأك‬# including
one from Funambu-
list contributor Jehan
Bseiso (June 2021).
another, within Palestine and across the diaspora. We are “THE COHESION OF
weighed down with the burden of naming ourselves each OUR STRUGGLE IS
NOT NEW, AS THE
and every day: that burden is a gift too. The cohesion of
TENDRILS OF THE GEN-
our struggle is not new, as the tendrils of the General Strike ERAL STRIKE OF 1936
of 1936 snaking across time to the Palestinian general SNAKING ACROSS TIME
TO THE PALESTINIAN
strike of this year reminds us, but the shadow of compla- GENERAL STRIKE OF
cency, of helplessness, of feeling so utterly alone (alone THIS YEAR REMINDS
US, BUT THE SHADOW
together, alone apart) continuously looms. OF COMPLACENCY,
OF HELPLESSNESS,
OF FEELING SO UT-
I wrote once in the pages of The Funambulist that “we are, TERLY ALONE (ALONE
after all, always in the process of becoming Palestinians.” TOGETHER, ALONE
APART) CONTINUOUSLY
The question for me then was “who will we be when we
LOOMS.”
are free?” We have, in these tender flutters and breaths and
moments of recognition, the profound assurance of our
own futurity and freedom, and of our future selves too. The
pauses and the breaks within and between these moments
in which we reflect one another do not constitute distortions,
but reorientations. In the mirror of the march in the square in
the city in the land along the sea, these reorientations pro-
voke within us alternative ways of recognizing one another,
and other paths and bridges across which to move. The
mirror reflects not that we share an image, but that we reflect
and capture and transmit light. In that fragmenting light, we
see one another, move with one another: not alone, but to-
gether. We have come together here for you too. ■
Sophia Azeb is an assistant professor of Black
studies in the Department of English Language and
Literature at the University of Chicago. Her current
book project, “Another Country: Constellations of
Blackness in Afro-Arab Cultural Expression,” exam-
ines how Blackness and Black identity is variously
translated, mobilized, circulated, and contested by
African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Af-
ro-Arab cultural and political figures across North
Africa and Europe in the 20th century.
7
NEWS FROM NATIONAL MUSEUM OF EELAM:
THE FRONTS
THE DIASPORIC (HI)STORIES OF
EVERYDAY TAMIL OBJECTS
After the defeat of the guerrillas in 2009, the three-de- With its inventory of objects photographed on a black
cade-war ruins are being gradually erased. The Sinha- background, in the manner of archaeological or ethno-
JEYAVISHNI FRANCIS JEYARATNAM lese power continues its policy of predation and en- graphic treasures, the National Museum of Eelam em-

& SIMON-PIERRE COFTIER deavors to eradicate every trace of Eelam, to make the
memory of the struggle disappear. Far from the shores
of the Indian Ocean, Eelam persists within the diaspo-
ra, as if each refugee had taken away a tiny fragment
of it in exile. From Paris to Oslo, from Zurich to Toronto,
an extremely dense network of associations has been
forged in a vast transnational structure. Shops, tem-
ples, cinemas, sports clubs and Tamil cultural centers
are open in cities where the diaspora lives. Children
can learn the language and culture of their elders in
schools with unified curricula and examinations. Ev-
erywhere, attention is being made in rebuilding a Tamil
social and cultural framework.
Though I am part of this diaspora, I grew up on the fring-
es of this community. As a child, I did not identify myself
with the red flag with a tiger. The songs to the glory of our
“Uncles the Tigers” did not make me vibrate. And while
a climate of suspicion prevailed among refugees in the
early 1990s — mistrust fuelled by fratricidal fights be-
tween armed groups on the island — my parents limited
interactions with other refugees. My attachment to Tamil
culture was expressed almost exclusively in the family
sphere. It was in 2009, when I took part in the demon-
Left. Poster (Paris): Poster plastered on the strations against the massacres of civilians perpetrated
walls of the 10th arrondissement in Paris in
tribute to Thileepan, an emblematic figure of the
at the time by the Sri Lankan army, that I became aware
independent Tamil movement, who died after a
Which objects constitute the collection of a national museum in exile? How can that I belonged to a people. We were many to share the
hunger strike in 1987. Right. Statuettes of Ga- diasporic stories express more than history books will ever be able to? These ques- same destiny, the same indignation. Placards, slogans
nesh (La Courneuve): Statuettes of Ganesh
tions are beautifully expressed by Jeyavishni Francis Jeyaratnam and Simon-Pierre and megaphones. Tamil identity confined to my private
given to the guests at the wedding ceremony
of Santhia and Viknesh, celebrated on May 17, Coftier’s project National Museum of Eelam in homage to the Tamil diaspora. sphere burst into the public space and asserted itself on
2018 at the temple located in La Courneuve.
a political ground.
A plastic statuette made in India, a handful of earth in a packet, a used toy. These are the
sorts of objects that make up the collection of the National Museum of Eelam — banal This awareness which is at the origin of the National
and without any market value. Combined with a brief narrative, each object tells the story Museum of Eelam, was definitively obvious to me when
of a people torn from their land and scattered in the metropolises of the five continents. A I returned to my homeland 30 years later. I found my
people whose aspirations, memory and identity have been trampled. These people are childhood house along with many sensations: the smell
“I WAS BORN IN the Tamils of Sri Lanka. This lost land is Eelam. of fruits fallen to the ground, the taste of the water from
JAFFNA IN THE
EARLY 1980S the well, the sound of the temple bells.
WHEN THE YOUTH I first heard the word Eelam in the 1990s. I had just arrived in France. The country at war
FROM THE TAMIL
that my mother, my brother and I had left, was called Sri Lanka, or Ceylon. I was born in But the joy of discovering a world in accordance with
MINORITY TOOK UP
ARMS AGAINST THE Jaffna in the early 1980s when the youth from the Tamil minority took up arms against the my memories was followed by a feeling of uneasiness:
DISCRIMINATORY discriminatory policies and the violence perpetrated by the central government. Since the
POLICIES AND THE VI- what connects me today to that territory? To what extent
withdrawal of the British in 1948, the Sri Lankan State established itself as a Sinhalese and is that distant land part of my identity? Faced with the
OLENCE PERPETRAT-
ED BY THE CENTRAL Buddhist nation, excluding minorities from power. While the Tamil Tigers guerrillas (LTTE) desolate landscape of the Jaffna lagoon, I realized that
GOVERNMENT.”
laid the foundations of an independent state in the North and the East, I left my hometown the answers are to be found elsewhere, within the dias-
for India and then France. Four years passed between my departure from Jaffna and my pora, in this huge archipelago connected across seas
arrival at Charles-de-Gaulle airport. Hundreds of thousands of us fled combat zones and and borders. What we are trying to capture with the proj-
the climate of terror. By the end of the conflict, about a third of the Tamil population lived ect of the National Museum of Eelam is this multiple and
abroad. The National Museum of Eelam explores this vast diaspora’s memory. evanescent territory.
braces the form of the museum institution, appropriates
its codes, but abandons the exceptional in favor of the
ordinary. Thus, it takes the opposing view of the origi-
nal function of a national museum, an institution at the
service of a power seeking to entrench its authority in
the distant past, exalting the purity and authenticity of
an exclusive cultural heritage. Exploring Tamil diaspora
identity, the National Museum of Eelam does not expose
a 1,000 year-old tradition or the traces of a glorious past
but, rather, the banality of the most trivial everyday ges-
tures. In this way, it stands out from the war-centered
representations of Tamil identity that dominate the dias-
pora public space. Putting to one side military uniforms,
martyrs’ cults and flags, it proposes another imagina- “THE OBJECTS FROM
THE NATIONAL MUSE-
tion, nourished by memories, sensations, perfumes, fla-
UM OF EELAM BEARS
vours, music; sensitive experiences in which a culture is THE IMPRINT OF A
UNIQUE STORY [...].
embodied and lives.
STRADDLED BETWEEN
TWO WORLDS, THE
The objects from the National Museum of Eelam bear OBJECT BEAR WIT-
NESS TO A TORN FATE
the imprint of a unique story: traces of wear, patina of BETWEEN HERE AND
time, imperfections. Fragments of life seem to have THERE, A BACK-AND-
FORTH BETWEEN PAST
clustered there. Straddled between two worlds, the AND PRESENT.”
object bears witness to a torn fate between here and
there, a back-and-forth between past and present.
Along with a brief account, it tells a personal story.
Therefore, the National Museum presents the collec-
tive identity through the prism of the individual, of the
subject in its singularity. The mosaic of objects renders
a reality that transcends the encompassing categories
of community or migrants, general terms that reduce
the multiplicity of experiences to a homogeneous en-
tity, which assign men and women to an identity that
is external to them. Behind exotic representations, be-
yond otherness, the pictures and the short narratives
bear witness to subjective experiences that everyone
can easily identify with. ■
Jeyavishni Francis Jeyaratnam studied Language
and Literature at the University of Paris IV-Sor-
bonne. She works on colonial literature, intertex-
tuality and gender issues in the English modernist
fiction. She teaches English in a high school in
Seine-Saint-Denis.
Simon-Pierre Coftier is a graphic designer, artist
and film maker. He co-founded Le Bail, a contem-
porary art organization located in Paris. Today, he
is involved in curatorial art projects and working
as an art teacher.

8 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 9
Flag (Le Blanc-Mesnil): Reka’s parents always talked about guerril-
la warfare tacitly. They spoke of the “movement” of “boys,” as if men-
tioning LTTE openly was taboo. When the militants rang the doorbell,
her mother would make them tea and hand them an envelope. Her
uncle disapproved of this support, though he never did so openly.
In Spring 2009, when Tamil diasporas were demonstrating world-
wide, Reka joined the huge crowd waving the red and yellow flags in
Paris. Now the support for the struggle was on display. The diaspora
showed its unity while facing the atrocities against Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Virgin Mary Plastic Bottles (Dusseldorf): Mrs. Jeyasekaran has
displayed a small altar in her wardrobe. In the half-light of the cup-
board one can distinguish statuettes of Ganesh and Krishna, a col-
lection of popular frames portraying other deities. Among all these
ritual objects, Mrs. Jeyasekaran placed two plastic figurines of Mary
containing water from Lourdes. In the absence of a Hindu pilgrimage
site in Europe, the pious woman attached to tradition got into the habit
of making a journey with her family to Lourdes every summer.
10
Mathematical Drawing Instruments (Stains): When she was a stu-
dent, Rakshika had been invited by her friend Pauline for a weekend at
her parents’ house in Normandy. Discovering her friend’s childhood
room, the toys, the posters, and the countless objects full of memo-
ries, Rakshika realized that she had nothing left of her childhood in
Jaffna. The few items taken in the flight had been lost during the trip to
Europe or in successive moves. Today, the only object she keeps from
her past is a small metal box containing geometry instruments. A gift
from her grandfather for her seventh birthday.
Virgin Mary Plastic Bottles
Indian Music Cassette (Pontoise): “My dear, when I do not see
you, my heart is wavering like a kite.” This sweet refrain is etched in
Anusha’s memory. This Indian song is closely linked to her childhood
memory. As soon as she hears the first notes, she sees herself on
the way to school, sitting on the luggage rack of her grandfather’s old
bicycle. She remembers the feel of the warm wind on her face and the
music from the mechanic’s shop that echoed all over the street. Years
later, Anusha found the tape in a Parisian Indian store. She loved listen-
ing to this song on her walkman on the bus on her way to high school.
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
Idiyappa Ural (Bondy): Mrs. Sivaranjan prepares the best idiyap-
pams in the outskirts of Paris. Everybody no longer calls her by her
first name, Jeyaranee, but Idiyapparanee: the queen of idiyapam.
People order idiyappams for a birthday dinner or a party. On Saturday
mornings, she goes down to the kitchen in the basement of her house
to prepare her inimitable steamed flour noodles. Whenever she is
asked the secret of her recipe, she prefers to talk about the traditional
manual press inherited from her mother.
Touristic Map of Sri Lanka (Bordeaux): After her marriage, Nathu-
sa decided to travel to her country of origin, which she had left 25
years earlier. When she was consulting a French travel guide, she
found that her region and her hometown, the second largest in the
country, did not exist on the map. Materialized by a white spot, the
heart of the Tamil country is like a terra incognita. After three decades
of war, discriminations and persecutions, the Tamil presence on the
island is symbolically denied. The Northern Province, occupied by the
government army, is made invisible to foreign tourists.
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
Soil from home (Rheinfelden): Kasthuri left her country as a child.
When she first returned in 2018, she went to her family home. Strolling
through the empty rooms, she tried to remember the location of her
bed, the living room shelf, or the recess in the wall where the altar
used to be. Despite her efforts, she failed to recollect. When she left
the house, she took some soil from the garden for her mother who
had stayed in Switzerland, the refugee status preventing her from any
possibility of return.
Mrs. Selvaratnam’s gloves (Bobigny): Mrs. Selvaratnam taught
literature near Trincomalee. She left her country in 1995 as combats
intensified in the East. As a refugee in France, she had to accept a
job below her qualifications in order to reimburse the debts she had
borrowed for the trip and pay the rent of the small family apartment
in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. Deeply affected by this social
downgrading, she was taking steps to return home six months after
her arrival. She eventually stayed in France and now lives in the
suburbs of Paris.
11
FICTIONS THE HOLES
SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI
I step out through the restaurant’s rear door into the small alley. The daylight is already gone.
Next to the overflowing trash dumpsters, he is leaning against the wall and is smoking a ciga-
rette. His face is illuminated by the light of his mobile phone on which his eyes are fixed.
I wait there in silence until he raises his head and looks at me. He cannot see my face but
only my body in silhouette, lighted up by the light from the inside of the restaurant. Yet it is
enough for him to recognize me and before lowering his eyes back to his phone, he says:
“No job tomorrow. Maybe in the weekend…. I call you.”
“But you told me I could work the whole week,” I say, and regret it immediately. Without
looking at me, he says, “I said, I call you!”
When we first met the day before yesterday, he told me that there were many like me: “I ask
for one, hundred persons show up.” Anyway, he then smiled and said that I would be paid as
much as others. But he lied. I realized it this morning when I was taking dirty tablecloths to the
basement where two other workers were chatting about their wages. I could see the disgust in
his eyes when I asked why I was paid less than others. “When you have no papers, you have a
red sale sticker on you. Fifty per cent off,” he said and pointed to his forehead.
I know he won’t call me. Why would he? There are many like me in this city, with a sale
sticker across their face.
12 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// FICTIONS
When I turn left onto the main street, I take a cigarette from the packet. It is a breezy evening.
I look up. The London sky seems shorter than ever. I cup my hands to light my cigarette, but
the wind blows the flame out. I go closer to the side to shelter it from the wind. When I raise
my head, while taking a deep puff, I find myself in front of a rug hanging in a store window.
Its pattern is divided by panels, like a chessboard. In elegant red color, it is divided into sym-
metric squares, decorated with animal or plant motifs, with cypresses, flowering shrubs, and
horses all over it. I know every corner of it. I grew up on one of them.
The thought that it could be woven in my village brings a smile to my face. I feel warmer
and hold my head up straight to see it better. The rug seems aged. I think that the young
girls who wove it are now old women or maybe even dead. On the right side, a little over an
image of a partridge, a hang tag is attached with a thread through a hole on it. The tag reads
the name of my region: Bakhtiari. My eyes move to the price. More zeros than I could ever
earn, in God knows how many years, if I bear the sale sticker on my forehead.
The mighty red color of the rug passes through the double glass and with its details shows
off its elegant beauty. On the glass window there is also me, reflected. Blurry and vague —
just a silhouette of a body, of a face. We had a rug like this one in our home. Who could have
imagined that such a rug would become so precious here?
Long tedious afternoons were spent on the rug. I played with matchboxes and drove them
as if they were cars on the contours of the squares as roads. Along the roads, I placed pens
one after another as if they were the huge overland pipeline that passed close to our village
carrying oil northbound. My younger sister, leaning over her schoolbooks, did homework
on the other corner of the rug. One day, she spilled ink on it and made a small stain. Her
fearful eyes asked for help. To remove the stain with a wet cloth was a silly idea. It just be-
came bigger; a big black stain which covered part of a cypress and the head of a horse.
When my mother lifted her arm, I did not say it was not me. I did not move. Soon, I did not
count anymore how many times she lifted her arm. For days to come, the bruises on my
face were not less inky than the stain on the carpet. I move a little bit and try to remember
which one of the cypresses my sister’s ink blackened.
Where is she now?
So far from home, we two Bakhtiaris. Between us a double-paned glass window, to keep the
inside intact from the undesirable outside. While my eyes move from top to bottom, I ponder
that at least one of us has a paper to say where it comes from — a tag. It is proudly hanging
there in its whole length. No trace of shame and no need to explain its presence.
I do not like rugs. They recall bleeding fingers. My sister, like other girls, worked on rug looms
in small and dark chambers, tying knots for long hours. They continued for days on end
until the last knot was tied. Then, the owner of the looms came to take the rug to the town.
Knotting scared the smooth skin of young girls and caused it to bleed. Blood blended with
the red color derived from pomegranates and made it persuasively redder. Who else than
me in this city can see traces of blood behind cypresses and shrubs?
I am still imagining the fingers, moving yarns to loop around and make a knot, when sud-
denly I feel the presence of someone behind me. A middle-age couple — one on each side
of me and a step back. I can see them reflected on the glass window.
The woman says: “There it is! Look yourself!”
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// FICTIONS 13

