Reconstructing the ‘Pluriverse’ as the Hegemony Unravels—IV
Stories are pathways to a pluriversal world
In dazzling proclamations and manifestos, the Zapatistas announced the rise of the fourth world and the radical rejection of neoliberalism in 1994.
”We Indian peoples have come in order to wind the clock and to thus ensure that the inclusive, tolerant, and plural tomorrow, which is incidentally the only tomorrow possible, will arrive,” Marcos said. “With our struggle, we are reading the future which has already been sown yesterday, which is being cultivated today, and which can only be reaped if one fights, if, that is, one dreams.”
”A new lie is being sold to us as history. The lie of the defeat of hope, the lie of the defeat of dignity, the lie of the defeat of humanity… In place of humanity, they offer us the stock market index. In place of dignity, they offer us the globalization of misery. In place of hope, they offer us emptiness. In place of life, they offer us an International of Terror. Against the International of Terror that neoliberalism represents, we must raise an International of Hope.” ~Quoted by Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
We are at a revolutionary moment in our civilizational trajectory. As the hegemony visibly digs its own grave exposing its Machiavellian machinations for all to see, its time to reimagine, remember and reconstruct our wondrous, beautiful, diverse, and abundant pluriversal planet. Many might say that the hegemony is still going strong—bombing to hell all that stands in its way. But that would not be true. Bombing is really all that hegemony knows; its default reaction to opposition, resistance, and voices of reason and compassion. It can only incarcerate, incinerate, and incite violence. Hegemony basically has a ‘military’ solution to everything. It is stuck in a destructive loop of its own making with visibly ageing leaders struggling to remain in power even as they are confronted by their own irrefutable obsolescence.
At this final stage of colonialist necro-capitalism the absurdities are so vast, so copious and bizarre, that not for one second there exists a reality in which the formal narrative has any credibility. Hegemony’s problem is it continues to do the same thing expecting different results, and this is insanity as Einstein (probably) has said. Listen to what Biden says: “Are the airstrikes in Yemen working? Well… when you say ‘working’, are they stopping the Houthis [Ansar Allah]? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” This is a textbook case of insanity.
This utter absurdity is predicated on the belief that trade and commerce should be permitted to continue as usual with zero economic repercussions of any kind. That the horrors being unleashed in Gaza should have no material impact on the rest of the world whatsoever is profoundly disorienting and problematic. This is the kind of blindness that obeisance to a single story and one worldview perpetuates—horror beyond belief. The issue is that hegemony can’t see, sense, think, or stop its own juggernaut. It is on autopilot heading off a cliff, and taking the perpetrators as well as whole chunks of other life forms with it.
Digital colonization is further enforcing hegemony where technology is more than a tool now. “It is an instrument of power and control, the means to construct a false narrative of our relationship with the natural world and society, eclipsing nature’s creativity and productivity, and the contribution of those who are colonised—women, slaves, workers, and farmers.” ~Vandana Shiva
The reductionism associated with technology is also reflected in the reductions in society—the 99% lose their economic security; their diverse skills, ways of thinking, potentials, and intelligences are reduced to the management of digital data; and people end up as appendages to machines and technologies. Instead of being a means to reaching higher ecological, ethical, social and human ends, the deployment and use of industrial technologies become an end in themselves, a new religion. ~Vandana Shiva
“The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, reveals a new Oxfam report.” This is hardly news. But it indicates the extraordinary control that the 1% have over geopolitics, global economy, our ‘democracies’, and all aspects of our lives.
Hence, the imperative to collectively bring to fruition our vision of a pluriversal world—one where many worlds fit.
This Eurocentric hegemony that seems all powerful, pervasive, and ubiquitous is a superficial construct imposed on the rest of the planet as an imperial-colonial-modernism project, further enforced through globalization and neoliberal capitalism. The myth of its universality has been carefully constructed and enforced through military might and media machinery. The dominant narrative is merely one of many, neither infallible nor indestructible, but disastrously trying to play the ‘god trick’. The world has always been pluriversal. That's the default.
This imposition of hegemony is a bid to forcefully constrict and contain a diverse, abundant, myriad, and mysterious world. It is an effort to confine an ‘unruly’ and ‘capricious’ world within the narrow bounds of hegemony. What doesn’t fit the dominant narrative is usually ruthlessly erased or rendered invisible. Universalization is, thus, an essentially violent process requiring the use of unmitigated force to obliterate other ways of being, seeing, sensing, and relating to the world. Embodying pluriversality is, therefore, to reclaim and remember our inherent multiplicity and diversity, our indelible interconnectedness, and our gloriously entangled and messy abundance.
