Composting the Frustration

Aerin Dunford

We called it Nepantla. For god’s sake, WHY?

Nepantla: the in-between-place, the no-place-place. Before it all started, a wise man asked if we were sure that was really how we wanted to describe the first face-to-face gathering of The Emergence Network. We had to be prepared for anything. Yet, just any thing it was not.

My mind tumbles back over the cobblestones, jetlagged madrugadas and Airbus A320’s of the past four weeks; it slips like sand through nearly invisible cracks in the pavement of those five days together. I consider the possibility that maybe we can’t even know what Nepantla is or what is happening there while we are in that place. It’s not until we’ve somehow scraped ourselves off the ceiling of the auto-rickshaw and come back to… well, to whatever we think is on the other side of not knowing… that we can recognize or begin to feel what it’s like to have inhabited the crack in no-man’s land for some time together.

In the midst of it, I admit to feeling confused. I remember there were spikes of annoyance, anxiety, frustration in the midst of a generalized sea of disorientation, unexpected tears and 26 dirty feet, punctuated by the occasional perfectly timed fart. When I remember hard, I know there was also laughter, tenderness, bonds forged and a fair amount of absolute ridiculousness (including Báyò shooting at balloons on the beach with a shotgun). Yet I don’t really think I was fully aware or present to the magnitude of being in Nepantla until I had emerged from it. Maybe the in-between-place isn’t full of suffering after all. Maybe it’s just how we remember it.

There was the sea and a beach full of fishermen’s poop. There was a sweet woman who worked at the Villas and glanced curiously at us in her beautiful purple sari and giggled when I greeted her with my poorly pronounced “Vanyakam” in the mornings. And there was blood. In the blood there are words that I don’t remember. Ésú was there, inviting me to see things anew through his trickster-black eyes. But I couldn’t… and I fell into the long sleep of forgetting: of forgetting myself and forgetting all of you and forgetting about food and forgetting about Nepantla and forgetting about the ground-floor pool and the incessant mosquitos and the crows. Swaddled in the coolness of the aircon that never ceased in our room the whole week… I slept.

Here, from Nepantla’s far bank, I am left with a few words:

P R O P H E C Y

K I N D N E S S

C O N C E R N

R E L E A S E

A C C E P T A N C E

Faith that this is and was what it needs to be; that somewhere in there, our roots widened the crack between the worlds and we all became more entwined. I cannot say that I feel good. I think that Nepantla has (perhaps) made me a stranger to a former self: to the one who flew the long miles to India for a “meeting.” The imaginal cells of the other one are doing their work now… dividing now… growing now. I remember: we came to fail. And fail we did. A brilliant failure, opening the impossible-to-see-in-between future. Nepantla.

We let what is real move through.

We’re talking about things so absent that they’re impossible not to see.

Don’t let the design or the plan get in the way.

Gathering to slow down.

Where is our POWER ?

Organize in kolams.

The dehiscence.

We hope to FAIL in our strategy. We are here to honor that FAILURE.

Foot of strategy.

Foot of failure.

The trickster makes the world again.

Postactivism is a slave seeking a fugitive community.

The war of sides: what is the third way within the modern apparatus?

Keep raising questions rather than seeking the answers. 

We have a colonial anxiety about imposing our voices or opinions on others.

Fugitive notions of gift and funding.

In the ongoing wrestling with things, there’s a way.

It’s a question whose answer is always yet to come.

Part of it is to be with the messiness.

Composting the frustration.