The man says nothing. He lifts his glasses and bends his
head forward to see better. His head now almost touches
my shoulder. I am not sure if the couple even see me.
They both look at the rug in silence for a while.
The man says: “It is a piece of art.”
Then, they go inside. The man inside the store who has
been observing us for a while approaches them smiling-
ly. The door is closing behind them slowly. I cannot resist,
and step in. My entrance goes unnoticed.
The couple are carefully listening to the man who is pas-
sionately speaking. From time to time, their eyes turn to
the rug. I look around. I can’t see any other rug from Bakh-
tiari. Between the window where the rug is hanging and
the door there is a large poster on the walls. It shows a
young Bakhtiari woman in a colorful long skirt with many
layers and a long scarf with ornaments and decorations
of faux coins sewn in. Her dark black eyes on a sunburnt
face look back into the camera. Under the photo it reads:
Bakhtiaris, a forgotten people.
Those rare afternoons when my mother came back from
the farm early, we ate dinner together and she told us
stories. She used to tell stories about the people who
had been coming to make holes in the earth. I look at the
poster and remember how my mother used to raise her
arms to the sky and wished that the hole-makers would
forget us. But they did not.
14
THEY HAVE CLOCKS,
Her stories were detailed. She told and told back again
the same stories, about how the hole-makers measured
WE HAVE TIME
every inch of our land, how they turned every stone to
find something to unearth. Every time they returned, more
THE FUNAMBULIST Nº36
holes were drilled. My mother used to talk as if she was
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT, WAI ARCHITECTURE THINK TANK, RASHEEDAH PHILLIPS, MERYEM-BAHIA ARFAOUI,
talking to herself, her eyes taking on a distant look:
EMILY JACIR, SYMA TARIQ, MICHAEL ROTHBERG, SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI,
NASRA ABDULLAHI & MIRIAM HILLAWI ABRAHAM, AND KEVIN BERNARD MOULTRIE DAYE.
“There is no oak tree left to sit under when the sun is
scorching. No graves of ancestors left to visit. Without
the graves where can we find relief? When hole-makers
come not even the dead are left alone. When earth was
drawn from under our feet we got into darkness, like in-
side the holes. Empty. They kept perforating until the land
became like a strainer.”
Reaching this part of the story, my mother would stretch
her hands forward, showing her chapped palms with fin-
gers apart, as her hands resembled a strainer, and said
life itself ran through the holes until nothing was left. She
could not have imagined that the holes would take me
and even this rug to the land of the hole makers.
Where is she?
I go towards the large window and wonder if by any
chance there would still be some soil from Bakhtiari stuck
between the knots. Suddenly I notice that the couple and
the dealer are looking at me. Did they hear me saying
something? Did they say something to me? They come
towards us, me and the rug. I step back to avoid being in
their way. Between me and the rug there are people who
desire it. It is welcomed in any home here. The couple are
discussing where in their house they should have it — li-
brary or dining room?
I open the door and go out. Did they notice? Outside a
cold breeze makes me to sink into my jacket. At the first
intersection, waiting for the green light. I take out my right
hand from the pocket, open it and look at the tag. Next
to the logo of the rug store there is the name of the rug,
where it is from and below that there is the price.
And next to it there is a hole. ■
Shahram Khosravi is a former taxi driver and cur-
rently an accidental Professor of Anthropology at
Stockholm University. Khosravi is the author of some
academic books and some articles but he prefers to
write stories. He has been an active writer published
in the international press. The past year he has been
working on an art book on Waiting and two years
ago he started Critical Border Studies, a network for Suspended Time by Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji (2006). / Photo by Aurélien Mole
scholars, artists and activists to interact. See also his (exhibition “Quelques bribes arrachées au vide qui se creuse,” MACVAL, 2021).
Fixing time, movement, and pace, this sculpture in blown glass is, in a way, the immobilization of the
interview about his work on waiting in this issue. artist’s performance Impossible Journey, the suspension of sand that flows and forms possibilities.
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// FICTIONS THE FUNAMBULIST 35 /// DECOLONIAL ECOLOGIES 15
 THEY HAVE CLOCKS,
ARTICLES
WE HAVE TIME: INTRODUCTION
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT
Chronocartography of the content of my book
États d’urgence: Une histoire spatiale du contin-
uum colonial français (States of Emergency: A
Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum,
PMN, 2021). It attempts to bridge space-time that
would ordinarily be assumed as distinct, as well
as to show the stretchability and compressibility
of what we designate as “time.” The red areas
visualize phases of state of emergency or other
legalized exacerbation of colonial violence in
Algeria, Kanaky, Tahiti, the French banlieues, and
in other so-called “oversea territories.”
16
Welcome to the 36th issue of The Funambulist. With it, we conclude our sixth year of publishing,
thanks to the continuous support of our subscribers! Allow me to begin the introduction to this
issue with a personal anecdote that is only slightly older than this magazine. In the spring of 2014,
I recorded a few episodes of The Funambulist podcast in Vancouver. One of them was with legal
scholar Renisa Mawani about the question of the archives. Being familiar with my work about
the weaponization of architecture, she offered me some advice: “Your work is very interesting
Léopold, but you think too much about space; you also need to think about time.” If I’m being
honest, I had no idea what she meant. “Time is time,” I thought; “what is there to think about?”
Renisa’s words have remained imprinted in my mind, and like every good advice, it prepared
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
me for a transformative encounter. This encounter came two
years later when Kandis Friesen introduced me to the work of
Rasheedah Phillips and Black Quantum Futurism, which led
to four contributions by her to the magazine. Consequently,
my entire understanding of time in relation to eurocentrism,
colonial rule, and temporal resistance is energized by what
I have learned from her work these past five years. Her text
“Dismantling the Master’s Clock/Map,” in our 18th issue (Ju-
ly-August 2018) remains one of my very favorite writings that
we published — I know that many readers have been struck
by it too. I am therefore particularly happy and honored that
she accepted to be part of the magazine, both with a text
and the cover artwork, in an issue fully dedicated to time.
The issue’s title, “They Have Clocks, We Have Time” is an
expression that I have heard a few times in Kanaky (“Eux,
ils ont des montres, nous, on a le temps”) that we wanted
to honor here. The idea that people living under colonial
rule “have time” can seem counterintuitive at first glance.
We can associate this to another idea: the perspective of
colonialism as a temporal parenthesis, as Kanak President
of New Caledonia’s Congress Roch Wamytan articulates.
Both of these ideas related to time may seem presumptu-
ous to bring forward for us, who are not experiencing co-
lonial violence. Yet, there is something undoubtedly potent
in refusing the temporal scale of colonialism as the alpha
and omega of stolen land. In this regard, allow me a second
anecdote. In 2018, a few anticolonial activists in Paris orga-
nized an event in solidarity with the Kanak independentist
struggle. At the end of it, a friend and I were talking with a
Kanak person who was in the audience. At some point in
the conversation, my friend asked him how old he was. With
a big smile, he answered: “I’m 3000 years old,” referencing
the amount of time Indigenous people have been living in
Kanaky. Thinking of time through indigenous nation time or
even a geological time makes colonialism appear much
less as the insurmountable horizon that it wants us all to be-
lieve it is. The cyclity of its clocks might comfort the colonial
power, as Emily Jacir shows us in Ireland and Palestine, but
its end is only… a matter of time.
The cliché that says that “history is written by the victors”
does not constitute a politically productive vision of this no-
tion of history. It conceptualizes history as a retrospective
narrative that materializes when written in books or carved
in the stone of statues. I learnt a lot from Meryem-Bahia
Arfaoui (also a contributor to this issue) when we worked
together, in particular that histories exist within people (un-
derstood as both a sum of individuals and as a collective),
and that colonial violence does not write history as much
as it annihilates histories. The Middle Passage that over 12
million abducted African peoples were forced to complete
across the Atlantic Ocean by European powers between
the 16th and 19th centuries is one of the most striking ex-
amples of this. In The Colonisation of Time (2012), Giordano
Nanni (often cited by Rasheedah Phillips) reminds us that
such journeys across the Ocean, from the settler coloni-
zation of the so-called “Americas” to the transatlantic slave
trade, were only possible thanks to time instruments that
would help position the latitude of the ships.
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
What we call “time” is thus inextricable from space. The no-
tion of continuum, as conceptualized by physics, can help
us make sense of this: by envisioning a four dimensional
topological surface — something I personally represent in
my mind as a sort of magma — we can distinguish con-
tinuum as the relationship between two space-time nodes
that would ordinarily seem unrelated. This is a method I
attempted to use in my most recent book States of Emer- “THE ISSUE’S
TITLE, “THEY
gency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum HAVE CLOCKS, WE
(2021). This research used the colonial history of the French HAVE TIME” IS AN
EXPRESSION THAT
state of emergency in Algeria (1955-1962), Kanaky (1985), I HAVE HEARD
Tahiti (1987), and the French banlieues (2005, 2015-2021) A FEW TIMES IN
KANAKY (‘EUX, ILS
as a constellation of space-time in which anticolonial up-
ONT DES MON-
risings were met with an exacerbation of colonial violence TRES, NOUS, ON A
to trace some parts of the French colonial continuum. In LE TEMPS’) THAT
WE WANTED TO
the representation of this colonial continuum, time is both HONOR HERE.”
stretchable and compressible, and one day (such as Oc-
tober 17, 1961, during the Algerian Revolution) or one week
(such as the last week of October 2005, during the banlieue
uprising) can be seen as “lasting longer” than entire years.
Through this method, we can also envision the infinity of
temporal layers (past and future) that allows each space to
co-exist simultaneously upon another. This is an exercise
we made with Mogniss H. Abdallah and Hajer Ben Bou-
baker in the working-class neighborhoods of northeastern
Paris in our 34th issue The Paris Commune and the World
(March-April 2021). We excavated the political geology of
these neighborhoods from the 1871 Paris Commune to the
Algerian Revolution, to more recent anti-racist organizing…
This is also what propose in this issue: Kevin Bernard Moul-
trie Daye with his concept of extraorthographics applied
in San Francisco, and Miriam Hilawi Abraham and Nasra
Abdullahi who look at a tectonic shifts and temporal scales
in the Horn of Africa.
Fundamentally challenging both the uniformity and the lin-
earity of time can significantly alter our understanding of re-
“THE CYCLITY
ality and our political engagement within it. A notion such as
OF ITS CLOCKS
that of “memory” for instance can be interpreted in a radical- MIGHT COMFORT
ly different way, perhaps if memory is perceived as a pres- THE COLONIAL
POWER [...] BUT
ent experience rather than a past one, as we try to suggest ITS END IS ONLY…
with Michael Rothberg in a conversation that ties together A MATTER OF
TIME.”
the collective memory of the Holocaust with the collective
memory of the 1960s decolonizing movement. In her text,
Syma Tariq challenges the notion of event as “punctuality,”
when it comes to the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. In
addition to “memory” and “event,” a third temporal concept
questioned in this issue is that of “waiting,” as we discuss
with Shahram Khosravi: making people wait, between Kafka
(The Trial) and Beckett (Waiting for Godot), as a means to
assert power upon them, but also waiting as a revolutionary
gesture. I hope that this issue will contribute to multiplying
these questions around time and the eurocentric hegemony
of its application. I wish you an inspiring read. ■
Léopold Lambert is the editor-in-chief of The Funam-
bulist. He is a trained architect and the author of four
books, examining the weaponization of architecture
in multiple geographies including Palestine, Algeria,
Kanaky, and the French banlieues.
17
 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

Architecture and Urbanism College, US backed Canada stops sponsoring

Fordlandia Indian Residential Schools THOA Silvia
University of São Paulo
B r a s i l i a
coup in Brazil
(1969)
SUBALTERN Rivera
BRAZIL ABOLISHES Puerto Rico tries to ban Brazil (1948) (1964) (1983) Xucuru Cusicanqui
SLAVERY Loudreading in Tobacco Factories (1928) (1956-1963) US supports Bolivia includes
Case Ch’ixinakax
(1888) (1897) Cuban Revolution coup in Bolivia Zapatistas Uprising Wiphala Flag
(2018) utxiwa
(1953-1959) Bay of Pigs (1971) (1994) in constitution (2020)
Cuba reinstates
Panama secession from Colombia
Invasion UPR Student massacre INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE (2009) Colectiva Feminista
CUBA WAR OF backed by US-France
Loudreading in tobacco WEB Du Bois Cuba Architecture Mexico City en construccion
INDEPENDENCE Panama Canal Company Black (1961) (1966) (1968)
factories CUBA ABOLISHES (1903) Reconstruction (2013) Standing Rock
(1895-98) Jacob Lawrence joins Summer Olympics
(1880) SLAVERY Black Wall Street (1935) Jamaica Dakota Access
(1886)
Cuba bans
(1921) HOLC Black Mountain College faculty independence Mexico City TRANSFEMINISM Emi Koyama Pipeline protests
Loudreading in tobacco Home (1946) (1968) US supported Black Black
(1962) The Transfeminist (2016)
factories (continues banning sporadically) The Clansman Ku Klux Klan Parade Owners B l a c k M o u n t a i n C o l e g e coup in Chile Édouard Glissant Lives Lives
(1925) Loan C I V I L R I G H T S M O V E M E N T (1973) Rem Poetics of Relation Manifesto ABOLITIONIST
(1896) (1933-1957) Matter Matter

J I M C R O W
Marie C. Turner (1915) NCARB Corporation Koolhaas Angela Y Davis (2001) ANTI-RACIST
enrolls in created Delirious
(1990) founded FEMINISM Protests
USA (1919) (1933) Stonewall Women, Race, Class Afropolitanism (2020)
Robert Robinson Taylor MIT Architecture H a r l e m R e i n a s s a n c e Irving L. Peddrew III (1969)
New York
(1978) (1981)
AFROFUTURISM (2013)
claims (1909) (1918-1937) Taliesin Fellowship Malcolm X (2005) Rebuild
enrolls in MIT Architecture enrolls in Virginia Tech assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. Oka Crisis
Puerto Rico USA Jones-Shafroth Act assassinated Foundation
(1888) (1932) (1953) (1965) (1990)
Wounded Knee Guam, Philipines, Cuba makes Puerto Ricans US citizens Philip Johnson attends (1968) Land-Grant Tribal (2009) protests at Yale
Frantz Fanon
Anexes Hawaii drafts 20,000 to war NAAB The Wretched B l a c k P a n t h e r P a r t y and Harvard
Massacre Nazi Youth rally Colleges
(1890) (1898) Walter T. Bailey
(1917) Indian Citizenship Act
(1932) (1940) SEGREGATIONIST of the Earth (1966-1982) Combahee River Collective (1994)
Lehman Brothers due multibillion dollar
(1924) All US public files for
Sitting Bull graduates University of Illinois Philip Johnson head of Department of Architecture and Design MoMA (1961) colleges admitting Declaration investment in
(1904) Black and White Students (1977) US bankrupcy Puerto Rican Debt
assassinated (1932-1954) (1968) Arcosanti Immigration and (2008)
Dawes Act divides (1890) Mies Van de Rohe heads IIT Architecture department Indian Civil Righst Act (1989) Customs Enforcement Netherlands (2018)
Native’s lands into Second Morrill Land Grant 1890
reservations for segregated Universities D e S t i j l (1937-1958)
Constant
(1968)
Black Environmental
ICE is founded Antilles POST-COLONIAL
(1917-1932) Gropius Architecture Chair at GSD (2003) are dissolved
(1887) (1890) New Babylon Studies Team last year
Ebenezer Howard Wits University (1938-1952) (BEST)Yale I R A Q W A R (2010)
(1956) Philip Johnson works at MOMA
Garden Cities of To-morrow
(1900)
THE GREAT WAR Architecture founded
GE Pearce
Cape Town
School of
University president
pressures Gropius to admit women
(1968)
(1988)
ANC wins election
WTC Attack
(2003-2011)
(1914-1918) Architecture in Architecture program GSD First Prizker prize is awarded to (2001)
(1922) Mandela become president
TU Delft Architecture Cape Institute of Architects (1937) (1943) Philip Johnson
ANC Founded
(1904)
(1912)
(1922) WAR MINIMAL Manifesto of the 121 Learning from 26 consecutive awards go to men
(1994) Achille Mbembe
French colonization M a n d a t o r y P a l e s t i n e (1950) Las Vegas Necropolitics Predictive Policing
ALGERIAN WAR (1979) ANC unbanned (2003) Sayak Valencia
West Africa and (1920-1948) (1968) (2008) Gore Capitalism
Aimé Césaire (1954-1962) Nelson Madela

A P A R T H E I D
COLONIAL League of Nations Le Corbusier
Anglo-Boer War I Timboktu Anglo-Boer War II Cahier d'un (1990) Peter Sloterdijk (2016)
(1920) Plan Obus Algiers
(1893) South Africa Otoman Empire end (1931) “Rules of the Patrik Schumacher
South Africa Land Act retour au pays natal
French Guinea (1899-1902) (1922) Partido Nazionale Human Zoo” “In Defense of Capitalism”
(1880-1881) South Africa (1939)
(1891) (King Leopold II) (1913) Egypt Fascista The Truth about the Colonies EAST Policy of apartheid Congo Durban Strikes CFSA students Namibia Independence (2000) IBM (2015)
(1931) AFRICAN Independence (1973) force Columbia (1990) Smarter
independence (1927) adopted by National Party (NP)
C O N G O F R E E S T A T E Rape of Belgium
(1922) Paris Colonial
CAMPAIGN
(1940-1941) of South Africa
Patrice Lumumba
Prime Minister Angola independence South Africa d Cities TECHNO-FASCIST
Leopoldville (1914)
(1881)
(1885-1908) Libya Civil War Benito Mussolini Exposition I t a l i a n L i b y a (1948) (1960) (1974) divesment (2008)
forms government (1931) (1934-1943) T e a m 1 0 (1985) Facebook
(1911)
(1922) C o ngr ès Int erna t i ona ux d 'Arc hi t ec t ure Mod erne Mozambique independence (2006)
King Leopold II Jewish settlers USA and Belgium backed
G e r m a n R e p u b l i c (1928-1959) (1974) Big Data
dies proclaim the Patrice Lumumba MAGA
(1918-1933) (2005) MAGA
(1909) Mass Murder foundation of Israel assasination Adobe Photoshop Federal
B a u h a u s (1961) Twitter CCP Weird
(1919-1933) at Auschwitz (1949) (1990) Google (2004) Buildings
www
Germany and Britain sign Filippo Marinetti
Walter GropIus
Mies Van de Rohe (1942) US drops two atomic bombs in Japan The Republic internet goes public (1999) REACTIONARY Architecture (2020)
negotiates with Gestapo (1945) of the Congo (1990) (2014) Stephan Trüby
founds Bauhaus Japan regains
Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty Italian Futurism closes Bauhaus independence Saskia Sassen Metacity /Datatown Right-Wing Spaces
Weimar India wins independence from US from France European Customs Community
(1890) (1909)
(1919)
FASCIST (1933) independence (1952) Tunisia (1960) The Global City (1999) (2016) Non-Referential
Created 3D printer
The Sydney School of Architecture from United Kingdom independence Nigeria Independence (1968) (1991) SMLXL NEOLIBERAL Architecture
(1983)
G E R M A N C O L O N I A L E M P I R E (1920) (1945) Mao Zedong (1956) (1960)
Shenzhen and (1995) (2018)
March Chagall proclaims the founding CULTURAL REVOLUTION Shanghai Stock Handover of Beijing WeChat
(1880-1920) SETTLER founds People’s
Art School Vitebsk
WORLD WAR II of People’s Republic of China
(1949)
(1966-1976) Market
(1989)
Hong Kong Olympics
(2008)
(2011)
(1939-1945) (1997)
W H I T E (1918)
A U S T R A L I A
Vera Ermolaeva Adolf Hitler and Nazi party Tsinghua SA “the pill”
P O L I C Y East and West Germany
reunited
BRICS
(2009)
Social Credit
System National
rector People’s claims power (1946) (1990) Dolly
Art School Vitebsk (1954) Social Credit (2014) Grief and
(1919) (1933) Indonesian (1996) System Pilot Grievance:
Spanish Civil War CAD Art and
People’s Art School revolution VIETNAM WAR Montenegro and Serbia (2009)
(1936-1939) (1957) Mourning in
Vitebsk (1945-1949) (1965-1973) form Federal Republic of Yugoslavia America
Union treaty creates USSR
(1918-1922) NAZI C O L D W A R (1992) (2021)
(1922) TV
Talking Motion Picture UNOVIS KO R E AN W AR
Piotr Kropotkin (1919-1922) (1925) Malaya PEASANTS REVOLT Slovenia, Croatia,
(1910) (1945-1953)
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution OCTOBER REVOLUTION independence J a p a n e s e M e t a b o l i s m THAILAND Macedonia, Bosnia
Piotr Kropotkin (1960-1970)
The Conquer of (1902) (1917) UTOPIAN Socialist Yugoslavia (1957) (1970s) break from Yugoslavia
Curstis Act BALKAN WAR RUSSIAN V h k u t e m a s declared by Marshall Tito Kiyonori Kikutake (1991)
Bread Exhibition “The
(1898) (1912-1913) CIVIL WAR (1920-1930) (1945) “Metabolism1960-
(1892) International Style” Proposal for a New Urbanism” Russia independence PPE
SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR (1918-1920) MOMA, NY Russian Red Army USSR collapse Kosovo
(1898) R I F W A R captures East Berlin Independence
(1911-1927) Penicillin (1937) (1991) COVID-19
(1928) Germany Surrenders (2008) (2020)
(1945)

HISTORY DOESN’T EXIST

WAI ARCHITECTURE THINK TANK
HISTORY DOESN’T EXIST. Historical narratives do really
exist, like propaganda: though rendered with ideology,
they are real productions that satisfy the positions of
settler-colonization, ruling classes, capitalism, white-su-
premacy, and heteropatriarchy. Architectural History™,
which organizes the reduction of systems of extraction,
accumulation, capture, and predation to white-washed
accounts of style, aestheticized movements, and de-
politicized asymmetrical power relations, is incapable
of presenting a critical account of its alliance with sys-
tems of human oppression and ecological spoliation.
Architectural theory has been its masterpiece. At the
root of the canonized architectural history lie a thousand
theories that reinforce the status quo. As hegemomic
Designed as part of
WAI’s Manual of An-
ti-Racist Architecture
events, institutions, inventions, and propositions. By in- imaginations that bind the Loudreaders in the Tobac- Education (2020),
cluding Jim Crow in USA, Apartheid in South Africa, and co Factories at the beginning of the 20th Century with rather than being a
definite device for
White Australia Policy in Australia, the diagram invites a forms of indigenous resistance, police and carceral ab-
the reading of his-
regimes shape and fund architectural histories and the- more critical understanding of historical matter and its olitionism, and transfeminist rights in 2021. tory, this map pro-
ories that multiply like trees in a forest, anti-racist forms relationship to architecture during the last 140 years. By poses to stimulate
the anti-racist, ant-
of historical narrative must dig down into the soil of ide- decentering uncritical readings of whiteness and high- WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio ableist, anti-capi-
ology and address architecture’s white-supremacist, lighting regimes of anti-Black oppression, the diagram practicing by questioning the political, historical, talist, transfeminist
imaginations as we
capitalist, and heteropatriarchal roots. Among these, connects the history of colonialism and imperialism, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture continue to dream
the multiple iterations of Charles Jencks’ “Evolutionary the construction of architectural and urban institutions, and urbanism. Founded in Brussels during the fi- other forms of ar-
chitecture and other
Tree” highlight the construction of historical narratives and the ongoing struggles of those historically left out of nancial crisis of 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, art- worlds that are
that overemphasize Eurocentric worldviews, while over- mainstream narratives of history. ist, curator, educator, author and theorist Cruz Gar- possible, urgent,
and necessary.
looking and erasing the systems of extraction that have cia and French architect, artist, curator, educator,
historically fueled, funded, and shaped them. Just as it displays how Philip Johnson attended a Hitler author and poet Nathalie Frankowski, WAI is one of
Youth Rally the same year that he founded the Architec- their several platforms of public engagement that
Through an anti-racist approach, this chronocartography ture Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New include Beijing-based anti-profit art space Intelli-
rethinks the concept of the ‘evolutionary tree’ by re-cen- York, the graphic also creates a continuous current gentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative educa-
tering three global anti-Black regimes in relationship to between subversive, anticolonial, and anti-capitalist tion platform and trade-school Loudreaders.