What is the purpose of resisting hegemony if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the indescribable, the local, the poetic, and the eccentric? Radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, “The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational as Capitalism.”
Today, in an organically rising movement, hundreds of thousands are marching across the world in different cities and nations, asking for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“A march is when bodies speak by walking, when private citizens become that mystery the public, when traversing the boulevards of cities becomes a way to travel towards political goals. A moment when history would not be made by weapons but by walkers under the open sky.” ~Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
A new imagination of politics and change is already here. History is being made out of common dreams, groundswells, turning points, watersheds. Therefore, the stories we nurture and tell ourselves at this civilizational juncture between collapse and creation, between chaos and care matter more than ever. As John Berger poignantly wrote: “Never again will a single story be told as though it is the only one.”
Stories trap us, and stories free us; we live and die by stories. Pluriversality is an invitation to recognize that we have the power to be storytellers, not just listeners. It is an invitation to participate in creating a dialogic, convivial, and democratic world. To reclaim our agency to be creators, disruptors, dreamers, story-tellers, and scribes of an emerging future. Stories lie in the realm of the metaphorical, the symbolic, and ‘the terrain of their action is collective imagination’.
Stories have a way of seeping out of cracks and crevices, out of rubbles and ruins, and colonize our imagination. They refuse to let go. They beckon and inspire, tantalize and tease us with their hidden possibilities. They demand articulation. These are the stories with the powers to shift what seems immovable, implacable, impervious. When such stories coalesce, connect, interweave, there is no stopping the tidal wave of transformation. Sometimes, this happens incrementally, in invisible ways, and then crashes forth one day. This is how, for example, Mahatma Gandhi's Satyagraha and non-violent resistance gathered momentum.
Sometimes, stories also reverberate across centuries providing inspiration and wisdom. I believe stories don't die. They are sometimes forgotten, go into hibernation, and then emerge anew, with new significance and meaning. As the hegemony disintegrates into incoherence, the lost stories are reappearing from the shadowy, ignored, and invisible corners of the world. Those corners where people escaped the globalization matrix, thus becoming invisible. They retain the power of ‘invisibility’—an authenticity denied to those infected by the hegemony virus. Their stories are as yet untainted and unsullied, still containing the wisdom that allowed them to coexist harmoniously. In these neglected places lie radical power. Countless such unseen, unheard, unacknowledged stories are emerging and claiming their rightful place in the process and praxis of worldbuilding.
Even as Gaza is being pulverized, the stories of Gaza’s destroyed olive groves are reappearing, inviting us to imagine a vibrant, beautiful Gaza where olive harvesting was a time of celebration, where olives not only provided livelihood but was a way of life. “During the festival, Palestinians sing national songs and sometimes dance dabka while enjoying traditional Palestinian bread with olive oil and thyme. Palestinians consider the olive harvest to be as traditional as a Palestinian wedding.” Such stories take us beyond the hegemonic horrors, and open the doors to an enchanting world of community, care, and celebrations.
Am I saying their existence is all trouble-free paradise? No. I am saying that they have managed to lead a more convivial and communal existence away from the grip of the metropole. Instead of expropriating their land for the next mining project or the next Ben Gurion canal, it would be way more worthwhile to learn from and integrate their wisdom without usurping their sovereignty. Countless such pockets of alternative living exists that can serve as role models for a pluriversal and coherent world.
Arundhati Roy describes this as “the dismantling of the Big—big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small.”
Small stories rising from the edges and margins have a way of percolating and seeping out into the stratosphere. If the big media houses function to manufacture consent on behalf of the hegemony, the millions of blogs, podcasts, tik tok videos are the edge voices shredding the hegemony’s veil of illusion to bits. This organic rising of collective imagination is the death knell of the hegemonic powers. The animating spirit driving collective vision is often unexplainable, supple and fluid as art, gathering impetus as it moves through the hearts and minds of many. There are no defined designs, no rigid dogmas, and no specific isms. They arise from a spontaneous meeting of visions and beliefs whose time has come.
Dismantling the hegemony requires embracing and embodying all that the hegemony is not. This means recognizing our inherent interconnectedness and interrelatedness, eschewing all fallacious narratives of separation and otherization, rejecting the productization of every facet of life, and pathologizing of all that makes us human—kindness, care, empathy, connection. This means untangling ourselves from hegemony-imposed notions of separation, hyper-individualism, endless consumption, and extreme fear of the unknown. This means escaping—even if occasionally—from hegemony’s narrow confines to weave other tales of togetherness. This means becoming conscious of all the tools in hegemony’s arsenal, and refusing to be indoctrinated.