18 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME 19
ARTICLES COUNTER CLOCKWISE:
UNMAPPING BLACK
TEMPORALITIES FROM
GREENWICH MEAN TIMELINES
RASHEEDAH PHILLIPS
Left. New Myths
Right. Shadow Por-
tals. / Mixed media Continuing her series of texts about the weaponized
collages by Black
Quantum Futurism
concept of time in The Funambulist, Rasheedah Phil-
(2019). lips draws relationships between the 1884 Internation-
al Prime Meridian Conference and the imposition of
Western linear time over Black life following the aboli-
tion of slavery in the United States.
Although the United States settler colonial project is of-
ten referred to as one that successfully colonized space,
it also necessarily involved a conquering of the temporal
domain of the future. In A Republic in Time (2008), for in-
stance, Thomas W. Allen covers in detail how early 19th
century political writers such as Thomas Jefferson actually
worked to emphasize “America’s place in time rather than
space.” Barbara Adam similarly observes that “colonization
with time has been achieved with the aid of standard time,
time zones and world time, on the one hand, and with the
globalization of industrial time and its associated economic
values as common-sense norm, on the other” (Time, 2004).
Where time reckoning had historically been determined
by solar time and other local time-reckoning methods, the
growth of global capitalism and maintenance of global col-
onization by European nations and their colonized territories
20
increasingly required clock and calendar time standard-
ization. In 1883, the U.S. standardized its four time zones
in accordance with the railroads, for example, collapsing
capitalist time into natural time in ways that fundamentally
shifted humans’ experience of, and relationship to, time.
The International Prime Meridian Conference (IPMC), is a
critical point on the Western timeline for understanding the
backward and forward reaching impacts of time standard-
ization and its resulting temporal oppression. In October
1884, male delegates from 25 countries in diplomatic rela-
tionship with the U.S. convened in Washington D.C. by an
act of U.S. Congress “to fix on and recommend for univer-
sal adoption a common prime meridian, to be used in the
reckoning of longitude and in the regulation of time through-
out the world.” I’ve written previously (including in The Fu-
nambulist) about how the colonization of the Australian and
African continents was enabled by the search for the inven-
tor of a device that could accurately measure longitude. As
Giordano Nanni notes in The Colonisation of Time (2012),
the clock was as essential to colonization as the ship. In a
clockwork, Newtonian universe where God is the ultimate
clockmaker, setting the zero point for the world’s time was
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
the earthly counterpart and institutionalization of a God-like
infinite power over time and space. The IPMC was meant
to be a formality where diplomats from the world’s most
powerful nations would come together to confirm what
had already been decided at two previous conferences on
the matter of the universal meridian in Venice in 1881 and
Rome in 1883: that the world’s prime meridian would lie at
Greenwich Observatory in London.
The IPMC was ill-planned and politically fraught among
the various nations represented — particularly France,
which wanted a neutral meridian that did not pass across
any continent — while “delegates at the meridian con-
ference had no authority to commit their nations to any
resolutions” (see Ian R. Bartky, One Time Fits All, 2007).
The result of the IPMC was seven resolutions, which in-
cluded a recommendation for the official adoption of the
Observatory of Greenwich in London as the prime meridi-
an, and a recommendation to rearrange the astronomical
and nautical days to begin at mean midnight. The reso-
lutions were not immediately adopted or acted on by the
representative countries; however some countries began
setting their times in coordination with Greenwich Mean
Time about a decade after the IPMC.
Though the U.S. Secretary of State’s opening speech at the
IPMC claimed that “most of the nations of the earth are rep-
resented,” European and South American countries dom-
inated the conference, with only Japan as a named repre-
sentative for Asia, and Liberia as the only African nation.
Liberia itself was a newly formed nation in Africa, founded
as an American colony in 1822 by white abolitionists of the
American Colonization Society (ACS), whose mission was
to relocate free Black people in the U.S. to West Africa. The
ACS supported several thousand liberated and free-born
Black people in voluntarily relocating to Liberia by the time
the country gained its independence in 1847. The country
also became a critical site of refuge for thousands more
Black people looking to escape violence or death during
the Civil War, and was seen by politicians as a potential
answer to the problem of what to do with enslaved Afri-
cans after emancipation so that they would not compete
with whites for jobs and resources. Even Abraham Lincoln
noted in an 1854 speech that his “first impulse would be to
free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own
native land.” The largest settlement in Liberia, Monrovia,
was named after President James Monroe and would later
become the capital of the country.
After receiving diplomatic recognition by Lincoln in 1862,
Liberia was later able to be represented at the IPMC by
ACS Secretary William Coppinger, who was the author of
a report called “The continent of the future: Africa and its
wonderful development - exploration, gold mining, trade,
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
missions and elevation.” Despite its supposed indepen-
dence, Liberia was still locked into colonial space-time re-
lationships with the U.S. government, which would almost
ensure its failure as a project of temporal autonomy and
spatial agency for liberated Black people, and perhaps a
portend of what was to come for the project of emancipa-
tion for those remaining in the U.S..
About 20 years before the IPMC, another important event
underscored time’s lack of objectivity, the uneven rate by
which information traveled, the role time played in rein-
forcing colonial power, and the inequities in how events
get marked on the western timeline. On June 19, 1865
many enslaved Africans still being held captive on plan-
tations and farms in Galveston, Texas were freed, despite
legal chattel slavery having been abolished two and a half
years earlier on January 1, 1863 via the issuance of the
Emancipation Proclamation. “DECEMBER
31, 1862 THUS
BEGAN WIDELY
Abraham Lincoln originally issued a preliminary Procla- HELD WATCH
mation on September 22, 1862 and signed it on Decem- NIGHT SERVICES,
AS ENSLAVED
ber 18 with a declaration that three quarters of enslaved AND LIBERATED
Africans in the confederate states were “forever free” as of AFRICANS AND
WHITE ABOLITION-
January 1, 1863, except for some 800,000 slaves across ISTS WATCHED
four slaveholding states that could opt-in on declaring loy- THE MASTER(‘S)
CLOCK AT WATCH
alty to the union. Freeing some of the enslaved Africans
MEETINGS AND
was a bargaining chip for states engaged in rebellion WATCH PARTIES IN
against the union. December 31, 1862 thus began wide- SANCTUARY SPAC-
ES, WAITING FOR
ly held Watch Night Services, as enslaved and liberated THE NEW YEAR TO
Africans and white abolitionists watched the Master(‘s) ARRIVE...”
clock at watch meetings and watch parties in sanctuary
spaces, waiting for the new year to arrive, and with it, con-
firmation by newspaper or word of mouth that Lincoln’s
proclamation had in fact been implemented.
With the Emancipation Proclamation going into effect, this
makes January 1, 1863, the first documented public cele-
bration or observance of a “Freedom Day” in the United
States, but of course only for some. This brings us back
to that day on June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas, when
General Granger and troops arrived to bring news that the
Civil War was over and that the slaves were in fact free and
had been for nearly three years. Many slavers had moved
their plantations to Texas during the Civil War given that no
major battles had touched the state, while the Texas’ con-
federate constitution prohibited the release of one’s slaves.
Enslaved Africans likely knew of the ending of the Civil War
and Emancipation Proclamation, but owners found ways
to ensure that many of their captives could not collectively
act on the information in order to obtain their freedom.
Facticity means a thing can only take on the feature of be-
ing a fact, of being real, of being truth or a part of reali-
ty when it has been pinpointed to the linear timeline and
21
 assigned a date. Anything that cannot be pinpointed to a
date on the calendar and time on the clock is not consid-
ered real, factual, event(ual) or as having happened. The
word derives from Latin factum “an event, occurrence,
deed, achievement,” in Medieval Latin also “state, con-
dition, circumstance,” literally “thing done” and from the
1630s, a fact is a “thing known to be true” and “something
that has actually occurred.” Eve Ruhnau writes that “to test
the truth or falsehood of predictions, measurements have
to be made. Measurements produce facts. Predictions are
about possible future events. Facts are constituted in the
present and are, retrospectively described as past events
with respect to instants which have already passed.”

In order for freedom for Black people to become fact by defi-

nition — an event or a truth — a measurement had to be
made: a date and time assigned that would mark it upon the
western timeline. Here we see “the Gregorian calendar and
clock-time come together in capitalist social time relations
and coalesce into specific hegemonic time forms,” and into
“BLACK FOLK
“the expression of specific forms of historical conscious-
NARRATIVE ness.” (see Jonathan Martineau, Time, Capitalism, and
REPORTS WERE
Alienation, 2015). Time Scholar Kevin Birth notes that “like
ACTIVATED WHEN
OTHER ENSLAVED the clock, the Gregorian calendar emphasizes uniform du-
AFRICANS TRA- ration as the means of reckoning time” representing time “as
VERSED TIME
consisting of empty containers to be filled. Birth agrees that
AND SPACE TO
LIBERATE ONE “the relationship of time, politics, and globalisation involves
ANOTHER LONG
BEFORE THE TIME the interaction of the global imposition of a Western times-
OF THE EMANCI- cale, local ideas of timekeeping, and how cycles of holidays
PATION PROCLA-
MATION, DURING
shape sentiments and approaches to political challenges”
THE TIME OF THE (Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality, 2012).
CIVIL WAR, AND
AFTER THE TIME
OF SO-CALLED The nature of the two primary Freedom Days that the U.S.
FREEDOM.” recognizes — January 1 and June 19th — as a historical fact
marking a “freedom” date for enslaved Black people, and
the idea that on either day they became liberated demon-
strates the fallacy of facticity. It is the evidence of time being
out of sync with liberation of Black people on the Western
timeline, where time is measured by observing facts (see
Eve Ruhnau, “The Deconstruction of Time and The Emer-
gence of Temporality,” 1997). Progress and accumulation
of facts or points on the linear timeline always comes at the
expense of Black lives, the goal of Western linear time is
always to lock Black bodies out of the Future and remove
them from the timeline of civilization. Freedom from bond-
age and white terrorism via slavery was declared in a written
document but Black people still had to wait for it: wait for the
violence of war to end, wait for the Master’s Clock to stroke
midnight on January 1, wait for Lincoln to sign the procla-
mation, wait for the information to travel, wait for the sun to
rise on June 19, wait to escape, wait for General Granger to
leave Louisiana and march upon Galveston with his troops,
and read General Order No. 3 before liberation could be-
come “fact” and freedom could become “truth.”
Such means of time reckoning, truth-rendering and factic-
ity are in direct opposition to Black folk traditions of time
reckoning and truth rendering. As Laura C. Jarmon notes,
“The features of time and reality [...] may not always op-
erate as criteria stable enough to delineate information
status across communities. Consequently, Black folk nar-
rative may employ contemporary information and it may in
various ways relate information to fact. Black folk narrative
reports events with participant group interests informing
the report’s tenor and reiterating the group’s perspective”
(Wishbone, 2003). Black folk narrative reports were acti-
vated when other enslaved Africans traversed time and
space to liberate one another long before the time of the
Emancipation Proclamation, during the time of the Civil
War, and after the time of so-called freedom. They also
strategically used waiting time, communicating in codes,
symbols, songs, chants and other means of obscuring
the message: a social network relying on Afrodiaspori-
an technologies that white colonialist human traffickers
thought they had left behind.
Liberated Black laborers of Galveston — the original es-
sential workers — understood the toll of waiting time, and
that their freedom had in fact been purposely delayed.
Demonstrating an elite understanding of facticity on the
Master’s timeline, they began advocating for a policy pro-
posal using the white master’s own language of “time as
money,” turning facticity, and reclaiming their waiting time
to demand just compensation and accountability from
slaveholders who had kept them in captivity from Janu-
ary 1, 1863 to May 20, 1865 in spite of the Emancipation
Proclamation setting the end date of January 1, 1863. They
understood, as Giordano Nanni observes, that “the rise
of capitalism and the work-clock [...] went hand-in hand:
time became a quantifiable measure of exchange-value
in the marketplace for trading in the commodity of human
labour, the currency in which the workers’ lives — their
time, reified — was bought and sold” (The Colonisation
of Time, 2012). The liberated Black laborers of Galveston
challenged and chose not to accept the war end date of
April 9, 1865 as the date by which they should measure
the start date of their freedom and waged services. This
practice of temporal advocacy and temporal abolition was
seen elsewhere around the country, where Cheryl Wells
argues that “emancipation stripped masters of ownership
of slaves’ time, and African Americans recognized their
ownership of time and used the language of time to nego-
tiate clock-regulated working hours and wages, much as
northern wage laborers did” (Civil War Time, 2012).
However, practices of temporal oppression and uses of
clocks, watches, and nature itself as instruments of sur-
veillance, labor regulation, objectification, and punish-
ment persisted in different forms. Clock time under these
circumstances was transformed into what Michael Han-
chard calls “racial time [...] the inequalities of temporality
that result from power relations between racially dominant
and subordinate groups [...] produc[ing] unequal tempo-
ral access to institutions, goods, services, resources,
power, and knowledge” (“Afro-Modernity, Temporality,
Politics, and the African Diaspora,” 1999). This racial time
was very literal. On most plantations, “the masters ha[d]
Left page. Like
Clockwork. / Digital
collage by Black
complete control over the distribution of the negro’s time”
Quantum Futurism
(The Essex Count Standard, 1838). An 1833 article in the
(2021). Left. Shad-
Morning Standard discusses the issue of the most eco- owGrams Room in
Timeless Degrees of
nomical ways to divide up a “negro’s time,” should they Freedom exhibition
be emancipated: “three-fourths of the negro’s time were (2019) at Vox Populi
Galleries. Right. In-
to be given to former owner...” Jamaican abolitionists in stallation shot from
1838 rallied not only against the ending of slavery with All Time is Local
exhibition (2019)
a list of specific grievances that included harsh, physical at the Center for
punishments, but they also named the “arbitrary appro- Emerging Artists.
priation of the negro’s time” as one of the ills of slavery.
In my own research, I found what may be one of the first
print references to colored people’s time in an 1878 op-ed
“...PRACTICES
on political divisions between the north and south in the Cin- OF TEMPORAL
cinnati Enquirer. Another reference to CP Time was slightly OPPRESSION AND
USES OF CLOCKS,
more positive in 1867, where an anonymous op-ed ob- WATCHES, AND
served: “The colored people lose time, it is said, attending NATURE ITSELF
AS INSTRUMENTS
public meetings. Well, what if they do? – it is their own time.”
OF SURVEIL-
References to the “old time n*gger,” the “n*gger’s clock,” LANCE, LABOR
and the “old time darkey” surfaced in newspaper articles REGULATION,
OBJECTIFICATION,
and literature soon after emancipation, a lament of the loss AND PUNISHMENT
of the mythological joyful, docile, Black slave who is “the PERSISTED IN DIF-
FERENT FORMS.”
happiest of all living creatures” and “comes nearer being a
joy forever than anything earthly” (Sioux City Journal, 1893).
As Black people sought more control over their own time
and labor, the tropes would later morph into “negro time,”
negro clocks, and an evolution of the phrase “colored
people’s time,” co-associating Black time with lateness
and laziness. See, for example, the 1935 Weekly Tri-
bune where an ad notes, in part: “NO C. P. T. ALLOWED

22 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME 23
 THIS SEMESTER.” In order to materialize these tropes of restricted where they could live, learn, and work, were just As the name implies, Black people traveling through a be vigilant when it comes to the time of the legislative
white-proscribed Black time and maintain stereotypes that as much a project of temporalized segregation of Black town had to be outside of its limits by dusk, and were process, voting times, politician time, and the many other
would reinscribe Blackness as inherently inferior, Black people from white people, or what Charles W. Mills notes not allowed to settle down or live in these areas. The means through which capitalist and colonialist time does
“NEWSPAPERS
people were relegated to the status of clocks by way of as a “racial regime (racial slavery, colonial forced labor, Jim towns also extended into entire “sundown counties” and violence or is not aligned with lived times and realities. As
DURING THAT
TIME PERIOD, racist material cultures of Americana memorabilia, where Crow, or apartheid polities) [that] imposes, inter alia, partic- “sundown suburbs.” These towns were not rare, and a matter of survival we are attuned to the ways in which
FOR EXAMPLE, Black caricatures were locked into clocks, such as mam- ular dispositions and allocations of time that are differentiat- were often demarcated by signs that read things like the Western linear timeline is openly hostile to Black bod-
LISTED TABLES
OF TIMES WHEN my clocks, or clocks built into cast iron bodies of carica- ed by race: working times, eating and sleeping times, free “Whites only within city limits,” “N*gger, don’t let the sun ies, and openly denies us access to our own futures and
BLACK PEOPLE tures, such as Topsy Blinking Eye clocks. times, commuting times, waiting times, and ultimately, of set on you here;” advertised in newspapers: “Don’t let fixes parameters for our movement through time and
COULD ACCESS
CERTAIN PUBLIC course, living and dying times” (“White Time,” 2014). News- the sun set on you here, you understand?”; signified by space. If we have any hopes of fundamentally breaking
SPACES, SUCH Racial time was also used to catalyze and perpetuate sys- papers during that time period, for example, listed tables actions such as blowing a loud whistle to signal the time away from patterns of the past and rupturing the inad-
AS SCHOOLS OR
THEATERS, VER-
temic oppression denying Black communities’ access and of times when Black people could access certain public that they needed to leave; or through violent, physical equate present, we must do no less than redesign the
SUS THE “NOR- agency over the temporal domains of the past, present, spaces, such as schools or theaters, versus the “normal attacks such as shootings, beatings, and lynchings of timeline and unmap the time zones.
MAL TIMES” FOR
and the future through legacies of de facto and legalized, times” for white people to access public spaces. Defiance Black people by whites. In fact, James W. Loewen, au-
WHITE PEOPLE TO
ACCESS PUBLIC racialized segregation and discrimination in public spaces, or challenge of these laws often resulted in arrest or impris- thor of one of the only books written on sundown towns, Through an on-going fellowship project with Vera List
SPACES.” “IN CONSIDERING
access to housing and land in the U.S., which proliferat- onment, hefty fines, or extreme punishments of death and notes that “probably a majority of all incorporated plac- Center for Art and Social Politics called Time Zone Pro-
NEW SPACES AND
ed during and after the Civil War, evolving alongside of the violence against Black individuals or entire communities. es kept out African Americans” (Sundown Towns, 2005). tocols, I explore the written “Protocol Proceedings” de- TIMES FOR POLIT-
struggle for emancipation, always keeping true freedom in People who did not obey the signs were subject to State veloped at the IPMC, and trace the creation of written ICAL EMPOWER-
MENT, TIME ZONE
check. Known as Jim Crow laws and Black Codes, and in One particularly pernicious form of racialized temporal op- violence, while the everyday citizen was allowed to en- and unwritten political and social agreements, protocols PROTOCOLS EN-
the real estate realm, showing up in the form of redlining pression and spatialized segregation are “Sundown Towns.” force the law without consequence. and rules underlying Westernized time constructs (such GAGES AFRODIAS-
PORAN CULTURAL
American Dreams, and racially restrictive covenants, these laws were com- Sundown towns are towns all over the U.S. where strict ra- as Daylight Saving Time), with the aim of illuminating the AND COMMUNAL
Machines, and
monly thought of as spatial segregation. However, the laws cial segregation and exclusion against Black people was Sundown towns were wholly reliant on localized time reck- impacts that oppressive time protocols and policies have SURVIVAL MECH-
Promises. / Mixed ANISMS AND
media collage by that were designed to deny Black people the right to vote, practiced and reinforced by threats and physical violence. oning — the time a sun sets in each town is different, day to had and continue to have on marginalized Black com- TEMPORAL
Black Quantum day, season to season. This is not time “determined by hu- munities in the U.S. in particular, helping to catalyze and TECHNOLOGIES
Futurism (2021). THAT BLACK
man or mechanical means,” as codified through the IPMC perpetuate systems of oppression that deny communi-
INDIVIDUALS AND
Protocol Proceedings, but rather, “natural times [that] were ties access to and agency over the temporal domains of COMMUNITIES
determined by the seasons, the weather, the sun, and the past, present, and the future. HAVE DEVELOPED,
UNCOVERED, AND
moon” (Wells, Civil War Time, 2012). In the days before RECONFIGURED
smartphones and GPS, and even with the standardized In considering new spaces and times for political empow- TO COMBAT
TEMPORAL OP-
time zones in place, a clock or watch wouldn’t necessarily erment, Time Zone Protocols engages Afrodiasporan cul- PRESSION AND
help you without an almanac present. Racialized time is tural and communal survival mechanisms and temporal RECLAIM OUR
TIME.”
not objective, despite its reliance on objective time-reck- technologies that Black individuals and communities
oning to lock temporally-oppressed bodies into politically have developed, uncovered, and reconfigured to combat
constructed space-time relationships. temporal oppression and reclaim our time. The project will
result in an inter-media work rewriting protocols of time,
The temporal legacy of Sundown Towns continues into the rezoning the time zones, and unmapping the imperialist
present. Today, more than 50 years after the passage of global time colonization project with a Black futurist lens.
the Fair Housing Act of 1968’s prohibition against housing The piece will be developed via Colored People’s Time as
discrimination, exploitive real estate practices and the deep an ontological framework and alternative theory of tem-
inequities flowing from them are not historical artifacts. poral-spatial consciousness. This reworking of Colored
They appear in the form of realtors and property managers People’s Time into Colored People’s Time Zones or Black
showing Black renters and those seeking homeownership Womanist Temporal Zones is supported through the the-
fewer options in neighborhoods cut off from adequate oretical and aesthetic groundwork laid by concepts and
transportation, grocery stores, or green space. They ap- practices of Black quantum futurism. ■
pear as exclusionary zoning practices that discourage af-
fordable housing in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods. Rasheedah Phillips is a queer Philadelphia-based
housing attorney, parent, and interdisciplinary
The timeline from the so-called ending of chattel slavery artist. Phillips is the founder of The AfroFuturist
to the present reflects a society designed to systemati- Affair, a founding member of Metropolarity Queer
cally leave Black families and other marginalized people Speculative Fiction Collective, co-founder of Black
behind. As such, Black people have always needed to Quantum Futurism, and co-creator of Community
be vigilant of political and institutional time, with an inti- Futures Lab. As part of BQF and as a solo artist,
mate understanding of how it moves. Black people have Phillips is currently a CERN Artist Resident, Vera
always needed to navigate white Western timelines as List Center Fellow, Knight Art + Tech Fellow, a for-
our ancestors did the stars. We have always needed to mer Pew and A Blade of Grass fellow.

24 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME 25
 TIME AND THE COLONIAL STATE
beginning in which the oppressed only enter histo-
ARTICLES ry through the oppressor’s narrative. Part of France’s
persistent selective retelling of history includes decid-
ing who is part of history and who isn’t — and when.
Only in this context could former French President Sar-
MERYEM-BAHIA ARFAOUI kozy have said “the tragedy of Africa is that the African
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY CHANELLE ADAMS man has not fully entered into history” during his 2007
speech in Dakar. After stating that African people exist
outside of history, he elaborated on his colonial ideolo-
gy adding that the “African peasant” exists in an end-
less present and is therefore, not only without a past,
but also without a future. The idea of “giving birth” to
peoples and nations organizes the world on a colonial
timeline. For example, many migrants in France have
been assigned the birthdate of January 1st, a day “au-
tomatically given to immigrants who did not know their
date of birth, because they came from countries or re-
gions where civil status services were lacking or were in
their infancy” (Latifa Oulkhouir, 2001).
Official history is the dominant national narrative that aims
to hold sole authority on events that, in reality, possess
multiple accounts: “until the lions have their own histori-
ans, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
French history is taught as a list of important dates to
memorize by heart. The selected dates are, of course,
always to the advantage of the national narrative: a
bunch of notches on a timeline follow the march of prog-
ress demonstrated by an arrow moving from left to right
which represents past, present, and future — implicitly
suggesting that writing in the other direction would be like
Untitled #17 from the regressing, going against progress. The events on the
series Mémoire by
Sammy Baloji (2006).
timeline are discontinuous and detached from their con-
Courtesy of the artist structive processes. The product of this superimposition
and Imane Farès.
of key dates is the illusion of a sum of moments in which
nothing happened between the dates. A timeline speaks
nothing of the interstices.
The Desert Is Not a Void ///
Colonization draws spatial borders on geographical
maps while totally ignoring existing social realities. In a
similar way, colonization draws subjective temporal bor-
ders across the world that impose a rhythm and social
Left. Roads, railways, formations that ignore pre-existing realities. Take the Sa-
and airways in
hara as an example, which is often represented in French
colonized Algeria.
Right top. Assakrem
When the colonial power builds a railway, it does in Ghardimaou dates back to the 1920s. Growing up geopolitical books as a “non-space”, “hole”, or “void.”
road in construction not only colonize space, it also colonizes time. in France, everything I learned in school from history This depiction makes it seem as if the desert were a so-
in the Algerian Sa-
Meryem-Bahia Arfaoui describes the relationship books — which was already quite limited — seemed off. cial anomaly absent of any life. Because the desert does
hara. Right center.
Railway in Abadla in between time, space, the State, and the law in this That’s because it was. Even though this history claimed not correspond to the Western political imagination, the
the Algerian Sahara. article that can be used as a toolbox for our issue. to be objective, the narrative was never impartial in its
Right bottom. Sahara is denied politics or history.
“The imperial road” storytelling or its timeline. By removing human experi-
between Bechar in One evening, my uncle and I sat in our courtyard in Jen- ence, the history I was taught claimed to survey the en-
Algeria and Gao in
The Sahara has its own temporality that largely precedes
Mali. / All documents douba in northwestern Tunisia, talking about our home- tire world by conveying strictly the facts. But time and popularized representations of it. In reality, the desert is
from Science & Vie land. In Tunisia, “we got our independence in 1956,” I chronology are not politically neutral. And colonizer time far from static and empty. It is a highly mobile and nomad-
no. 43 (June 1958).
said. He abruptly shot me a stern look, almost as if by is not the same as time kept by the colonized. ic space, which is not defined by its margins (a function
reflex, before retorting, “1956... that’s a French date!” of borders) but by the flows that structure it. For example,
That night, my ensuing questions pierced through the Birth of Independence /// an oasis is a crossroads and lively meeting place, but is
thick silence of the quiet border villages. I would come Back home, in the mountains connecting Algeria and often depicted in the exotic imagination as a site of rest
to learn that Tunisian independence had been claimed Tunisia, no one will let you say France “gave birth” to our for lone, weary travellers. When the colonists arrived they
long before the 1950s. In fact, the armed resistance freedom in 1956. “Giving birth” implies a mythological denied the pre-existing realities of the Sahara. In total
26 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
contradiction with colonial aspirations for a sedentary
and expansive authoritarian State, the colonists imposed
structures of control. Enforced standardization of space
“RAILROAD CON-
and time radically distorted the desert. Railroad con-
STRUCTION MADE
struction made connecting two points of space quicker CONNECTING TWO
and as a result, it compressed time, reduced it and gave POINTS OF SPACE
QUICKER AND AS
it an exogenous rhythm that did not correspond to the A RESULT, IT COM-
desert’s pre-existing spatio-temporality. PRESSED TIME,
REDUCED IT AND
GAVE IT AN EXOG-
Chronopolitics /// ENOUS RHYTHM
THAT DID NOT
Colonization imposes definitions of time across space CORRESPOND TO
— or the domination of time through the appropriation THE DESERT’S
PRE-EXISTING
of space. The imposition of the capitalist-State as the ulti-
SPATIO-TEMPO-
mate form of social organization creates a standard tem- RALITY. ”
poral referential (modernity) whose main functions are
to normalize the negation of any other social temporality
and to establish State dominion over any other social
structure. On the world map, we can observe how time
zones require all of humanity to live at the same rhythm
of “progress.” These lines are also borders.
Political time is created and ordered by State authorities
that declare itself as the norm. To define political time, the
State must describe itself as timeless such that without
the State there is no temporality: nothing exists before
the State nor beyond it. In this construction of political
time, the State centers itself as the defining, dominant,
authority of time-space. Because creating political time
requires memory, the State produces its own superficial
and fictitious accounts by drawing up a linear and causal
narrative to make it seem as if history were the product
of a progression of moments. The State then denies any
role in this construction and defers to an essentially tau-
tological referential: it is because it is.
One main function of the State is to name and to govern.
It does this by systematically determining what is and dif-
ferentiating it from what is not. To do this, the State needs
a nomenclature system. Law is the language of the State.
It is used to define political time by establishing a system
of measurement. Therefore, in the same way that there is
a “geopolitics” aimed at analyzing power over territories,
it is essential to acknowledge a “chronopolitics,” which
“...COLONIZATION
analyzes power over temporalities. IS NOT A MOMENT
IN HISTORY BUT A
Colonization as Anti-History /// PROCESS OF DE-
STRUCTION. IT IS
To say colonization is a part of history is to give it con- THE PERMANENT
structive value. In actuality, colonization is not a moment NEGATION OF ALL
THAT IS PRE-EX-
in history but a process of destruction. It is the perma- ISTING.”
nent negation of all that is pre-existing. In practice, colo-
nization destroys, deforms, and suffocates history by en-
forcing a dominant temporality and organizing the whole
world around it. Colonization denies collective construc-
tions of history in favor of a fictitious imaginary. In pursuit
of an idealized Western social organization, colonization
enacts an expansionist de-historicization through de-
struction and annihilation. For example, pretending land
is without history is a myth the colonizer employs to ap-
propriate, privatize and to transform land into goods for
the purposes of production and consumption.
27
 The colonial State monopolizes space by denying any
form of habitation other than that which has been clear-
ly defined by borders. These borders produce an interior
and exterior. But in colonization, the outside is just another
inside. In the same way, the State monopolizes time by
denying anything outside of it. This is how a colonial State
gives “birth” to independence by solely acknowledg-
ing that a society exists. By defining modernity and the
meaning of progress, the State also defines the meaning
of “history.” It imposes systematic ruptures upon histories
(of countries, peoples, humans, etc.). Through creating
permanent ruptures it fabricates a standardized structural
continuity in their place — such that anywhere in the world
it’s the year 2021, even though this calendar corresponds
to a specific history that is far from relevant to most. As
another example, the term “medieval” has the connotation
of something regressive in the Western context. For Arabs,
the Middle Ages are a period rich in innovation and to call
something “medieval” would mean the exact opposite.
It’s essential to deconstruct the idea that histories of mar-
ginalized struggles are only constructed by their relation
to dominant colonial history. Understanding histories of
the oppressed through narratives provided by those that
seek to destroy them is counterintuitive. Considering re-
sistance while remaining in this State vision of time forces
a sequence of events stuck in the logic of strict causality.
Struggles and revolts are not disconnected from tempo-
rality. However, they take place on their own temporal-
ity located on a matrix of existence that spans the long
“REVOLTS AGAINST
COLONIALISM ARE term — a proper historicity with extant social knowledge
NOT JUST ANTI-CO- and practices — which makes contact with this new, fic-
LONIAL HISTORY;
THEY REPRESENT titious, short term temporality.
AN EVEN LONGER
REFUSAL OF COL-
ONIZATION WHICH
To struggle is to restore continuity by building bridges
REAFFIRMS ITSELF across the ruptures imposed by the colonizer. Resistance
CONSTANTLY. TO LIM-
IT THE HISTORY OF
reaffirms a process of construction in the face of the West-
STRUGGLE AGAINST ern State, which seeks to convince us that nothing exists
COLONIALISM TO THE
outside of its definition. The histories of struggles are not
COLONIZER’S CLOCK
IS TO DEFER TO THE ruptures in colonial continuity. Rather, it is colonization that
DOMINANT TIMELINE is a rupture in the histories of the oppressed; the oppressed
OF THE OPPRESSOR.”
will be in permanent resistance against it. Revolts against
colonialism are not just anti-colonial history; they represent
an even longer refusal of colonization which reaffirms itself
constantly. To limit the history of struggle against colonial-
ism to the colonizer’s clock is to defer to the dominant time-
line of the oppressor. This would effectively render colonial-
ism as a positive temporality through which a resistance
must be constructed. But, it is not violence that creates
resistance, it is everything that precedes it. If we highlight
the fact that colonization is an anti-history that aims to anni-
hilate everything that exists outside of it then we can return
it to its marginality, to its violence, we denormalize it and call
it what it really was: the destruction of history.
28
The Law as the State’s Metronome ///
The State is essentially based on two permanent tensions
that constitute the basis of its modus operandi: repression
and law. Repression serves to dominate space (notably
by police force), and law serves to dominate time (nota-
bly through its legislation). Above these two axes, the State
grants itself “the monopoly of legitimate violence” (Max
Weber, 1919), which is the all-encompassing power of
determination and definition. The State defines through sil-
houette: something is defined not by what it is, but based
on what it is not. In this formulation, everything is a funda-
mentally negative entity. To create an object, it must draw
its contours. To create a State, it must draw boundaries
that exclude. To create ordered political time, it must ex-
clude all “illegal” (i.e., outlawed) temporalities. The norm is
a fictitious reality of exclusions constituted as the basis for
measurement. And it is through this lens that all things are
determined. The State is, in essence, a process of negation
and exclusion enforced by violence and use of lethal power
(material and immaterial).
The law is the most purified form of the State’s authority be-
cause it creates a unit of measurement that allows it to con-
stitute itself entirely. Law measures the political time of the
State: it defines when things are, when they are no longer,
how long they last, etc. Legislation stands as truth as long
as they are in place, even if they’re in total contradiction
with social practices. For example, the French law of the 26
Brumaire year IX (November 7, 1800) specified that “any
woman wishing to dress as a man must present herself to
the prefecture of police to obtain the authorization” forbid-
ding women to wear pants, was only repealed in 2013. The
law creates a political time distinct from lived social realities
which makes it one of the most insidious weapons of State
domination. It permeates all social interactions — from the
duration of a president’s term of office to the duration of
a cell phone contract — and permanently measures and
defines everything in order to constrain it (to legalize is to
control). Therefore, the law creates a strict temporal frame-
work outside of which everything is considered illegitimate.
The law is a political metronome of the State’s daily
rhythms. In everyday life, most legal rules are latent and
infiltrate all our actions until they become reflexes — cross-
ing at the crosswalk is not innate behavior. By what I would
call “the routine exception,” the law suddenly breaks with
a previous order to create a new normal. Take for example
the rules inherited from the successive states of emergen-
cy in France, which have imposed themselves as a new
legal order. States of emergency are initially presented as
a very short expression of State omnipotence. However,
in a State of law, there is no exception. It is structured by
exceptions. Therefore, the very nature of a state of emer-
gency is to normalize the latent violence of the State and
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
to give the impression that, because it is widespread, it is
bearable. Without a State of emergency, there is no State of
non-emergency — and therefore, no rule of law.
While states of emergency are observed as legal re-
sponses to active realities (mass uprisings, health crises,
etc.), there is also a permanent state of emergency with-
in the State: the prison. The prison is another structuring
fiction that serves as a basic unit of measurement of the
State. It calls both the law and the State into existence. It
operates as a unit of measurement, since it serves to de-
fine the extreme violence of the State in relation to which
diffuse violence is constituted.
The prison both reinforces the State’s ordinariness and, at
the same time, structures it: the law has no viability if it is
not sanctionable. By creating this exceptional space-time,
the State normalizes ordinary law, ordinary repression, or-
dinary violence and ordinary political time. The prison is
a spatio-temporal structure of chronic concentration —
both time and space are constrained. It is therefore where
the rules for measuring political time are created. Without
a space-time of ultimate constraint, the State cannot de-
fine an ordinary and therefore a political time that would
like to be objective and whose only purpose is, in reality,
to serve its own survival. In prison, one is condemned “for
a time,” in the State, one is condemned for life. It is the
difference between the two that normalizes the State con-
straint exercised on our temporalities.
In order to exist, the State controls time and distorts his-
tory. By rendering itself as preponderant, everything else
is defined by contrast as anomaly or deviance from the
norm. Colonization and prisons are archetypal examples
of State domination over time. The State derives its power
from this self-conferred authority to dictate political time.
It seeks to be the sole structure of continuity. It imposes
the idea that, de facto, there can be no society without a
State even though it draws its power from the systematic
negation of its own temporalities. The State is a social
rupture. This is because it denies all other temporalities
and processes of social construction (a common sense
of living together, a shared memory, an affective trans-
mission) to maintain State power. However, the State is
the temporal deviance. It is the State which builds itself a
posteriori of the societies that constitute it, that amalgam-
ates them and oppresses them. The State is a social and
temporal anomaly, which is to say — it is not measured
because it exists but only exists because it is measured.
To resist is also to create linkages and bridges, to break
the ruptures and to bind that which exists.
Transmission, such as the conversation I had with my
uncle, is essential to our struggle because it is what
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
characterizes continuous time — social collective or-
ganization is a process in permanent reaffirmation and
mutation of itself. Each time the State imposes its domi-
nation on time, the autonomous, marginalized social en-
tities (from oppressed peoples in current colonies to the
inhabitants of racialized working-class districts), reaffirm
and transform knowledge of the long term within these
very recent, short determined chronopolitics. But ulti-
mately, the State needs control in order to exist. Societies
do not need a State to reinvent themselves.
That August, I stayed up late into the night as my uncle
relayed a history previously unknown to me. When he
was six years old he would go with my grandmother each “THE PRISON IS
A SPATIO-TEMPO-
day to bring lunch to the house next door where Houari RAL STRUCTURE
Boumédiène and other Algerian National Liberation Front OF CHRONIC
CONCENTRATION
fighters were hiding. He told me how we hid in the moun-
— BOTH TIME AND
tains and fought in Aïn Draham. And how we turned the SPACE ARE CON-
house into a makeshift hospital. STRAINED.”
That night, for the first time, I could situate myself in a tem-
porality that was not fictional. I felt what it was like to have
my own history — one that reaches far beyond the ports
of La Goulette. There was still so much for him to tell me,
and so much for me to hear. I think he didn’t want “France
to swallow me up,” as he said. We said we’d continue
the discussion “next year in shaa Allah.” “Next year,” for
us, means “the next time you come to Tunisia.” One time
“next year” amounted to four years.
I finally made it back that December. Unfortunately, this
time I came to bury my uncle. His stories were buried with
him. Our courtyard in Jendouba is silent again. Or so it
seems. I like to believe there’s more writing on the walls to
be revealed in time. I replay this night from memory, nostal-
gic for all the conversations we never got a chance to have
and with immense gratitude to have been able to have this
one. I re-tell this story so it is not forgotten and to remind us
that, after all, 1956 is only a date made up by the French. ■
Meryem-Bahia Arfaoui is an activist of Tunisian
descent who grew up in a working-class neigh-
borhood in Toulouse, France. After having ob-
tained a degree in geopolitics, she started a PhD
aiming at questioning the relationship between
time and power. She interrupted this PhD and
went back to Toulouse where she has been or-
ganizing in antiracist, working-class, feminist,
queer, and anti-carceral movements for the last
three years. She is currently working in an asso-
ciation that accompanies Toulouse working-class
neighborhoods’ youth to create movies. She has
directed two short movies herself and contem-
plates resuming her research.
29
ARTICLES TIME STANDARDIZATION,
CLOCK TOWERS & COLONIALISM
IN IRELAND AND PALESTINE
EMILY JACIR
at Dunsink Observatory in County Dublin, where sun-
rise and sunset were 25 minutes and 21 seconds later
than at Greenwich Observatory in London. In the wake
of the Easter Rising, a proclamation by the British gov-
ernment stated that Dublin Mean Time would be syn-
chronized with Greenwich Mean Time for military and
commercial purposes. Later in that same year the Time
(Ireland) Act of September 1916 defined that the legal
time for Ireland was to be Greenwich Mean Time.
In 1917, the British military began its colonial occupa-
tion of Jerusalem. Five years later the clock tower at
Jaffa gate was removed under the command of Ronald
Storrs, the British military governor of the occupied city,
in an attempt to make the city match the British imag-
inary of what biblical Jerusalem should look like. This
intricate Clock Tower had been built at Jaffa Gate (Bab
al-Khalil) in Jerusalem in 1901. It was built to commem-
orate the 25th year of the enthronement of Sultan Ab-
dul Hamid II in the Ottoman Empire. The notables who
funded the project at Jaffa Gate were all local Jerusa-
lemites. Seven of these clock towers were constructed
throughout Palestine in Nablus, Akka, Haifa, Safad,
Nazareth, Jaffa, and Jerusalem.
Militarized Coloniza- One hundred years later, in the centenary year of the
tion. Reportage at Easter Rising and the Balfour Declaration, I exhibited
magazine Manchete
about the colonial two site-specific works at the Irish Museum of Modern
projects implement- Art: Notes for a Cannon (2016-2017). The Museum it-
ed by the military
dictatorship in the
self is housed in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, itself a
Amazon, early 1970. colonial site, and indeed it was from his rooms in here
that General Maxwell ordered the deaths of the leaders
Details from Notes for a Cannon by Emily Jacir of the Rising. The works came out of an extensive re-
(2016). / G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph
Collection (Library of Congress Prints and In 2016 and 2017, Emily Jacir exhibited a site-specific work entitled Notes for a search into the shared history of British Colonial Rule in
Photographs Division). Cannon at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Commemorating the 100 year anni- both Palestine and Ireland, remnants which still abound
versary of the Easter Rising in Ireland and the British Occupation of Palestine, today. Ireland was the first colonial laboratory of the
she traces time-keeping practices and the standardization of time imposed on British Empire and the Irish people lived for centuries
under British occupation. Between 1917 and 1948,
these intertwining geographies.
Great Britain, more than any other nation, helped to lay
In 1916, when the General Post Office (GPO) clock stopped at 2.25 p.m. during the the diplomatic, governmental, military, and economic
Easter Rising — an uprising to end British rule and establish an independent Irish Re- foundations for a State of Israel in Palestine. Though
public — it was operating under Dublin Mean Time. In London it was 2:50 p.m. (G.M.T). both sites were subjected to British colonial rule for
The GPO on O’Connell street had been taken over as the headquarters of the Rising’s very different lengths of time, Palestine’s comparatively
leaders and meeting place for the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, and it was from late entrance meant that it entered a system with al-
outside this building on April 24, 1916, that Padraig Pearse had read the Proclamation of ready well-established modes of governing, policing,
the Irish Republic. In 1880, the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act had defined Dublin Mean and administering along with hundreds of years of
Time (DMT) as the legal time for Ireland. This was the local mean time as measured experience accumulated against fighting anti-colonial
30 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
“IRELAND AND
PALESTINE SHARE
A HISTORY OF
PARTITION, OC-
CUPATION, AND
DISPOSSESSION.
movements and counter-insurgency in Ireland. The BOTH THE LAND
works examined how this violent colonial history and AND THE CULTURE
ARE MARKED BY
these invasive disruptions of social, cultural, religious, IMPERIALISM AND
and political orders played out and how they continue SETTLER COLO-
NIALISM, AS WELL
to shape our present condition.
AS BY AN ENDUR-
ING RESISTANCE
Ireland and Palestine share a history of partition, oc- TO THEM.”
cupation, and dispossession. Both the land and the
culture are marked by imperialism and settler colonial-
ism, as well as by an enduring resistance to them. Both
are positioned at the edge of mercantile seas and both
were/are colonial projects mapped onto a religious
conflict to make it appear as a “religious war.” There is
a long history of solidarity between Ireland and Pales-
tine, including radical tactics used by the Irish that have
served to inspire Palestinian efforts to resist occupation
such as the hunger strikes. Though the Irish went on
to attain their independence, with the exception of the
six counties in the North, Palestine with the Nakba, an
event whose repercussions are even more harsh and
devastating today, remained and remains occupied.
Additionally, refugees who were forced to flee Palestine
in 1948 have fled for a second, third and sometimes
fourth time due to current events in the Arab world.
Notes for a Cannon had many facets, but it was es-
sentially an exploration into the slippages of and stan-
dardization of time, as well as time-keeping practices “NOTES FOR A
in public spaces. It explored the ways in which various CANNON HAD
MANY FACETS,
times are lived and experienced simultaneously. BUT IT WAS
ESSENTIALLY AN
EXPLORATION
The passage of the Time Act provocatively followed fast INTO THE SLIP-
after the events of Easter 1916 and on the executions of PAGES OF AND
STANDARDIZATION
its leaders that culminated in Roger Casement’s hanging OF TIME, AS WELL
in August 1916. When, on October 1, 1916, Dublin AS TIME-KEEPING
PRACTICES IN
Mean Time was replaced with GMT, it was met with
PUBLIC SPACES.
considerable criticism and resistance at the time in- IT EXPLORED THE
cluding opposition from local councils, politicians, WAYS IN WHICH
VARIOUS TIMES
farmers and some business groups. The Irish revolu- ARE LIVED AND
tionary Countess Markievicz complained bitterly about EXPERIENCED SI-
MULTANEOUSLY.”
the change, writing that “public feeling was outraged.”
She had taken part in the Easter Rising and had been
sentenced to death, but her sentence was reduced on
account of her gender. In one of the many letters to the
newspapers that I collected regarding this one com-
mentator remarked, “an Irish sun was replaced by an
English sun.”
31
 At 2:00 am Dublin Mean Time on Sunday, October 1, 1916, time changed forever in
Ireland, when British clocks went back an hour for winter, Irish clocks went back by only
35 minutes to synchronize the clocks between Ireland and Britain, thus establishing a
“ALL IRISH CLOCKS
WERE NOW OFFICIAL-
uniform temporal regime throughout the “United Kingdom.” All Irish clocks were now
LY ENGLISH.” officially English.

Time also changed forever in Jerusalem when the Clocktower at Jaffa Gate was de-
stroyed in 1922:

“The famous Clock Tower at the Jaffa Gate, in Jerusalem, has been taken down on the
grounds that it was ugly and not in keeping with the ancient wall. It was put up in 1907,
and boasted of a fine timepiece, giving both European and Arabic times. The tower was
removed at the instigation of the Pro-Jerusalem Society, which was founded by Sir Ron-
ald Storrs, the Present Governor of the Holy City, some 18 month ago, and whose object
is “to preserve the ancient monuments, encourage technical education, plant trees, and
in general beautify the ancient and historic city of Jerusalem.” Harold J. Shepstone “Re-
storing the Walls of Jerusalem,” 1924.

The clock tower had displayed alafranga (best translated as “european style”) so Eu-
ropean standard time on its western and eastern faces and alaturka (best translated
as “ottoman style” local time on its northern and southern faces. Alaturka, an Ottoman
Details from Notes for a Cannon (2016).
/ Photos by Denis Mortell (2016).

Details from Notes for a Cannon (2016).

/ Papers of John D. Whiting (Library of Con-
gress Prints and Photographs Division).
system of measuring time, goes according to the setting and rising of the sun (sunset
being 0 hours and sunrise 12 hours). Alaturka time divides the day into 12-hour periods
whose actual duration varies with the season. To me the most important aspect of the
clock tower at Jaffa gate was precisely this, that it had kept two distinct modes of mea-
suring time in the same frame rather than seeking to eradicate one over the other. Two
temporal systems lived side by side inhabiting the same space. It was this concurrent
use of two time systems and their simultaneity that the British colonial power sought to
erase. British modernization could not accept the co-existence within the same frame
of these two distinct modes of measuring time, a reality that was actually lived in the
quotidian experience of the city’s residents. The removal of the clock tower in the name
of aesthetic and so-called “authentic” origins, had not only erased from Jerusalem the “THE REMOVAL OF
THE CLOCK TOW-
trace of an alternative vision of modernization capable of simultaneously embracing two
ER IN THE NAME
systems of marking daily time, but also imposed a historical fantasy of the city itself onto OF AESTHETIC
itself. Interestingly, in Ireland, despite the officially operating DMT time, each county AND SO-CALLED
‘AUTHENTIC’ ORI-
and city set their local clocks according to true local time or Apparent Solar Time and GINS [...] ERASED
in some rail stations both DMT time and local time were displayed on two time clocks. FROM JERUSALEM
THE TRACE OF AN
Mean time had entered the Ottoman Empire around the middle of the 19th century and ALTERNATIVE VI-
was increasingly used in various governmental agencies alongside the indigenous ala- SION OF MODERN-
IZATION CAPABLE
Converging grass-
turka hour system. The Ottoman Empire used alafranga time mainly for the military and OF SIMULTANE-
roots struggles. in various agencies handling communications, transportation and foreign affairs. OUSLY EMBRAC-
Photograph of ING TWO SYSTEMS
one of the famous OF MARKING
empates, i.e. stand- Internationally before the age of the railway and telegraph, every community kept its DAILY TIME...”
offs against loggers own hour which was derived from the meridian where it was located. By the 1870s, there
conducted by the
rubber tappers was pressure both to establish a prime meridian for worldwide navigation purposes and
movement in Acre, to unify local times for railway timetables and communication. The first International
Brazilian Amazon,
circa 1982. Geographical Congress, held in Antwerp in 1871, passed a motion in favor of the use

32 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME 33
 Top. Royal Hospital Kilmainham Clock Tower in Left. Detail from Notes for a Cannon (2016).
Dublin. / Photo by Emily Jacir (2016). Bottom. View 1982 poster issued by the Republican Movement.
of the exhibition Notes for a Cannon by Emily Jacir / Courtesy of the Linen Hall Library. Right. Detail
from Notes for a Cannon (2016). Free Derry Muse-
(2016). Photo by Dennis Mortell (2016) / The work was As part of my exhibition at Irish Museum of Modern Art, one of my first proposals was that um. / Photo by Emily Jacir (2009).
comprised of two piece: a site specific sound piece
at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham Clock Tower, and a the museum would run on Dublin Mean Time (DMT) for the duration of my exhibition and
multimedia installation at the Irish Museum Modern to change all the clocks in the public spaces to DMT, all lectures and events scheduled to
Art (IMMA), which includes drawings, videos, texts
and photos created by the artist as well as, archival
DMT, and all day-today operations and the website to be in DMT. When that was unable
material and objects including photographs from the to be carried about by the museum, I then proposed that the Royal Hospital clock would
papers of John D. Whiting; Library of Congress Prints
be stopped at 2:25 p.m. on November 24, 2016, and that no bells would ring throughout
and Photographs Division; newspaper clippings
from the Irish Independent (courtesy the National the duration of my exhibition. The Royal Hospital clock would then resume timekeeping on “THE SOUNDS IN
Library of Ireland); newspaper clippings from Falastin February 27, 2017, after the exhibition was over. A third proposal was that a cannon shot THE INSTALLATION
Newspaper (courtesy Institute of Palestine Studies, WERE THUS ALL,
Beirut); a document from Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi would be fired at noon alaturka each day for the duration of my show — the museum did
TO VARYING DE-
(The Ottoman State Archives, Istanbul); a 1982 poster actually contact the Irish army in order to try to make this happen. GREES, MARKING
issued by the Republican Movement (courtesy the TIME AND COR-
Linen Hall Library); 19th century bell once installed in a RESPONDENCES
church in Armagh, Northern Ireland (manufactured by It was my fourth proposal — a site-specific sound intervention — which was realized BETWEEN TWO
T. Mears Whitechapel Foundry, London); 19th century DIVERGENT SYS-
Ottoman Billodes/Zenith pocket watch: K. Serkisoff &
and which took place at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham Clock Tower. For the duration
TEMS OF RECORD-
Co. Constantinople. Commissioned by IMMA for the of the exhibition every day at noon, Dublin Mean Time, a bell struck 12 times from the ING AND MARKING
exhibition Europa at IMMA, 2016-2017.
tower, signaling a noontide 35 minutes out of sync with what is now standard Irish time THE HOURS OF
THE DAY THAT
(GMT). At noon Greenwich Mean Time, the sound of a single cannon shot rang out from WERE EQUALLY
of the Greenwich Meridian for (smaller scale) passage charts, suggesting that it should the tower. And finally, at noon alaturka time the call to prayer from the tower echoed DISPLACED BY
A COLONIAL
become mandatory within 15 years. At the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington throughout the area. The alaturka timing of the call to prayer meant that it was gradually
IMPOSITION OF
D.C. in 1884, the Ottoman delegate declared that in the Ottoman State there would shifting in relation to the sun, but also in relation to both DMT and GMT across the du- STANDARDIZED
always be two times: mean time dials placed next to alaturka ones on all public clocks. ration of the exhibition. The sounds in the installation were thus all, to varying degrees, TIME.”