Pluriversality also eschews anthropocentrism and an anthropocentric worldview. The very notion of the pluriverse embraces stories of the other-than and more-than human. It's not only ecocentrism, which again centers the human. Its about listening—deeply, with humility, with amazement. As Mary Oliver writes in When Death Comes:
When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Forests tell stories as do oceans and mountains. Bears and otters, sunbirds and beavers, seals and salmon—all have their stories. How do we learn to listen? How do we listen to a tree? To the rhythms of life pulsing through her? Maybe, occasionally we can learn to live by ‘Tree Time’.
It was impossible to rush plants, to tell a tree to ‘hurry up’. In envy, in admiration and with ambition, I began to call that pace ‘Tree Time’.
~Sumana Roy, How I became a Tree
The very notion may appear impossible or idealistic or both. Nonetheless, it's now apparent that ignoring the myriad other stories have led us down a dangerous path of civilizational annihilation. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together and intermingling of cultures that overlap, learn and borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any limited or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow.
Sooner or later, the time will have to come to draw attention to the manner in which the exclusion of other traditions of knowledge by reductionist science is itself part of the problem that has led to myriad failed development initiatives all around the world. —Catherine Odora Hoppers, Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems
I wrote a series on the Dangers of a Single Story some time back; the hegemony survives by keeping our imagination constricted, our creativity restrained, and our artists and dreamers silenced or incarcerated. This is how hegemony perpetuates a single, homogenous, economic monomyth of endless profit and accumulation of capital by a few.
Hence, the need to reimagine pluriversal futures. The best way to resist monolithic homogeneity is with multiplicity, pluriversality. Will the hegemony vanish overnight? Of course not. It will continue to wreak havoc on its way out. However, reimagining possible futures is not premised on the end of the old. Acts of co-creation are already happening as tens of thousands take to the streets in support of Palestine.
Prior to this global uprising, many movements have been erupting across the globe as antidotes to the hegemonic narrative—creating reservoirs of hope, resilience, and respite. Some movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street gained global prominence, while others stayed in their corner of the planet impacting local laws and regulations like the Farmers Protest in India. Nonetheless, ripples of these stories floated out disseminating their energy far and wide in defiance of hegemonic repression.
Will we achieve a perfectly pluriversal world? No. But the aspiration of it, embodying it, envisioning it, imagining it will be worth it. The needle of the world will shift—sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes with a wild swing that can exhilarate and astonish. And for us to embody a pluriversal world, I invite us to listen to trees.
Not that I want to be a god
or a hero
Just to change into a tree,
grow for ages, not hurt
anyone.
~Czeslaw Milosz
Pluriversality is in profound ways anti-ideological, where ideology means ironclad prescriptions about who's an ally and what makes a better future. It's improvisational, collaborative, creative—constantly in a state of forming and reforming, interweaving and intersecting, reimagining and refining. There's an openheartedness, a hopefulness, and a willingness to trust.
To be anti-doctrinal is to open yourself up to new and unexpected alliances, to new networks of power. It is an ideology of sorts, which is to say it is an ideology against ideologies. An ideology of absolute democracy that is about preventing authority from rising, with the concomitant limits on imagination, participation, and adaptation. ~Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
Pluriversality is a convivial, dialogic, and democratic vision of a world that is not bound to an ideology or an ‘ism’. It eschews the constraints that such isms pose, and instead opt for the fluidity, flexibility, and fecundity of collaboration, improvisations, and wholehearted hopefulness. The people on the streets today asking for a ceasefire in Gaza are demonstrating what an intersection of boundaryless allyship, hope, and resistance look like. This is how pluriversality emerge from the unexpected, the organic, and the creative acts of rebellion and resilience. It is a mode of being, a way of seeing and sensing the world that refuses binaries, linear causalities, easy tropes and simplistic stereotypes.
Naomi Klein writes:
When critics say the protesters lack vision, what they are really saying is that they lack an overarching revolutionary philosophy—like Marxism Socialism, deep ecology or social anarchy —on which they all agree. That is absolutely true, and for this we should be extraordinarily thankful.
Your writing is such a gift Sahana, thank you 🙏🏻
Thank you Sahana for sharing and using your gifts to help us see, sense and reimagine in visceral ways.