The Ottoman Clock tower in Akka still exists today. The first time I filmed it in 1999, all
the clock faces were missing and all that remained were empty holes. I searched in vain
through archives trying to locate images of its clock faces after the State of Israel was
declared in 1948, but I found nothing. All that I have from before the so-called restoration
is my own video footage. The clock tower was “restored” in 2001 in a special ceremony,
where four new clock faces were installed: one in Hebrew, the second with Arabic digits
(European), the third with Roman digits, and the fourth Eastern Arabic numerals. The
clock tower at Jaffa gate was destroyed in order “restore” the ancient walls of Jerusalem’s
Old City and to preserve it as a non-modern and “ancient” biblical site. In Akka the “re-
stored” new clock faces are an example of the Zionist project to backdate the Jewish pres-
ence in Palestine, to imply a historical continuity with the ancient sites and the traditions of
the area, while simultaneously erasing the actual history and relationships on the ground.
marking time and correspondences between two divergent systems of recording and
marking the hours of the day that were equally displaced by a colonial imposition of
standardized time. ■
Emily Jacir lives in the Mediterranean and is an artist and filmmaker who is
primarily concerned with transformation, translation, resistance and silenced
historical narratives. Her work investigates personal and collective movement
through public space and its implications on the physical and social experi-
ence of trans-Mediterranean space and time. She is a co-founder and Execu-
tive Director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem. She
has built a complex and compelling oeuvre spanning a diverse range of media
and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative
gestures, and in-depth research.

34 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME 35
ARTICLES PARTITIONING TERRITORY,
PARTITIONING TIME
SYMA TARIQ
the world ended, and two independent nation States —
India and (East and West) Pakistan — were born, a birth
marked by communal and gendered violence and chaos
at a scale still somewhat unfathomable today.
The brand new border in the West, splitting Punjab in
haste with no consideration of the complex, syncretic
and ancient communities it cut through, facilitated mass
hostility and horror that still plagues public memory. The
boundary line re-drawn in Bengal in the East was one
of multiple “partitions”: 1905, 1947, and 1971, after the
Bangla language movement led to the bloody liberation
war with West Pakistan’s military regime and the creation
of independent Bangladesh.
Like the British partitioning of Ireland in 1922 and of
Palestine in 1947 (three months after India), long-last-
ing imperial policies of “divide and rule” were substitut-
ed by a new summary mode: divide and leave. Binary
identitarian lines were now markers of nationhood, and
anyone left on the “wrong” side of these religious-ter-
ritorial borders no longer fully belonged. These parti-
tions share another characteristic, one that is usually
left out of the history books and mainstream discus-
sions: the devastation of the colonial record by the exit-
ing British, who burned, destroyed or hid masses of ev-
idence relating to its rule over 37 former dependencies.
The decades-long secrecy surrounding the remains of
colonial files that were not destroyed, locked up in the
“migrated archives” of the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office in the U.K., was revealed in 2011 after a court
case connected to the Kenyan uprising and Mau Mau
massacre forced its hand to admit to its holdings. This
erasure is still ongoing: the U.K. ministerial veto on re-
leasing the Mountbatten papers to researchers — be-
lieved to contain much more evidence on the Partition
— is currently being challenged, with little optimism
A political cartog-
that they will ever be seen.
raphy of the Indian
In this text, Syma Tariq refuses to interpret the It’s difficult to pinpoint the end of colonialism, if you be-
Subcontinent in 1947.
/ Map by Léopold Partition of the Indian Subcontinent as a punc- lieve that it ended. In the context of the British Raj, howev- As described by Japanese researcher Shohei Sato, Brit-
Lambert and Shivangi tual event with a beginning and an end. Rather, er, the task is seemingly easier thanks to a clearly defined
Mariam Raj with ain should have theoretically handed over every docu-
inputs from Akanksha she conceptualizes it as a process that can be and often repeated time-stamp: midnight, on August 14- ment in the colonial territories to each of the new gov-
Kumar and Nilanjana reconstituted (in an always non-exhaustive man- 15, 1947. This specific moment is etched into the collec-
Bhattacharjee (2021). ernments, but some papers were deemed too sensitive
ner) through its sonic dimension embodied by the tive memory of the Indian Subcontinent and its scattered or inconvenient to be passed on. From 1947 onwards,
many stories — in their subjective temporalities — peoples, as well as in the minds of those who lament/ British officials swiftly engaged in a massive and shady
of those who experienced the State crystallization defend this shameful period of empire. From one day to programme relating to its administrative records. Under
of national identities. the next, so it goes, centuries of colonialism in this part of the clandestine and widespread Operation Legacy, as
36 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
detailed by British journalist Ian Cobain in his book The
History Thieves, officials were advised to destroy any
documents, anywhere, that would “embarrass” the Brit-
ish State.
So as fires raged across the Indian subcontinent, its
history also went up in flames. Palls of smoke hung
in the Delhi sky for around two weeks, according to
journalists who witnessed the bonfire of documents
outside its government building. In some ways, the “IT IS APPAR-
ENT THAT THE
Partition restarted the clock of the world, the ashes of PARTITION IS
empire strewn across a landscape of ground zeroes, a MUCH MORE THAN
AN EVENT THAT
disappearing act conveniently obscured by the violent HAPPENED AT A
transition of historical epochs. CERTAIN TIME, A
TIME THAT HAD A
CLEAR BEGINNING
My research on the India/Pakistan Partition focuses on AND A CLEAR END,
A TIME THAT CAN
its sonic-archival forms and the prevalence of oral histo-
BE ENCAPSULAT-
ries and testimony in the wake of colonial rule, erasure ED BY STORIES
and abandonment. It is apparent that the Partition is THAT HAVE EASY
BEGINNINGS AND
much more than an event that happened at a certain ENDINGS.”
time, a time that had a clear beginning and a clear end, a
time that can be encapsulated by stories that have easy
beginnings and endings. The horrors and violence of
the Partition are well documented, but its legacies need
reiterating at a contemporary moment where racial and
religious division as well as Islamophobia determines
politics in both South Asia and the U.K.. Over the course
of my research, the increasing violence against Muslims
in India and Indian-occupied Kashmiris has brought
Partition into public discourse again. The government’s
implementation of the National Register of Citizens and
the Citizenship Amendment Act in December 2019, and
the feminist-led backlash against these laws, have re-
sulted in Indian Muslims being told a chilling phrase: to
“go to the graveyard, or go to Pakistan” — a similar sen-
timent is also expressed towards Assamese Muslims
to “go back” to Bangladesh. The mass exodus — en-
forced with no warning or aid — from cities into rural
areas during India’s COVID-19 shutdown in 2020 was
a disturbing evocation of the mass displacement and
total disregard for ordinary people’s lives that haunts the
language-image of the Partition.
Partition’s effects stretch backwards in time as well. In
London, a monument to Major General Sir Henry Have-
lock stands in Trafalgar Square for his “bravery” during
the “campaign” in India in 1857-1858. This campaign,
37
 depending on one’s position, is also known as the First
War of Independence or the Sepoy Mutiny. In essence
it was the first struggle of resistance against the Raj that
“THE ITALIAN
was widespread enough to threaten colonial rule, and
COMMUNIST ORAL
HISTORIAN ALES- involved Indians of all faiths and classes. After the resis-
SANDRO PORTELLI tance was quashed, the colonial administration — now
POINTS OUT THAT
TO TELL A STORY officially administered by the British crown — enshrined
‘IS TO TAKE ARMS in law a brutal regime of collective punishment, ingrain-
AGAINST THE
THREAT OF TIME, ing new stereotypes of race, religion and caste to sep-
TO RESIST TIME, arate Hindus and Muslims socially and politically, par-
OR TO HARNESS
TIME. THAT A TALE
titioning them long before colonial cartographers were
IS A CONFRONTA- drafted in nearly a century later.
TION WITH TIME
IS THE ATTEMPT
TO CARVE OUT A Today, these same post-mutiny laws are still used to
SPECIAL TIME IN quash dissent — including anti-NRC protests in contem-
WHICH TO PLACE
porary India. The apparent timelessness of Havelock’s
THE TALE — A
TIME OUTSIDE OF statue, easily overlooked due to its proximity to the more
TIME, A TIME
famous Nelson’s Column, is a problematic public signi-
WITHOUT TIME’.”
fier of social memory, thousands of miles away from the
region which was shaped forever by the military brutality
it celebrates, its permanence in a prime spot of the city
so far unquestioned as a part of the U.K.’s heritage. With
all its complexities, “Partition” has become an increas-
ingly loaded term, and to wield it in the context of mem-
ory means to grapple with temporality just as much as
geography.
After the several decades of silence on the Partition — a
period of time marked by trauma and cultural taboo both
in the former colonies and the former heart of empire —
it has become a little easier to speak about, as long as
certain parameters are present: of visibility, of palatabili-
ty, and of colonial silence. This involves a kind of tempo-
“IT MEANS REFUS- ral framing that verges on the apolitical — liberal norms
ING THE UNIVER-
SALIZING TIME- of speech tell us that documenting witnesses of horror
LINES THAT HAVE and violence is an unproblematic solution to its ongo-
BEEN IMPOSED
ON TROUBLED ing effects. A largely cited motivation for the archival
AND SUBJUGAT- and cultural projects that now depend on such witness
ED HISTORIES,
LISTENING TO
voices is at first a coherent and justifiable one: the age-
THE STORIES ing Partition generation’s stories are to be lost forever if
THAT FILL AR-
they are not recorded, and so, time is running out to hear
CHIVES, MUSE-
UMS, BOOKS, them. If we consider the destruction of the colonial re-
AND FAMILY cord, the pressure of recording these witness accounts
HOMES IN WAYS
THAT INSTEAD becomes even more immense. Many voices are left out
CENTERS THE of the archives, of course, with the event-memory of the
TIMEFUL-NESS
OF THE EVERY- hegemonic classes most often prevailing. Sanitized oral
DAY, REVEALED history, of the kind that is designated to the inevitability
THROUGH MULTI-
PLE LANGUAGES,
of the past and the enclosure of the post-colonized ar-
SUBJECT POSI- chive, has been the backbone of a “‘memorial industry’
TIONS, SILENCES
that has grown out of the belated realization of Partition
AND SOUNDS.”
as collective trauma,” according to Ananya Kabir in “Hi-
eroglyphs and Broken Links: Remediated Script and
Partition Effects in Pakistan” (2009).
38
The capacity of storytelling to disrupt the received
timelines of history, however, also holds a lot of pow-
er. The Italian communist oral historian Alessandro
Portelli points out that to tell a story “is to take arms
against the threat of time, to resist time, or to harness
time. That a tale is a confrontation with time is the at-
tempt to carve out a special time in which to place the
tale — a time outside of time, a time without time.”
Considering the rhythms of speech, velocity of the
narrative and the spatial and subjective dimensions of
the story means fixed timelines are always disrupted.
On top of already fraught questions of how to create
historical meaning through personal narratives, this
messy act of witnessing challenges the idea of linear
chronology. In an oral narrative, for example, sever-
al years can be glossed over in a matter of minutes,
whereby a moment deemed notable enough can be
devoted to many interviews over several days in its
telling and retelling.
The collapsing and expansion of time in stories told
and preserved, about a time that has uneasy begin-
nings and endings as it is, means that the relationship
between time and storytelling, shaped by the collec-
tor’s presence in the current time, is embedded in the
practices and politics of listening. Sometimes dates are
misremembered. Sometimes experiences of the pres-
ent seeps into memories of the past. Aligning human
experience to the patterns of historical discourse in-
volves intersubjective encounters that are always con-
tingent on the time they take place. And no story is told
the same twice.
The idea of the Partition as a (sonic) condition, rather
than as an event that is fixed to a temporal moment,
therefore emerges from an Arendtian position: the Par-
tition as labor, a condition of life itself. This flip, which re-
jects the givenness of beginnings and endings, means
to reject colonial ideas of progress, of chronological
cause and consequence, of the idea that modernity
marches onwards, only disturbed by moments of irra-
tional violence that hinges on the social inevitability of
conflict that defines “non-modern” peoples. It means
refusing the universalizing timelines that have been im-
posed on troubled and subjugated histories, listening
to the stories that fill archives, museums, books, and
family homes in ways that instead centers the time-
ful-ness of the everyday, revealed through multiple
languages, subject positions, silences and sounds. As
listening to stories of the Partition reveals, time does
not in fact run out, but goes on and on — implicating
the undocumented as well as the documented across
multiple geographies and histories.
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
Considering Partition as a sonic condition is then an exercise in conceiving the pres-
ent as inseparable from the events of the past and imaginations of the future, a future
that does not look (or sound) the same for every body on all sides of its dividing lines.
The settler-colonial mentalities that have shaped the destinies of so many in Kashmir,
North-West Frontier Provinces, Balochistan, Assam, Chittagong Hill Tracts, and other
parts of the Indian Subcontinent depend of course on historical silencing, but also
on the persistent repetition of violence and contestations against injustice that are
never preserved. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay describes, whoever resists being properly
archivable along a linear time line under established categories becomes a violator of
the already accomplished past,and thus, the present.
“I QUESTION
THE IDEA OF
Is violence only worth remembering when it happens at a certain place and time? In THE EVENT [...]
a time of renewed North-South inequality through global medical apartheid, it is clear THROUGH SPEECH
AND LISTENING,
that some lives are more grievable than others. The fact that State or State-supported ENCOMPASSING
archives put people in their “right time” as well as their “right place” is a complex tool ORAL HISTO-
RIES, ARCHIVAL
of erasure to consider. In a series of ongoing audio essays called Partitioned Listening,
TELEVISION
initially produced as part of Nottingham Contemporary’s online public programme FOOTAGE, SONGS
Sonic Continuum, I question the idea of the event — one that is finite, and which we OF PROTEST, PER-
FORMANCE AND
imagine ourselves as standing outside of — through speech and listening, encom- MUSIC.”
passing oral histories, archival television footage, songs of protest, performance and
music. While time might be a human universal, the ways in which it is measured,
perceived and demarcated are not, and so listening becomes a tool in which we
can rethink historically instituted timelines. Listening (rather than looking or reading)
demands our temporal attentions in intimate ways, and so, amid the conditions of
borderization and division (partition), we are also implicated in these processes. For
example, what do I hear when I hear the term “riot?” How are time and place instituted
through its utterance? What images are conjured? Whose bodies are ensnared?
The Partition’s oral archive is a pertinent as well as problematic site for the investiga-
tion of the relationship between collective memory and collective oblivion; pertinent
due to the diversity and nuance of the information it holds and the richness that
testimony embodies, and problematic because of the opacity and silences that ar-
chives, as temporal as well as physical institutions, always contain. To conceive the
Partition as a sonic condition then imagines it as a state where recognition and rela-
tion, as well as division, are constantly produced. Listening to stories can be a way
to overcome the partitioning of people and places, finding expansive commonalities
of experience in what is said as well as what is not. It is also an exercise in resisting
the partitioning of past, present, and future. ■
Syma Tariq is a researcher, writer and radio producer. Her PhD, “Partition
as a sonic condition: listening through the postcolonized archive,” is being
undertaken at the centre for Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice
(CRiSAP), University of the Arts London. It focuses on the discursive and
temporal separations embedded in histories of the 1947 Partition through
sonic-archival forms and processes.
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME 39
INTERVEWS HISTORIES IN COPRESENCE:
CREATING A MULTIDIRECTIONAL
MEMORY OF THE HOLOCAUST IN
THE AGE OF DECOLONIZATION
A CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL ROTHBERG
Left. Monument to
the Ghetto Heroes
in Warsaw sculpted In this conversation with Michael Rothberg, we dis-
by Nathan Rapoport cuss his concept of “multidirectional memory,” which
in 1948 with
allows to place the living memory of the Shoah in a po-
materials originally
ordered by Albert litical and healing dialogue with other traumatic living
Speer for Nazi
monuments. / Photo
memories, in particular those that were formed in the
by Pudelek (2016). 1950s and 1960s by the violent counter-revolutionary
Right. The African
efforts against decolonization movements.
Renaissance
Monument in Dakar
designed by Pierre LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: Your book Multidirectional Mem-
Goudiaby in 2006.
/ Photo by Bigfall91 ory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolo-
(2013). nization (2009) draws “transitional lines” and “parallels”
between the Nazi Holocaust and the history of European
colonialism. You quote Jurgen Zimmerer about the role
German colonialism played in the acceptance, if not com-
plicity, of German citizens in the construction of the geno-
cidal machine. Can you talk about this, as well as your pre-
cise endeavor to de-exceptionalize the Holocaust, which
does not reduce its place in the history of the world, but
rather, makes it participate in a dialogue with other histo-
ries of European industrial violence?
MICHAEL ROTHBERG: The impetus to start working on
Multidirectional Memory came from my sense that a history
that should stand as a radical indictment of Europe — the
Nazi genocide of European Jews — was often being used
to prop up a perverse kind of Eurocentrism. In public dis-
course, especially, the Holocaust was treated as a unique,
sometimes “sacred” event detached from the histories out
of which it emerged and completely distinct from other his-
tories of genocide and racial violence. While I don’t think
40
the Holocaust is the “same” as other histories of violence,
including other genocides, I don’t see how we cannot also
note parallels, entanglements, and similarities. Making
note of such connections does not reduce or relativize the
significance of the Holocaust in world history — in some
ways it increases its importance. I remain puzzled about
what would follow from such an uncompromising empha-
sis on the uniqueness of an event — any event. Should
we only remember unique events? Do only unique events
make moral demands on us? Obviously not.
Scholarship sometimes contributes to this “exceptional-
ization,” but it also helps us understand the Holocaust as
a secular event that can be contextualized in various ways
and carefully compared to other historical occurrences.
Especially in the last couple of decades, one of the most
important tendencies in Holocaust research has been a
widening of the geographical lens: scholars have empha-
sized that, even if the genocide was initiated and planned
by Germans — who naturally bear primary responsibility
for it — much of Europe was involved in its perpetration
as collaborators, as beneficiaries, and sometimes even
as independently acting initiators of mass killing. My col-
leagues Sarah Stein and Aomar Boum (along with other
scholars) have also been pursuing the unfolding of the Ho-
locaust in North Africa, which has not received as much
attention as it deserves until now.
If we then widen the chronological lens as well, as numerous
scholars also demand, it seems indisputable that Europe’s
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
past played a crucial role in helping establish the condi-
tions of possibility for the genocide. Within this widened
chronology, we find not only World War I, the economic and
political crises of the interwar period, and a long history of
Christian anti-Judaism, but also necessarily the history of
European imperialism. It is within the history of empire that
ideas about racial superiority and inferiority developed, that
certain groups were marked as disposable, and that a high
tolerance for extreme violence against racial others was cul-
tivated. How can that not be relevant?
There is ongoing debate among historians about what pre-
cise role colonialism played in the Nazi genocide. For me, it’s
less about drawing a straight line from German colonialism
to the Holocaust than about considering what I’ve called the
conditions of possibility for the genocide: whatever the spec-
ificities of the Holocaust, I can’t see how we can discuss it
without seeing that imperialism and the violent racialization it
entailed — along with other racial regimes like segregation in
the U.S. — are significant factors, as Hitler himself indicated
at various points in his own writing and speeches.
As I was answering this question, I was also thinking
about the famous line from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”
It seems to me we can say the same thing about the per-
petration of the Holocaust: all Europe contributed to it —
including the history of European imperialism. This is not
a new idea; we see it in some of the earliest responses to
the Holocaust such as Hannah Arendt’s study The Ori-
gins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Aimé Césaire’s polemic
Discourse on Colonialism (1950), both of which I discuss
at length in Multidirectional Memory.
I think the exceptionalist approach to the Holocaust is not
as strong as it was 20 years ago when I started writing
my book. Movements like Black Lives Matter as well as
calls for restitution of colonial plunder and reparations for
slavery have brought other (non-identical) histories of ra-
cialized violence into public consciousness in necessary
ways. One place where exceptionalism remains strong,
however, is Germany, where the translation of Multidi-
rectional Memory was attacked viciously by many in the
mainstream press for allegedly relativizing the Holocaust
through reference to colonialism and “taking away” Ger-
man responsibility for the genocide — which is really the
last thing I’m interested in doing!
At the same time, in thinking about the conditions of possi-
bility for the Shoah and about comparison between different
histories, I believe we need to be careful about falling back
into a linear conception of time. That slippage can happen
if we talk about certain histories, like colonialism, “caus-
ing” the Holocaust — which is, in any case, a caricature
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
of what historians like Jürgen Zimmerer actually argue. In
my account, a multidirectional approach means thinking
about how the significance of events can reconfigure the
meaning of what came before them: in other words, it’s not
just that we need to think about the history of imperialism to
understand the Holocaust, but also that the Holocaust can
transform our understanding of what came before it. This
kind of multidirectional interaction plays out very clearly in
the realm of memory, which is my central object of study:
one of my arguments in the book is that the unfolding of
decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s helped shape how “...THE UNFOLDING OF
we think about the earlier events of the Nazi genocide, but DECOLONIZATION IN
THE 1950S AND 1960S
that subsequently our new understanding of the Holocaust HELPED SHAPE HOW
would change how we come to terms with colonialism and WE THINK ABOUT THE
EARLIER EVENTS OF
slavery. This mutual interaction continues today and is visi-
THE NAZI GENOCIDE,
ble in almost all the debates coming to terms with the past BUT THAT SUBSE-
QUENTLY OUR NEW
in Europe and the U.S., at the very least.
UNDERSTANDING
OF THE HOLOCAUST
At a greater level of abstraction, I would say that to under- WOULD CHANGE HOW
WE COME TO TERMS
stand memory and especially memory’s multidirectionality WITH COLONIALISM
we need a new concept of time. I draw on the German-Jew- AND SLAVERY.”
ish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s critique of the “progres-
sive,” linear conception of history, a conception that he saw
as useless in the struggle against fascism. In his final text,
“On the Concept of History” (1940), Benjamin argued that
ideas of linearity and progress “cannot be sundered from
the concept of [...] progression through a homogenous,
empty time.” Anti-fascist historical materialists thus need a
new concept of time, which Benjamin associated with the
idea of the “constellation” and of “time filled full by now-
time [Jetztzeit].” This is the concept of time that I attempt to
mobilize in Multidirectional Memory.
LL: You write that memories are simultaneously individual
and collective. Similarly, the way you seem to understand
the concept of memory makes of it a sort of entity of its
own, which circulates, evolves, branches out, or disap-
pears, as the beautiful title of your book’s second part sug-
gests: “Migrations of Memory: Ruins, Ghettos, Diasporas.”
If we are to stop reading time through a paradigm of lineari-
ty or progression as we propose in this issue, we might see
memory, not as the reminiscence of the past, but as what “...IN THINKING
we call “the past” happening simultaneously with what we ABOUT THE CONDI-
TIONS OF POSSIBIL-
call “the present.” What do you think these two affirmations
ITY FOR THE SHOAH
entail for the way we approach “the present?” AND ABOUT COMPAR-
ISON BETWEEN DIF-
FERENT HISTORIES, I
MR: For me, memory is an important category because of BELIEVE WE NEED TO
the constellation it implies between past and present. I’m BE CAREFUL ABOUT
FALLING BACK INTO A
not an expert on the neuroscientific or cognitive-psycho- LINEAR CONCEPTION
logical dimensions of memory, but I think any scholar in OF TIME.”
the field would say that remembrance is an act that takes
place in the present even as it refers to the past. And I
think most would agree that the act of remembrance does
not simply “resurrect” a fully formed past, but rather brings
41
 into being a particular version of the past in a past-present
constellation; there is a performative dimension to memo-
ry and this has important implications.
The importance of the present, performative moment of re-
membrance is for me also one of the grounds for talking
about memory’s multidirectionality. What I argue is that
because we always remember a particular event from our
“...THE HAUNTING
location in a different time and a different place, memory
OF THE IRREVOCA- involves a dialogue across different times and spaces.
BLE IS FREQUENTLY
Remembrance is intrinsically a productive, multidirection-
MULTIDIRECTIONAL
— THAT IS, THAT THE al process of bringing different histories and actualities
SPECTERS OF ONE
into relation. Even if we return to a site, the site is no lon-
TRAUMATIC HISTORY
OFTEN RESONATE ger the same. Think of the film Shoah (1985), where Claude
WITH OTHER TRAU- Lanzmann brings camp survivors back to the site of the
MATIC HISTORIES,
WHETHER OR NOT genocide: there is not really anything there to see; it is now a
THOSE HISTORIES new site, even if traces of the past can be found. As a con-
ARE CONNECTED TO
EACH OTHER BY EM-
stellation of past and present and of here and there, mem-
PIRICAL HISTORICAL ory necessarily possesses a “comparative” or relational
LINKS.”
dimension. To give an example that’s central to my book:
when W.E.B. Du Bois travels to Warsaw in 1949, his confron-
tation with the ruins left by the Nazis’ absolute destruction of
the ghetto they had established there changes the way he
remembers and conceptualizes the anti-Black racism with
which he is intimately familiar. The site of remembrance in-
flects the experience being remembered.
The multidirectionality of memory transforms both the thing
being remembered and that which is put into relation with
it. It also helps us think differently about the status of past
and present. When it comes to questions of temporality,
I draw on the work of the theorist of history Berber Bever-
nage as well as Benjamin. In his book History, Memory, and
State-Sponsored Violence (2012), Bevernage distinguishes
between history as “irreversible” and as “irrevocable.” Con-
ventional history uses a conception of time as linear and
therefore irreversible — what happened happened and it
remains safely in the “past.” But some aspects of the past
Left page. Index of Jewish Life from
May 1952 featuring the essay “The
Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” by
W.E.B. Dubois. Right page left.
Still from the discomforting scene
in Jean Rouch and Edgard Morin’s
film Chronicles of a Summer (1961)
described by Michael Rothberg in
Multidirectional Memories and this
interview. Right page right. Excerpt
from France-Observateur in 1961
calling for a comparison between the
detention of Jews in Paris stadiums
during the Holocaust and that of Alge-
rians during the Algerian Revolution.
42
get “stuck,” in Bevernage’s terms, and thus break “with
the idea of a ‘temporal distance’ between the present and
the past that is so central to the irreversible time of history.”
When Bevernage talks about moments getting “stuck,” he’s
talking about traumatic violence and especially State-spon-
sored atrocity; one of his central examples is the Mothers
of the Plaza del Maya in Argentina who declare that their
children, who have been disappeared by the State, are not
in fact dead. The Mothers’ refusal to mourn is a sign of what
Bevernage calls the irrevocable and of the blurring of past
and present: “they do not consider [their disappeared chil-
dren] to belong to the past.” Unaddressed violence contin-
ues to haunt us and to make demands on the living.
What seems clear to me is that if there are pasts that re-
main irrevocable — that refuse to go away — then we
need to think about how different irrevocable pasts res-
onate with each other as well as with other, more “con-
ventional” historical moments. My work is dedicated to
showing that the haunting of the irrevocable is frequently
multidirectional — that is, that the specters of one trau-
matic history often resonate with other traumatic histories,
whether or not those histories are connected to each oth-
er by empirical historical links.
LL: The year 1961 is important in the second half of your
book. It is the year that, through the trial of Adolf Eichmann
in Jerusalem, the Holocaust emerges in an international
memory, but simultaneously serves the Israeli colonial ide-
ology. At the same...time, Maurice Papon who will (much)
later be the subject of another trial, proving his responsibil-
ity in the deportation of 1,600 Jewish people in his collab-
oration with the Nazi occupation in France, is the Prefect
of police of Paris and its close banlieues. He’s been called
back to Paris in 1958 after years spent as a colonial pre-
fect in Morocco and Algeria and in August 1958, he rounds
up thousands of Algerians in Paris and detain them in the
Vélodrome d’Hiver stadium and in the Japy gymnasium,
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
where less than 20 years earlier, thousands of Jews had
been rounded up by the French police before being de-
ported to Auschwitz. On October 17, 1961, the Paris police
murder hundreds and detain thousands of Algerians in a
massacre whose memory could not be more asymmetrical
still today between Algerian French and white France. How
is that simultaneity (simultaneity of time and simultaneity of
place if that makes sense) are productive for the concept of
multidirectionality?
MR: When I started working on Multidirectional Memory, I
was well aware of the importance of the Eichmann trial and
the year 1961 for thinking about Holocaust memory. But I
knew very little about the history of decolonization and the
Algerian War of Independence, and nothing at all about the
October 17, 1961 massacre. My discovery of these simulta-
neities was really accidental and somewhat circuitous. For
a few years I had been working on the project that would
become Multidirectional Memory, but I didn’t have that con-
cept yet and my focus had been primarily on “Black-Jew-
ish” intersections. I’d written an essay about W.E.B. Du
Bois and his visit to the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, which I
mentioned earlier, and I was starting to work on the writers
André Schwarz-Bart and Caryl Phillips, both of whom bring
together memory of the Holocaust and memory of transat-
lantic slavery. Then I happened to attend a lecture by Man-
thia Diawara, the scholar of African film, who was talking
about his counter-ethnographic film about Jean Rouch,
Rouch in Reverse (1995). In his talk, he mentioned Rouch
and Edgar Morin’s 1961 cinema verité film Chronique d’un
été (Chronicle of a Summer) and the fact that it staged an
uncomfortable encounter between a Holocaust survivor
and two African students. I said to myself: “wow, I need to
see that film right away.”
So, I found it and was immediately fascinated. The scene
Diawara described is truly discomforting: the Holocaust
survivor Marceline Loridan expresses certain racist
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
conceptions of Africans and the students initially misun-
derstand the significance of the tattoo Marceline received
in Auschwitz. My sense was that, in addition to those ten-
“...THERE WAS SOME-
sions, there was something significant going on in the
THING SIGNIFICANT
film’s overall juxtaposition of the memory of the Holocaust GOING ON IN THE
— through the testimony Rouch and Morin film of Marce- FILM’S OVERALL
JUXTAPOSITION OF
line recounting her deportation — and the ongoing events THE MEMORY OF THE
of decolonization, especially in the Congo and Algeria. I HOLOCAUST [...] AND
THE ONGOING EVENTS
wanted to understand why these different histories were OF DECOLONIZATION,
intersecting in Paris at this particular moment. ESPECIALLY IN THE
CONGO AND ALGERIA. I
WANTED TO UNDER-
As I read more about this moment of decolonization I STAND WHY THESE
DIFFERENT HISTORIES
came to see that there were several factors that were facil-
WERE INTERSECTING
itating the multidirectional “mnemonic” transfer between IN PARIS AT THIS PAR-
Nazi violence and French colonial violence. The first was TICULAR MOMENT.”
a basic chronological point: the time separating the Nazi
occupation and Vichy period from the Algerian War of
Independence was very slight. Indeed, if you think of the
massacres in Sétif and Guelma, which took place on the
very day World War II ended in Europe, there’s a complete
temporal continuity. This meant that, biographically, many
people involved in one way or other in the decolonization
struggle in France had living memories of the occupation
and a certain number had been involved in the resistance
to the Nazis and had even been deported to Nazi camps.
Marceline Loridan herself is an excellent example of some-
one who survived Auschwitz as a teenager and then, at
the same time she was filming Chronicle of a Summer, was
active as a “porteuse de valise,” one of the non-Algerians
assisting the Algerian independence movement by “car-
rying suitcases” of money for the cause; she also made
a film in Algeria with Jean-Pierre Sergent, who appears in
Chronicle as well, immediately after independence. Even if
few people had that level of involvement in both histories,
I think we can say that the memory of Nazi crimes and of
what we now call the Holocaust was fresh. In that con-
text, the methods deployed by the French State reminded
many people of what they had experienced or observed
43

A copresence of eras:
a temporal overlay of
the Eiffel Tower area
of Paris — which in- under the Nazis, especially the widespread use of torture
cludes the Vélodrome and the detention of hundreds of thousands in concentra-
d’Hiver (large grey
rectangular building tion camps both in Algeria and in France.
a few centimeters
above this caption) —
in both 1942 (when Discovering this larger context of entanglements between
13,152 Jews were the Second World War and the Algerian War of Indepen-
rounded up and de-
dence eventually led me to the October 17, 1961 massacre.
tained at the Vel d’Hiv
by the French police As you say, the memory of October 17 remains radically
before being de-
asymmetrical — both in terms of who remembers or for-
ported to Auschwitz
by the Nazis) and gets (Algerian French people or white French people) and
1958 (when Prefect also in terms of which events are prominent in public con-
of police Maurice
Papon rounded up sciousness (the Holocaust or the massacre). Nevertheless,
over 5,000 Algerians, what struck me as I learned about October 17 was that right
many of whom were
detained at the Vel from the beginning the massacre triggered memories —
d’Hiv). / Artwork by at least for some — of the Nazi occupation, and even the
Léopold Lambert.
Holocaust specifically. For example, just a week after the
massacre, France-Observateur — the New Left newspaper
in which I found many relevant sources, published a photo-
graph of Algerians who had been rounded up on October
17 being held at the Palais des Sports with a caption that
read “Cela ne vous rappelle rien?” (Doesn’t that remind you
of something?). The clear reference was to the July 1942
rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv’ when thousands of “foreign” Jews were
rounded up by French police and then deported to the East.
I found many other “multidirectional” references of that sort,
and what is really fascinating is that they took place long
before people realized that Papon had been involved both
in the deportation of Jews in Vichy and in crimes against
Algerians in Algeria and France. My colleague Lia Brozgal’s
new book Absent the Archive (2020) also demonstrates the
44
extent to which both Jewishness and Holocaust memory
have played unexpected roles in coming to terms with the
October 17 massacre, even as she warns (correctly) that the
massacre also needs to be remembered on its own terms.
My point is neither that October 17 has only been under-
stood alongside the Holocaust nor that it should only be
remembered in that way, but more simply that it has often
been understood and remembered in relation to the Holo-
caust and that that simultaneity and relationality have im-
portant implications for thinking about Holocaust memory
in particular and about the workings of memory in general.
Situating Holocaust memory in relation to the Algerian War
of Independence and the October 17 massacre produces
a kind of alienation effect. In place of the familiar narrative
of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and its role in globaliz-
ing Holocaust memory, we now find a very different kind of
catalyst for remembrance of the Shoah: one that is explicitly
entangled with political struggle and is frequently deployed
in anti-imperialist contexts. Certainly this is not the dominant
story of Holocaust memory: rather, it is a persistent count-
er-narrative that can be traced back to the earliest postwar
moments and that can be found today, for instance in the
mobilization of Holocaust memory in relation to memories
of colonialism and slavery and to ongoing struggles over
migration in Europe and the U.S..
The more general point that I draw about memory from this
particular moment (1961) is the extent to which public re-
membrance is to a significant extent built on the entangle-
ment of different moments in time that might, at first, seem
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
to have little to do with each other. This entanglement is pro-
ductive; it leads to more memory as well as new constel-
lations of memory — but it doesn’t come with guarantees
about the particular political valence of multidirectionality
(which can be reactionary as well as progressive) and it
does not mean that different memories automatically ob-
tain an “equal” place in the public sphere. As the example
of October 17 illustrates well: the field of memory is a field of
inequality. Overcoming inequality requires mobilization and
struggle. What I find, though, is that in that struggle, multi-
directional currents often play a prominent role and can be
resources for mobilization toward greater recognition and
redistribution of “mnemonic capital.”
LL: Borrowing from Marianne Hirsch’s work, you evoke the
concept of post-memory and the transgenerational trans-
mission of trauma. Several researchers are working on
demonstrating that this transmission might go as deep as in
the formation of DNA itself. Without essentializing through a
biologically-centered argument, could you talk about what
this means for us to embody a sum of individual and collec-
tive memories; some of which coming from space-time we
have not even experienced ourselves?
MR: Marianne Hirsch’s work has influenced my thinking
since I was a graduate student, and I feel fortunate to call her
a friend as well as a colleague. What she called “postmemo-
ry” about 25 years ago while writing about Art Spiegelman’s
comic-book memoir Maus (1980) immediately took off as a
concept among scholars — but also among artists and to
some extent among activists — because it so clearly names
a structure of experience that is widely shared. While most
of her own work has concerned transgenerational memo-
ry and trauma in the context of the Holocaust, she has al-
ways been open to the “migration” of her concept into other
realms and indeed she talks about how listening to Toni Mor-
rison read from Beloved (1987) was, along with Spiegelman,
one of her early inspirations. There is something “multidirec-
tional” in the emergence of postmemory as a concept!
I don’t feel I have the expertise to assess the extent to
which transgenerational trauma can be registered in
DNA, even if I understand that there is interplay between
social and biological factors. Certainly, in any case, post-
memory is bodily and affective — transmission happens
through a variety of channels. Hirsch quotes a powerful
passage from Eva Hoffmann on this issue: “In my home
[...] the past broke through in the sounds of nightmares,
the idioms of sighs and illness, of tears and acute aches
that were the legacy of the damp attic and of the condi-
tions my parents endured during their hiding.”
When I think about transgenerational transmission I also
think about another, related tradition emerging from Black
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
studies: the concept of the afterlife of slavery. Here the focus
is not just on the kinds of intimate, bodily forms of transmis-
sion that take place — though surely those are important
too — but also on the material continuities that continue to
shape Black bodies and Black lives more than 150 years
after emancipation. I’m thinking of Saidiya Hartman’s amaz-
ing book Lose Your Mother (2006), where she writes, “If slav-
ery persists as an issue in the political life of black America,
it is not because of antiquarian obsession with bygone days
or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black
lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus
and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries
ago. This is the afterlife of slavery — skewed life chances,
limited access to health and education, premature death,
incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of
slavery.” The afterlife of slavery, then, is a kind of structural
postmemory — not so much the legacies of an event as
the persistence of material conditions of systemic violence.
“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN
There’s a flip-side to all of this that is important to me, too,
WE THINK ABOUT THE
however. Both Hirsch’s and Hartman’s writings help us un- DESCENDANTS OF
derstand what you call “a sum of individual and collective PERPETRATORS AND
THOSE WHO BENEFIT
memories” possessed by those who are descended from FROM INEQUALITIES
victims of racial violence and/or continue to experience AND VIOLENCE BOTH
PAST AND PRESENT?”
such violence in the present. But what happens when we
think about the descendants of perpetrators and those
who benefit from inequalities and violence both past and
present? I believe we need a separate category here and,
in my most recent book, The Implicated Subject (2019), I
talk about those who enable, perpetuate, benefit from, or
otherwise inherit histories of violence and structures of in-
equality that they did not initiate and do not direct but none-
theless participate in indirectly. I call them “implicated sub-
jects” and I track “implication” in terms of both diachronic
events and synchronic structures — as well as the entan-
glement of these two temporal axes. White supremacy and
various kinds of privilege are also the outcome of transgen-
erational transmission and of the entanglement of past and
present; we need to understand that kind of implication too
if we want to build a more just world. ■
Michael Rothberg is the 1939 Society Samuel
Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of
English and Comparative Literature at the Univer-
sity of California, Los Angeles. His latest book is
The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpe-
trators (2019). Previous books include Multidirec-
tional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the
Age of Decolonization (2009), Traumatic Realism:
The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000),
and, co-edited with Neil Levi, The Holocaust: Theo-
retical Readings (2003). With Yasemin Yildiz, he is
currently completing Memory Citizenship: Migrant
Archives of Holocaust Remembrance.
45
INTERVEWS WAITING BODIES IN DICTATORIAL
AND BORDERING REGIMES
A CONVERSATION WITH SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI
ILLUSTRATIONS BY HAYFAA CHALABI
Are you afraid of us?
as part of Hayfaa
Chalabi, Refugees Waiting is a particular temporal praxis, whose polit-
Welcome?, 2020, ical dimension is more likely to be missed by those
also featured in Shah-
ram Khosravi (ed.) who make people wait than by those who have to wait
Waiting, a Project in for a visa, for food, for access to the city, etc. Shah-
Conversation, 2021.
ram Khosravi shares with us some of his reflections
on this action of waiting; its Kafkaian dimension, but
also its revolutionary potential.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: You recently published the book
Waiting: A Project in Conversation, which is a volume that
has a lot of you in it, but that you wanted to be a collabo-
ration with many people. You explain that you simply could
not make a book about waiting in a “purely academic
form.” Do you think that it says something about waiting
and time that you encountered this difficulty?
SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI: This comes from a project that I
have been working on for several years and I experienced
a failure in putting my experience of what I have been think-
ing about when it comes to temporality and waiting in the
form of pure academic language and format. I think it was
a risk to do a narrow focus on waiting and missing other
46
aspects of waiting, which are for me very interesting: for ex-
ample, the aesthetics of waiting, the visual aspect of wait-
ing, the architecture of waiting, etc. Also, within academia,
I felt that waiting is treated more or less from a power posi-
tion. You think about waiting from a power position, from a
State position. And I wanted to see not like a State; I wanted
to look at waiting from below. And this is why I started the
conversation with many people with different backgrounds
both geographically coming from different places, different
biographies, but also different disciplines or different work-
ing forms: they are artists or architects or storytellers, etc.
This is why I published the book in this form. This is a
collection coming from people who have been waiting
themselves for different reasons. They have lived experi-
ences of waiting themselves, because many of them are
non-Europeans — this book is not only about migration
and borders, but it is a main focus in the book. It talks about
the temporal bordering, delaying people, keeping people
in waiting, keeping people in queues outside embassies,
along the borders of European states, etc. It is also about
how waiting is about sense: you feel it with your body, and
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
it is very difficult to express or to write about, at least for me,
in an academic form. This is why I asked people from other
areas to share their experiences and knowledge with me.
LL: This bodily experience is as much in the short-term
wait, which hurts your back, your legs, etc., as in the long-
term one that damages mental health… In your introduc-
tion, you write that “One of the basic divisions in the world
today is between those who are forced into protracted
conditions of waiting and those who impose it.” Could
you elaborate on what it is that makes time so entangled
with questions of power?
SK: Yeah, if we go back in history, waiting has been sep-
arating those who have the power to make other people
wait and people who don’t have that power. But I think it
has become more visible, more explicit in modern times.
In modern societies, we see how time has become a
capital: you invest time, you save time, you spend time...
exactly the same vocabulary we use for money. So we
see time as something we can make a fortune of. So if
you have to wait for a long time, it can be felt like wast-
ed time. You don’t have that capital, you cannot use that
time for education or work or accumulation of this or that.
The power relation is very clear here: it is a class issue.
Who can wait and who can afford not waiting? Who can
pay and jump over queues? Who can pay and not wait in
refugee camps? Who can pay and not stand outside a
government office somewhere. As Pierre Bourdieu put it,
it is a form of domination: keeping people waiting without
crashing their hope. You tell them, “Come back tomor-
row.” “Come back tomorrow, come back”... this is really
Kafkaesque! So you keep waiting, in the hope that some-
thing good will happen, something which never comes.
This is very much a form of domination. And this is also
a neoliberal mentality that turns waiting into something
noble: if you are a good waiter, if you wait patiently and
don’t complain, then you are a good citizen. In Farsi, and
in Arabic, we use the words sabori, which means suffer-
ing patiently: the person who is supposed to do sabori
endures and doesn’t complain. The same goes for Latin
with patient, meaning to suffer and to endure. So, there is
some added value to endure and to not protest. Keeping
people waiting is reminding them of their place in a racial
and gender hierarchy, and of course, a class hierarchy.
LL: You talked about waiting at the border or waiting at
the embassy, which is always a sort of external condition
to the space we call “the border.” But as Harsah Walia or
yourself are teaching us, the border is not merely this line
or this specific space, it is embodied in pretty much every
space on both sides of that line we call “border.” Conse-
quently, would you say that this act of waiting for a visa,
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
a work authorization, etc. inside “the border” is one thing
that can help us reconcile this idea of a multi territorial
border regime?
SK: Yes, as you say, borders are not lines between states,
but a series of practices and this series of practices can
happen a long time after you cross the border between
States. And we see how one of the main aspects of tem- “IF WE GO BACK IN
poral bordering is delaying people. And this delaying, HISTORY, WAITING
HAS BEEN SEPA-
which results in waiting of course, is very much racialized, RATING THOSE WHO
and with long term consequences. I give you an exam- HAVE THE POWER TO
MAKE OTHER PEOPLE
ple. In the 1990s, two main big groups of asylum seekers WAIT AND PEOPLE
came to Sweden, on the one hand Somalians, and on the WHO DON’T HAVE
THAT POWER.”
other Bosnians, Somalian asylum seekers in average had
a longer asylum process, they also waited longer to get
Swedish citizenship, compared to the group from Bosnia.
And now 25 years later, we can see the consequences
of that delaying and waiting for Somalians in terms of
their weaker situations in the labor market situation, in the
housing market situation, for their children in education,
compared to the Bosnian group. So I think delaying is
very much a strategy to keep some people in this racial
hierarchy of society. This is only one example, but you “...THIS DELAYING IS A
can see so many others: African Americans in the United TECHNIQUE TO STEAL
THEIR TIME TO KEEP
States, Palestinians, etc. this delaying is a technique to THEM IN LOWER SITUA-
steal their time to keep them in lower situations in hierar- TIONS IN HIERARCHIES.
IT IS SO OBVIOUS IN
chies. It is so obvious in Palestine with Palestinians wait-
PALESTINE WITH PAL-
ing in long queues at the checkpoints... ESTINIANS WAITING IN
LONG QUEUES AT THE
CHECKPOINTS...”
LL: The administrative machine that regulates the legal
status of humans in the spaces where they live is argu-
ably the entity that produces the most waiting, with dev-
astating consequences on people’s mental health. Exiles
experience it on a daily basis, waiting for “a piece of pa-
per” that would ultimately allow them to breathe, virtually
liberated from the constant threat of deportation, often
only to realize that the next phase of waiting is coming.
What forms of resistance exist against what you yourself
designates as “stolen time?”
SK: Yes, I also used the term “wasted time” earlier, which
brings the idea of passivity. But waiting is full of potential
qualities. I use the metaphor of insomnia: waiting is like in-
somnia. You are aware of that, you think about why you
cannot sleep, and you also think about what you’re waiting
for. Those are very important questions. In the example you
gave, you’re waiting only for a piece of paper. The moment
you ask the questions you historicize your waiting, you po-
liticize it: what is the object of waiting?, why am I waiting?
Then, it also opens doors for resistance, for refusing... the
revolutionary unwaiting. Here I refer to Martin Luther King’s
call for unwaiting from his cell in Birmingham jail in early
1960s; “Why we can’t wait!”. The U.S. society’s promises of
47
 justice to African Americans, but it never arrives. The white
authorities asked them to wait and wait and wait, but jus-
tice never arrived. Never will arrive. So we should not wait
anymore. I agree with him and I follow his call for unwaiting.
“... I WRITE ABOUT
This is an urgent revolutionary act.
STEALING OF TIME,
KEEPING PEOPLE IN
WAITING, DELAYING But also going back to your question about stolen time:
THEM, STEALING
THEIR TIME, ETC. BUT I write about stealing of time, keeping people in waiting,
ALSO THAT THERE IS delaying them, stealing their time, etc. but also that there
A FORM OF RESIS-
TANCE IN STEALING
is a form of resistance in stealing back your time. We have
BACK YOUR TIME.” many examples of how people steal back their time, for
example, migrants or asylum seekers who have a depor-
supposed to have survived. The way they survived wars, These queue subjectivities are not only passive ones, but
how they’ve survived borders, border controls, and the they can also be full of potentiality for doing things.
asylum processes and migration processes. And they are
still here. When I’m talking about waiting, I’m not talking LL: Every queue is a potential conspiracy against what
about one year or two years, I’m talking, in some cases, makes people wait, right? If you make people wait for
decades. In the case of young people, 25 years old, and hours without giving them ultimate satisfaction, you have
he has been waiting 15 years; or 12 years of 19. We are a risk of an immediate rebellion.
talking about two thirds of one person’s life! So protracted “...PUTTING THEM IN
QUEUE AND WAITING IS
waiting is something we see more and more. In 1996, the SK: Yes, I agree. This is a form of organizing bodies, you A VERY SIMPLE FORM
average time of being a refugee was nine years. Today know, putting them in queue and waiting is a very simple OF CONTROL OF BOD-
IES, BUT MANY STATES
is more than 20 years. So not only do we have more and form of control of bodies, but many states are aware of the ARE AWARE OF THE
more people in refugee situations, but also these people danger of that. If too many people are queuing, as you DANGER OF THAT.”

tation order, they go in hiding, they refuse to collaborate, are longer and longer in refugee situations. We see that said, there is nothing to gain, and there is a risk of protest.
they start a clandestine life. So that refusal is a way to gain waiting becomes some form of permanence. This is very
time, to steal back time for finding a way out of this hor- obvious in the case of Palestinians, for example, you know, LL: On the other side of the spectrum of waiting, there
rible predicament. For example, in case of asylum seek- how many years they have been waiting: 73 years. That’s is the deliberate practice of waiting. What is revolutionary
ers, they can apply again, after four years, if they can, you why the Palestinian sumud is a central concept: being about this practice?
know, be in the same country, or if they can during time here, being present. This is so much about time, being in
of hiding, maybe saving money and traveling to anoth- that place during all these years and waiting for freedom. SK: If we think about how time is conceptualized from an-
er country. Or in case of failed asylum seekers to collect cient Greek, Chronos was a way to calculate and measure
documents, and coming back with a stronger case. LL: Queues are very present in the book: you write yourself time: weeks, months, years. But there was also Kairos,
Right page. Collec-
tive Waiting. Below. that “Queues produce obedient behavior.” Could you tell us which was more about the quality of time, versus the quan-
Refugees Welcome, / So, stealing back time is a way, but also, just waiting and more about this very particular spatialized form of waiting? Queues became something where people conceptualized tity of time. It’s with Kairos that we can think of moments of
Both artworks are part
of Hayfaa Chalabi, waiting and saying “I’m not going anywhere, I wait here”: life around, and I think this is very common in many oth- action, moments that you can use for making a change.
Refugees Welcome?, presence itself is a kind of resistance, because these SK: Coming from Iran and experiencing the 1980s, the er countries too in the part of the world we call the Global So many people are waiting for Kairos, moments when
2020, also featured
in Shahram Khosravi people are not supposed to be alive at all. They are not first decade after the Revolution: I grew up with queues. South. So, queues are a very visible form of how states they can do something for their situation. It is exactly this
(ed.) Waiting, a Project organize bodies. And it is a very visible form of sovereign revolutionary time that people are waiting for in countries
in Conversation, 2021.
identity that states can keep people waiting and waiting for under dictatorship, or Palestinians under occupation, or in
different things: it can be outside embassies in big cities, refugee camps in Lesbos in Greece, etc. They’re waiting
capitals, in Asia or Africa; it can be waiting for food, it can for an opening. During the so-called “refugee crisis,” when “...THE SAME SLOGAN
be waiting for clothes or fuel, etc. And I think it’s a very pow- the border walls were closed in the Balkans, especially at WAS USED AGAINST
DICTATORSHIP IN THE
“IT IS ONLY THROUGH erful scene to see citizens being kept waiting in queues, the gates of Hungary, where people could not go further,
MIDDLE EAST AND
ACTING TOGETH- one queue, another queue, you know, people move from they started chanting political slogans. One of them was AGAINST EUROPEAN
ER WITHIN BOTH BORDERS. YEAH.
ENVIRONMENTAL AND
one queue to the next. Because it’s not only one queue: “Infitah,” which in Arabic means “opening.” That opening
SO THIS INFITAH,
SOCIO-POLITICAL they queue for different things. And sometimes they queue is a very interesting slogan, which was used during the so- OPENNESS IS ABOUT
SPHERES OF THE
WORLD, THAT THE
many several queues in one single day. So, this is about called “Arab Spring” movements, but also by refugees to THE WAIT FOR AN
OPENING...”
EARTH CAN BECOME how citizenship is transformed. Javier Auyero, an Argentin- Europe: the same slogan was used against dictatorship in
AYITI.”
ian sociologist, writes how citizens are turned into “patients the Middle East and against European borders. Yeah. So
of the State.” They are no longer citizens with access to this infitah, openness is about the wait for an opening: the
citizenship rights, but they have become people who are opening of a political situation, but also the opening of bor-
waiting for something coming from the State. But again, if ders. Movements of bodies across borders, but also polit-
we go back to the resistance question, queues are also in- ical movements are interrelated. And this is all very much
teresting spaces where people while they are waiting, they connected to time, temporalities, and waiting. ■
talk to each other. And they complain.
Shahram Khosravi is a former taxi driver and cur-
LL: As Basma Abdel Aziz writes in the book, sometimes rently an accidental Professor of Anthropology
you start a queue, and only then you ask what the queue at Stockholm University. Khosravi is the author
is for! of some academic books and some articles but
he prefers to write stories. He has been an active
SK: Yes, exactly. And exactly that question. You start ask- writer in the international press. The past year he
ing: “What are you waiting for, what am I queuing for?” I has been working on an art book on Waiting and
also realized that queues are very interesting places for de- two years ago he started Critical Border Studies,
bate. People are complaining and exchanging information, a network for scholars, artists and activists to in-
and so it can also be a space for protest and resistance. teract. See also his short story in this issue.

48 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME 49
 THE HORN OF AFRICA:
ARTICLES
FRACTURING TIMELINES
NASRA ABDULLAHI & MIRIAM HILLAWI ABRAHAM
Satellite image of
Horn of Africa and
the Afar Triangle. / Using stationary time travel through past and future geo-
European Space logical eras, Nasra Abdullahi and Miriam Hillawi Abra-
Agency (2011).
ham describe their methodology to reflect on the Horn
of Africa geography in a recently written short story.
Nasra and Miriam are collaborating (across borders and
timezones) on an experimental work of fiction entitled, “The
Horn of Africa: Grounds for Unproof.” This short story looks
at the specific coordinates of La Place Menelik compound
in Djibouti City as a site of interrogation. As our heroine
unwittingly travels through time, the architecture is written
as a sentient antagonist, capable of desire, enduring vio-
lent change, and resisting its redefinition. In this context,
time travel is a site-specific phenomena that destabilizes
our understanding of normative systems. We use time as
50
a foil, no longer reliable and common but rather to tease
the unknown. Thus the constructs and experiences of
time-proper play a crucial role in this narrative. This text ex-
plores the methodology and motivations behind the proj-
ect. Throughout this piece, interjections are made by the
central character which is the Djiboutian landscape. How
do you guide yourself through unforetold realities?
As two women with the shared cultural terrain of the Horn
of Africa, we both find ourselves on unsteady grounds
when we are tasked with exercising our imagination for fu-
tures that are yet to emerge. In order to tackle this problem
we began to devise new analytical tools and playful de-
vices, borrowing from prescriptive and unchartered Black
speculative imaginations.
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
We ask ourselves, how can we arrive towards various modes
of being? Towards self definitions that are both multiplicitous
and without form?
In our choice to reside in the unforetold, we disobediently
liberate ourselves from the dreadful present day that has
already predetermined the inevitable demise of our planet.
Instead of continuing along the unalterable linear timeline, we
stumble as we take a dramatic detour to the unknown, per-
haps to a place of uncompromizing belonging and liberated
expressions of personhoods. Time has been used as a mea-
sure of control and subjugation. We break free from its bonds
and sync with the chaos of its absence, revelling in uncer-
tainty. In turn, time in our work becomes a critical method of
intervention in normative systems and historic hegemonies.
As we seek to excavate these paths and build worlds in ser-
vice of ourselves, we are often forced to contend with un-
proven and contentious sources from the Horn’s ancient his-
tory to it’s contemporary conditions. In order to think without
reserve, we embark on a deliberate but playful unsettling of
accepted grounds. Through collaboration and relation, our
attempt reckons with a desire to arrive from a feeling that
is pre-theoretical and unarticulated. Rather than beginning
anew, we gradually realize and tend to this mode of being
and start from where we are.
My boundaries make contact with the others.
Do they feel it too?
11.5949° N, 43.1467° E, 17/07/1538
Territorial Timelines ///
We begin, as all stories do, with land.
The ground beneath our feet is not unliving. The Horn of
Africa hosts one of the most active seismic zones on the
planet. The Afar Triangle, a geological depression between
a triple junction of tectonic plates at the crook of the Horn, is
the doorway to the East African Rift. This rift system meets
the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden before turning inland into
the Ethiopian highlands and farther down to Mozambique.
The rift is a literal tearing in the lithosphere, which is nestled
between the earth’s continental crust and the mantle. Seis-
mologists predict that the East African Rift, extending from
the Afar Triple Junction (in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti) will
continue to diverge until it eventually breaks away from the
continent forming a new sea and a new island consisting
of Djibouti, eastern Ethiopia, Somaliland, Somalia, and parts
of south East Africa. The vastness of geologic time, which
relentlessly murmurs beneath our banal human urgencies,
is juxtaposed with the Horn’s deep and immediate geopo-
litical tensions.
Mountains serve as exposed membranes; a series of visible
linings felt with bodies and minuscule beings roam and
exhaust their lives in the various interstices of my surface. My
remaking is painfully obvious and sublime, a constant hint
nudging at all that is. I exist in multiples dancing in between
the thresholds of infancy and ripeness.
10.8764° N, 44.5297° E, 17/07/5,002,020
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
This landscape was a determining factor in the settlement
and organization of societies in the Horn and the eventual
forced formation of Statehood. The homes of sedentary
and pastoralist peoples were situated in modern day Ethi-
opia and extended to the coastal states of Eritrea, Djibouti,
and Somalia. These included vastly diverse communities
with various competing systems of governance such as
the Gadaa system of the Oromo people, and the central-
ized and localized administrations of the Afar and Somali
Sultanates. The harsh terrains of the Ethiopian highlands
provided fortification and cover ideal for establishing the
seat of the ancient Abyssinian empire.
This region was of great interest to the European colonial “WE BREAK FREE
project as the ancient ports provided access from the FROM [TIME’S]
BONDS AND SYNC
Red Sea allowing for the extraction of resources from the WITH THE CHAOS
continent. While the modern day nation states of Eritrea OF ITS ABSENCE,
REVELLING IN
and Somalia fell subject to Fascist Italian rule, the British UNCERTAINTY.
occupied the contested independent state of Somaliland. IN TURN, TIME
IN OUR WORK
Further up at the northern tip of the Great Rift Valley, the BECOMES A
modern state of Djibouti is situated at a precarious geo- CRITICAL METHOD
OF INTERVENTION
logic tripoint. Djibouti, the smallest nation in mainland Af-
IN NORMATIVE
rica (both in terms of population and area), was France’s SYSTEMS AND
only colony in East Africa. Instead of using Djibouti as a HISTORIC HEGE-
MONIES.”
launchpad for further colonial expansions in the region,
as the Italians did with Eritrea and Somalia, the French
sought to use and control Djibouti as a strategic gateway
to the Suez Canal, connecting the region with Europe, the
Persian Gulf, and further into the Indian Ocean. As the
modern Ethiopian empire warded off colonial invasion, it
continued to consolidate power and expand its territorial
frontiers, thereby encroaching on it’s neighboring com-
munities that did not prescribe to a defined Statehood
and whose territorial identities were not always relevant
to fixed boundaries.
The Horn of Africa is unique in its tensions between an
indigenous imperial force and numerous European col-
onizers, at times competing and allying in working to ad-
vance their interests in close proximity with one another.
In this complex and dynamic context, Djibouti stands
out as an anomaly in the Horn of Africa for its perceived
sense of stability and calm. It gained independence from
French colonisation in 1977 as one of the last colonial
frontiers of the French empire. Its port’s position at the
southern entrance of the Red Sea serves as one of the
most strategic maritime trading nodes. Its port nation sta-
tus informs much of its socio-economic conditions. Con-
temporary Ethiopia is a landlocked nation and therefore
heavily relies on Djibouti’s ports for international trade. It
also houses the U.S.’s largest military base on the African
continent, the only Chinese military base in Africa since
2017, and Japan’s first and only overseas military facility
since World War II.
Trees had to be felled to give way to my elegant stone
walls. The sands that were once dug up and buried
under my deep foundation, still send shudders
and memories up to my terrazzo floors.
11.5949° N, 43.1467° E, 17/07/1905
51
 Instruments of Estimation ///
Territorial expansion in the region imposed protocols of
colonial cartography, with forceful impositions of mea-
sure and division. Brutalities of a formal historicization
followed a bureaucratic system of asserting absolutist
ideals through the deliberate skewing and burying of
competing political realities. Truth was thereby regulated
by protocols of authenticating historical claims through
rigid criteria that would, for example, dismiss oral histories
of certain groups while incorporating acceptable written
histories from others into the institutional framework. Fur-
thermore, colonial and imperial authorities participated in
mythmaking to justify violent expansion and subjugation.
“TRADITIONALLY, THE Fascist Italy’s myth of the civilization mission came into
ANDALUSIAN )(AMA- contact with the divine lore of Ethiopia’s Solomonic dy-
ZIGH) ASTROLABE, AN
ANCIENT ASTRONOM-
nasty. As these competing myths of power unfolded onto
ICAL DEVICE, WAS the worldviews of regional communities, whose “truths”
USED TO MEASURE
would prevail?
DISTANCES BETWEEN
CELESTIAL BODIES IN
ORDER TO DETER-
In this new era of violently mismatched absolutes, the
MINE LOCAL TIME.”
astrolabe becomes a navigational tool for finding oneself
in an approximated reality. Traditionally, the Andalusian )
(Amazigh) astrolabe, an ancient astronomical device,
was used to measure distances between celestial bodies
in order to determine local time. However, the accuracy of
the device was always subject to the limits of observation-
al and systematic errors. Rather than being alarmed by
this possibility of error, estimation suggests an opening
for playful interrogation. A “handheld model of the uni-
verse,” the astrolabe, allows for worldbuilding and orien-
tation around the self. Therefore our methodology is to
appropriate this astronomical instrument as a base for a
fictional intervention. The fun is in the approximation.
How do we measure something that has yet to happen?
While the device was used to solve problems of time,
in our hands it is used to hijack the reliable. By manipu-
“WE START BY lating readings, we are transported through spatio-tem-
LAYERING HUMAN
AND GEOLOGIC poral channels into the impossible. Because human
TIMESCAPES. IN activity is predicated around formal time, if for example
OUR STORYLINE,
HUMANS BECOME a 13th hour appeared on the face of Big Ben, it would
ACTIVE AGENTS be considered a glitch in our timeline. The normal rules
IN GEOLOGIC
MOTIONS.”
will no longer apply.
As State-approved histories inform our present political
dynamics, if we were to interrupt and jumble the timeline,
are anyone’s claims to truth, power or sovereignty still val-
id? This allows for us to contest social hierarchies and ab-
solutist identities by polluting constructed timelines with
marginal narratives.
Bhakti Shringarpure defines memoricide as “an orga-
nized effort to erase history and with it the collective cul-
tural memory of a group of people” (The Funambulist 11,
2017).It is the attempt to receive popular acceptance by
the deliberate forgery of truths and enforced fantasies of
virtuous origins. We combat the memoricide that is ram-
pant in the Horn of Africa today, by actively recalling lost
stories and re-imagining existing conditions.
52
I feel the heat as the astrolabe violently melts clean
through my earth, scarring me deeper. It’s enough to
make me shudder, and the guests lose their balance on
my surface. The device journeys deeper, descending
beyond my earth and farther into stone sending a sharp
fracture through the layers.
11.5949° N, 43.1467° E, 17/07/1538
Temporal Complications ///
As Black African storytellers, we are concerned with the
mastery of time. The continent was historically barred
from the universal future of a conscious humanity and
through global market and ecological projections is
doomed to fail. According to Kodwo Eshun, “The present
moment is stretching, slipping for some into yesterday,
reaching for others into tomorrow.” By manipulating the
temporal passages, we interrupt the inevitable. We are no
longer passive bystanders to our own destinies, no lon-
ger written to be abject prisoners to prepositions. We are
alive in our rejection of normative and pre-conceptualised
global realities. The point is not to erase or revise human
history but, rather, to reassert belonging and approximate
realities through fiction. In this manner we are exerting
temporal boundaries. If our imagination is limited to work
within the parameters of colonial conditions, how far can
we stretch to discover new ways of being? Why stay within
the realms of the believable?
Worldbuilding evolves into an analytical instrument. Our
fictional worlds are testing grounds to examine the ab-
surd, to divert trajectories and to cultivate multiplicities.
Global markets forecast preferred futures that serve to
maintain existing orders, as they create and feed into
recursive systems. Meanwhile, we are choosing to syn-
thesize worlds foregrounded in existing cosmologies. The
world we are building leaks out of its fictional containment
and demands to be actualized. Our unforetold potential-
ities can thus be realized in these indeterminate spaces.
So how do we cross over into this world?
We start by layering human and geologic timescapes. In
our storyline, humans become active agents in geolog-
ic motions. By mis-aligning the geological time-clock
with the human one, our characters fall into the faults
between these uneven durations. A sudden slippage
causes a rift or a glitch which represents an unexpect-
ed opportunity to explore the unproven. The astrolabe,
once as mundane as the modern clock, then becomes
instrumental to an unprecedented seismic and tempo-
ral event. The idea is that the non-linear cyclical nature
of time and its ability for repetition can allow for a glitch
(a gesture to imply time travel).
The land, in this case Djibouti’s geological and architec-
tural terrain, is not an unliving setting but, rather, the nar-
rator. It not only witnesses but has existed through various
epochs as a being with its own rhythms, memories and
longings. By observing geological time, we are able to
momentarily interrupt the urgencies of the human epoch
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
Left. Planispheric
Astrolabe from the
14th century. / The
Aga Khan Museum.
Right. Islamic plani-
spheric astrolabe in
brass, from 1077 AH.
/ Science Museum
Group Collection.
and wrench free from the colon designations (pre-colo- interrogations, our work expands into an ongoing proj-
nial, colonial, post-colonial) that, according to Clapperton ect that is in a state of becoming. Through this exercise
Chakanetsa Mavhunga, still retains the Western colonizer of imagination, we are also coming into ourselves, rumi-
as a central referent. All of this challenges the perceived nating on belonging and opening portals. We also hope
dominion of humans over nature by revealing how we are to cultivate an intersectional and collaborative ecosys-
intrinsically tied to time/space/land. It is an innate cosmo- tem based on solidarity with the Horn of Africa that is
logical grounding. both continental and diasporic.
Intimate murmurs travel from my core as Yet, destruction is my language.
powerful rhythms, beneath their warm soles. A ritual that is both prescriptive and uncertain.
I endure their tampering because they endure me. Will you be here or Elsewheres?
11.5949° N, 43.1467° E, 17/07/2021 ■
10.8764° N, 44.5297° E, 17/07/5,002,020
“OUR AIM IS TO
CONTRIBUTE TO
We are creating a relational knowledge base borne Nasra Abdullahi is a designer, writer and editor
BLACK IMAGINARY
from the groundworks of local African epistemologies based in London. She is the 2021 guest editor of REPOSITORIES
and from the Horn of Africa in particular. This specific- The Avery Review and a member of the second BY ENGINEER-
ING SITUATED
ity is paramount to the diversification of perspectives cohort of New Architecture Writers. A student at AFRICAN-FUTUR-
which is multiplicitous in imagination and thought. Not the Bartlett School of Architecture, she is interest- ISMS, WHICH
NNEDI OKORA-
only does it sustain the integrity and uniqueness of the ed in ways we can seek equitable futures through FOR DEFINES AS
site but it also allows us to innovate further. The dis- material cultures away from projected architectur- ONE THAT ‘DOES
NOT PRIVILEGE
tinction is necessary in order to embark on a diverse al and urban desires. OR CENTER
African cosmology that is simultaneously continental/ THE WEST’ AND,
FURTHERMORE, IS
local and technological/spiritual. Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary de-
NOT EXPECTED TO
signer from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With a back- REACH BEYOND
Our aim is to contribute to Black imaginary repositories ground in Architecture, she works with digital media THE CONTINENT.”
by engineering situated African-futurisms, which Nne- and spatial design to interrogate themes of equita-
di Okorafor defines as one that “does not privilege or ble futurism, experimental conservation and inter-
center the West” and, furthermore, is not expected to sectionality. She is a CCA-Mellon researcher for the
reach beyond the Continent. As we proceed with our Digital Now multidisciplinary project and a fellow of
unconventional methods of research and architectural Gray Area’s Zachary Watson Education Fund.
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME 53
ARTICLES EXTRAORTHOGRAPHICS
KEVIN BERNARD MOULTRIE DAYE
An Extraorthographic
of the West Adams
neighborhood of Los
Angeles, California. Each space hosts the copresence of what time cate-
/ Drawing by Kevin gorizes as “past” and “future.” Drawing from the work
Bernard Moultrie
Daye (2021). of Rasheedah Phillips and Black Quantum Futurism,
Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye presents his concept of
EXTRAORTHOGAPHICS, which uses a non-progres-
sive understanding of time, as well as architecture
modes of representation to visualize this temporal
copresence on any given site.
“When you see that there is more than one thing
Open up in a new way”
Yaeji, Feel it Out (Nick Godmode Remix)
Tile I: A Clock is a Map is a Code is a Key ///
Exactly four years ago, Rasheedah Philips posed a ques-
tion to the readers of The Funambulist. In the article “Plac-
ing Time, Timing Space: Dismantling the Master’s Map
and Clock,” she concludes with a sort of checklist for en-
gaging with maps and clocks critically. The 10 questions
provide a guide to assist in Black Quantum Futurism’s on-
going project that “reappropriates clocks and maps to de-
construct hegemonic Western Spacetimes and dismantle
54
the master’s clocks.” Indeed, the very structure of Western
Capitalism necessitated the colonization, standardization
and (literal) atomization of time itself.
As globalization spread from the European West, it de-
manded that local or indigenous conceptions of time
march to the beat of the same drum. The European co-
lonial project of ocean navigation spurred the need for
more accurate clocks, useful for calculating distance as
well as coordinating military troop movements. The rail-
road needed standardized time zones for operation and
coordination. Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 Principles
of Scientific Management and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s
time and motion studies in the 1910s broke down time
into “work units,” a process that optimized the increasing
need for efficient (once enslaved, now low wage) workers.
Time, it would seem, is not simply a neutral substrate but,
in its division and measurement, it is in itself, a code. An
expression of a system that, when properly decoded, can
provide an insight into the system that uses it. The modern
conception of time has steamrolled over local and indige-
nous cosmologies of time.
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
Before the invention of the mechanical clock, all time was
relational to the Earth or the conditions of the tool of mea-
surement. Egyptian shadow clocks needed the sun, mak-
ing time disappear at night and on overcast days. Chinese
incense clocks that measured time by the burning of often
elaborate paths of incense were subject to the heat and
speed of the flame that was ignited. Hourglasses and water
clocks relied on gravity to operate, with cold days slowing
time down to a crawl before freezing. These are variations
on the conceptual difference between mean time and ap-
parent time. In apparent time, time is not uniform, instead
each division of time is seasonal and varied. In these, typ-
ically local, systems time was measured proportionally, by
subdividing the year, month or day. As mechanical means
took over timekeeping, a shift happened. Instead of being
determined by something experiential, time became sub-
ordinated to an abstraction. A mathematically derived form
that cannot be understood through the senses, only de-
tected and verified through industrial processes. A second
transforms from a part of the day (divided sexagesimaly
or Base 60) into atomic time, or, as defined by the Bureau
International des Poids et Mesures:
“The SI unit of time is the second defined as follows: The
second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the ra-
diation corresponding to the transition between the two hy-
perfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom”
NOTE: At its 1997 meeting, the CIPM affirmed that this defi-
nition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a thermodynamic
temperature of 0 K.
Later, we will see this process of moving from human expe-
rience to mental abstraction is one that has parallels in the
history of space. Detangling, reversing and complicating
this process suggests and revives alternative cosmologies
and ways of relating to the natural world outside of Western
capitalism. However, once un-tangled, Rasheedah Phillips’
question remains: “Once we dismantle the master’s clock,
what clocks or timekeeping practices will take its place?”
Tile II: The Line is a Lie ///
For the discipline of architecture, the question is a poi-
gnant one. Space is irrevocably intertwined with Time,
and its conceptualization has been a major tool of em-
pire as well. And it too has been subject to increasing
abstraction from reality. The history of the United States
of America is rife with these instances. The Land Ordi-
nance of 1785 can be thought of as the moment when
the assumed rationality of “the grid” intersected the ac-
tual topography of the land. Driven mainly by an obses-
sion with both efficiency and the Enlightenment, the Or-
dinance transformed the recently stolen territories into a
patchwork of six-mile square settlements subdivided into
36 smaller one-mile square sections and then again and
THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME
again down to the scale of a 270 x 600 feet city block.
And so the land became an abstraction oriented to the
cardinal directions. Every building, farm, shed, and row of
corn in the quilt “America’s Heartland” pointing orthogo-
nally North, South, East or West, save for the occasional
rumpled hill or meandering river.
This example, however, illustrates an important distinction
“MAPS AND
between concepts of space and time. Maps and other
OTHER SPATIAL
spatial drawings (blueprints, etc.), much like clocks, are DRAWINGS
abstractions and projections of the thing they seek to de- (BLUEPRINTS,
ETC.), MUCH LIKE
scribe. A map or clock is a mechanism for measurement CLOCKS, ARE AB-
of duration or distance. However, in the hands of those STRACTIONS AND
PROJECTIONS
empowered to generate built form; planners, architects or OF THE THING
politicians, their relationship to the thing described is much THEY SEEK TO
DESCRIBE.”
fuzzier. We would like to believe, as Phillips and Korzybski
point out, that the map is not the territory. However, in archi-
tectural drawing and production a curious thing happens…
the map becomes the territory. Architectural drawing uses
abstracted representation to create embodied objects.
Typically, once leaving the academic institution (and much
to my dismay), the main role of the architect consists in pro-
ducing documents. These documents are both descriptive
of existing conditions, but also are instructions on how to
construct structures or buildings. And these documents
are usually drawn in a fashion specific to the field of ar-
chitecture (as well as to the military, but perhaps that is
for another time). Most of the images we interact with are
perspectival, they are representations of an image as it is
seen with the eye. Things recede into the distance because
the rays of light (or projection lines) bouncing off the object
travel to a single point, the viewer’s eye. Architectural pro-
jections (plan, sections, elevations, etc.), however, tend to
be orthographic. Those projection lines do not ever con-
verge, they remain parallel. Every point from which a line
emanates remains at a 90-degree angle (orthogonal) from
the others. This is not how we see in real life. This is an
abstraction of vision.
The reasoning behind the prevalence of this way of drawing
is to preserve the dimensional relationships of an object’s
size and shape. While this allows for the production of mea-
surable, accurate drawings; it also makes for a somewhat
surreal viewing experience. The human eyes do not expe-
rience the three-dimensional world in this way. Regardless,
orthographic plans, sections and elevations make up the
bulk of what are called construction documents, the draw-
ings used to build buildings. Much like Jefferson’s grid, the
parallel lines are implemented because they are assumed
to be practical, to be objective. Apolitical, authoritative ab-
stractions. The orthographic line defines and delineates
space, both in representation and in reality. Yet again we
see the triumph of abstraction over lived experience.
55
 “THIS RELATIONSHIP
OF CHAMORU PEOPLE Tile IV: EXTRAORTHOGRAPHICS ///
TO THEIR LAND IS The word orthographic comes from the Greek “orthos,” meaning “correct,” and “graph-
INDICATIVE OF THEIR
PLACE-BASED IDENTI-
ia,” meaning “writing or drawing” — the assumption being that these kinds of drawings
TY AND ECOLOGICAL are somehow “correct” and can act as authoritative documents of reality. They are not,
PRACTICES WHICH “TOO OFTEN,
CHAMPION AWARE-
however, objective or apolitical. Too often, these drawings are tools that have silenced THESE DRAWINGS
NESS OF ONE’S and shaped history to the detriment of many rich and beautiful communities and cultures. ARE TOOLS THAT
INTERDEPENDENCE HAVE SILENCED
Despite its seeming best efforts, architectural production has very little to say about this
WITH THEIR ENVIRON- AND SHAPED
MENT.” erasure of context. HISTORY TO
THE DETRIMENT
OF MANY RICH
Typical conversations about “Architecture responding to context” center on responding to AND BEAUTIFUL
the environment as it physically exists in the current moment. Designers draw large scale COMMUNITIES
AND CULTURES.
site plans and trace circulation and densities. Massing models are made to adjust to neigh- DESPITE ITS
boring buildings and typologies, while environmental models in the form of solar studies SEEMING BEST
EFFORTS, AR-
and wind charts. However, these studies, while sometimes alluding to “found conditions”, CHITECTURAL
rarely make explicit this fact that architecture is not simply an intervention in space, but also PRODUCTION
HAS VERY LITTLE
in time. Context exists in space and time.
TO SAY ABOUT
THIS ERASURE OF
Nowhere does this fact become more apparent than in the architectural history of cit- CONTEXT.”

By incorporating
annotation and Tile III: Plexity: Simplex, Complex and Multiplex ///
dimension, a different
understanding of how Now, let us return to Rasheedah Phillips’ questions. When
overlapping histories one dismantles the clocks, in turn, one must redraw the
converge is possible.
maps. What then, do we do with the architectural or-
thographics? Their utility is clear enough that perhaps we
should keep them in some way, shape, or form. There is
also no denying that these drawings, at best, leave out
important aspects of lived reality and, at worst, are part
of an ongoing colonial program designed to center En-
lightenment and Fordist philosophies of space and time.
Perhaps the answer then, is to reconstruct the orthograph-
ic perspective to include the very thing they leave out,
time. In most Western conceptions up until Einstein, time
was considered distinct from space. During that time,
however, non-western modes of thought that embraced a
more integrated view of spacetime were either destroyed,
“IT IS A HIGH died out, or their history hidden. For example, Cultures
INTENSITY such as the ancient Incan civilization held a concept
GRAVITATIONAL
SPACETIME EVENT
called pachas, or “world-moments.” Anthropologist Cath-
WHERE ‘THE TEM- erine Allen gives us one such example:
PORAL PRESENT
JOINS THE SPA-
TIAL PAST THERE “The Quechua word pacha may refer to the whole cos-
WITH THE POS- mos or to a specific moment in time, with interpreta-
SIBLE FUTURE,
AND THEY GET tion depending on the context. Thus the phrase, “Chay
TOTALLY MIXED pachapin” may be translated into English either as “In
UP. ONLY THE
MOST MULTIPLEX that world” or as “At that moment.” The difference be-
OF MINDS CAN GO tween a world and a moment is simply a difference in
THERE AND FIND
THEIR WAY OUT
scale. To participate in a pacha, a world-moment, is to
AGAIN’.” share in its sut’i, its clarity” What kind of sut’i would we
find if we began to re-collapse our moments into our
spaces? This requires a worldview that can handle con-
tradiction and complexity in ways that start to challenge
our notions of objectivity.
ies. While developers lobby for renamed neighborhoods and rebranded buildings, the
citizens of a city often hold and remember the city in all its forms. As city dwellers age
A favorite example is Samuel Delany’s novella Empire Star or move away, a city’s history is left to be documented by those in power in photos and
(1966). In it, he outlines three different ways of thinking: sim- architectural drawings. This can lead to erasure of the most potent kind. Entire communi- Once home to a
plex, complex, and multiplex — each with its own benefits ties and histories can be rendered silent in the poché of a Noli map, turned into graphical wealthy African
American enclave
and drawbacks. Simplex thinking is fairly basic and straight- fodder. While the classic tools at an architectural designer’s disposal: the Plan, Section, that fell victim to
forward, mostly black and white without shades of grey. Elevation and Axon, give preference to the dimensions we can then also ignore a dimen- intentional erasure
by urban ‘renewal’;
Think of a young person who has never left their hometown sion that is equally felt and experienced, yet harder to draw: time. This paradox is further Indegenous, animal
or experienced another culture outside their own. Complex heightened by the fact that, in essence, all architectural production is geared toward ac- and geological his-
tories play out over
thinking can grasp and understand intricacies and nuance, curate drawings of non-existent future structures. time, collapsed into
adding depth and broader understanding to your world- a single image.
view. Travelling is a useful analogue here, encountering and
comprehending diverse points of view and understanding
the differences between them. Multiplexity, however, makes
room not just for complexity, but also contradiction. The
past can be the future, over there can be over here and a
single thing can simultaneously exist in multiple ways. In this
view, imagine our young traveler now viewing the Earth, not
as a map, but as a mosaic; each tile a different scale, jum-
bled in order and position, but each just as important (or un-
important) as the next, yet still forming a cohesive/fractured
whole. At the climax of Delany’s story the characters final-
ly discuss the fabled Empire Star and discover that it isn’t,
strictly speaking, a place at all. Rather, it is a high intensity
Left page. Kiara
gravitational spacetime event where “the temporal present Quichocho standing
joins the spatial past there with the possible future, and they outside the District
Court of Guam
get totally mixed up. Only the most multiplex of minds can during the Fanohge
go there and find their way out again.” March for CHamoru
Self-Determination —
Fanohge translates to
Only a multiplex mind can make sense of a world in which “stand” in CHamoru.
Right page. Terri
time and space operate in strange, recursive ways, and use Quichocho picking
that understanding to create new possibilities that may have string beans from the
fence in her backyard
seemed impossible. Our reality is not so different. So then,
garden. This fence
I propose that we redraw our maps and clocks the same separates Terri’s land
way, a multiplex way. I suggest we replace orthographies from Guam’s airport.
/ All photos by Kiara
with EXTRAORTHOGRAPHICS. Quichocho (2019).

56 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME 57
 How then do we confront the inability of the architectural
orthographic drawing to convey cultural temporal-spa-
tial context?
The EXTRAORTHOGRAPHIC method is, at its core, quite
simple. One iteratively draws a single site in plan, section
and elevation at various times in its history and projected
future, culminating in an experimental four-dimensional por-
trait of a building in its spatiotemporal context. Moving from
research, to fiction, to abstraction, and always grounded
“SPACE HIDES WHAT in reality (with an eye to detail), we hope to draw out the
TIME REVEALS.
HISTORY IS NEVER
ways in which histories and futures collide in architectural
MONOCHROME, thought. The map becomes the clock.
AND CURRENT
ETHNIC ENCLAVES
COULD ALSO HOLD Intrinsic to this process is a deep dive into the multiple his-
MILITARY HISTORIES,
tories and cultures that are embedded into time and space.
ENVIRONMENTAL
EXTRACTIONS, UNEX- In current practice, neighborhood history is often simplified
PECTED MOMENTS into an easy-to-digest narratives of gentrification and new
OF SOLIDARITY, AS
WELL AS FORGOT- development. However, even a brief study reveals many
TEN SCENES OF overlapping (and often surprising) ways of reading any
VIOLENCE.”
site. Space hides what time reveals. History is never mono-
chrome, and current ethnic enclaves could also hold mil-
itary histories, environmental extractions, unexpected mo-
ments of solidarity, as well as forgotten scenes of violence.
This methodology was further refined and expand-
ed while teaching at the California College of the Arts
Graduate Architecture Department, with my colleague
Bz Zhang. For this iteration we chose a site in San Fran-
cisco’s Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood and drew
it over and over and over again. Students chose three
points of time between the time period of 3000 BCE (the
beginning of human settlement of the San Francisco Bay
Area) and 2100 CE (the extent of most projections of sea
level rise) to research and draw what was occurring at that
point in space — with one point serving as the project’s
point-of-origin, or “Present Tense” from which future and
past conclusions can be drawn.
The results were provocative. All at once we saw a single
piece of land that held:
An Ohlone settlement
A livestock slaughterhouse
A Chinese shrimping village
A thriving Italian and Maltese immigrant community
A Naval Shipyard
A hub of Black Migration
A site of ongoing nuclear contamination
A site of land speculation and rapid redevelopment
And this process can be replicated and repeated at any
location, anywhere, to reveal and unsettle current spatial
narratives. Crucially, this process challenged the idea of the At any given point in
space, are multiple
objective line in architectural drawing. By restricting the illus- argument then becomes that these histories and experiences are as literal and unambiguous
histories. It is the
trations of these narratives into orthographic production, the as the square footage of the lot, or the height of a parapet. It seeks to complicate and contradict role of a spatial
our assumptions about how truth and authority in architecture is represented. This method of designer to operate
both temporally and
contradictory understanding and movement is an intrinsic part of Black (and other non-Euro- physically in their
pean) folklore as a cultural guard against oppression. It is a requirement for an expanded and modes of operation.

radical retooling of architectural practice. In her 1991 essay “Finding Our Voice in a Dominant
Key,” Architect Sharon Sutton says:

“I imagine an alternative practice of architecture that simultaneously embraces two seem-

ingly contradictory missions. In this alternative approach we use our right hand to pry open
the box so that more of us can get into it while using our left hand to get rid of the very box
“THE WAY IMAG- we are trying to get into.”
ES ARE MADE
IS THROUGH AN
APPROACH AND AN The multiplex mind does not see this as a contradiction. It is simply another way of looking at
AESTHETIC THAT IS
truths. The prefix “extra” comes from the Latin for “outside” or “beyond” — as in the phrase,
NOT THOUGHT OF
FROM THE INSIDE. I “extra ordinem,” meaning outside the ordinary or normal course of events. As Delany says
ASKED MYSELF MANY towards the end of his short story, “As time progresses [...] people learn. That’s the only hope.”
QUESTIONS ABOUT
PHOTOGRAPHY. GIV- And perhaps the more time we have, the more we can learn. Luckily, there is plenty of time. It’s
EN HOW IT EMERGED all here right now, waiting for us to see it. ■
WITH THIS COLONIAL
AND EXTRACTIVE
REALITY, HOW CAN Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye (KBMD) makes music, designs, curates, fabricates,
I TRANSCEND OR
DISTORT THIS?”
teaches and is a founding member of SPACE INDUSTRIES, a spatial design col-
lective based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. His work focuses
on issues on how issues of time, climate, identity, material and culture intersect
in spatial theory. Currently, he is an adjunct professor at the California College
of Arts and a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley as well as an 2021
Emerging Curators at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. He is also an ar-
chitectural designer at EHDD.

58 THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME THE FUNAMBULIST 36 /// THEY HAVE CLOCKS, WE HAVE TIME 59
MASTHEAD
Issue 36 (July-August 2021): They Have Clocks, We Have Time
Next issue: 37 (September-October 2021): Against Genocide (guest edited by Zoé Samudzi)

funambulist: fu·nam·bu·list (fyo͝ o-năm′byə-lĭst)

noun. One who performs on a tightrope or a slack rope. (The Free Dictionary)

ISSN: 2430-218X
CPPAP: 0921 K 92818
Publisher’s Address: The Funambulist, 75 rue du Cherche-Midi, 75006 Paris, France.
Printer’s Address: Alpha S.A.S. 57, ZA La Boissonnette 07340 Peaugres, France.

Editor-in-Chief: Léopold Lambert

Advisory Editorial Board: Margarida Nzuzi Waco, Caroline Honorien,
Nadia El Hakim, Flora Hergon, and Noelle Geller
Contributing Copy Editor: Carol Que
Contributing Translators: Chanelle Adams, Amanda Chartier Chamorro
Graphic design freely adapted from a model by Julie Mallat

Contributors: Edna Martinez, Sophia Azeb, Jeyavishni Francis Jeyaratnam & Simon-Pierre Coftier, Shahram
Khosravi, WAI Architecture Think Tank, Rasheedah Phillips, Meryem-Bahia Arfaoui, Emily Jacir, Syma Tariq,
Michael Rothberg, Nasra Abdullahi & Miriam Hillawi Abraham, and Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye.

Special Thanks: Hiroko Nakatani, Shivangi Mariam Raj, Renisa Mawani, Hayfaa Chalabi, Taysir Batniji, Jehane
Bseiso, Zoé Samudzi, Akanksha Kumar, Nilanjana Bhattacharjee, and Julia Albani.

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el of publishing in the future.
An exploration of architecture’s ability (or lack of) to evolve in dialogue with society.

Family, love, friendship, work, labour, governance, ownership, debt, consumerism,

fertility, death, time, retirement, automation, and digital omnipresence.

EUR 12,00 ISSN 2430-218X

cca.qc.ca/catchingupwithlife