Contemporânea

The theft of black interiority—aka dehumanization—constitutes, for Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida and me, a crime against humanity that no court will be able to judge, and so the work of reconstituting this interiority falls to the plundered themselves. Self-repair appears as a form of intimate utopia, which insists on cultivating the unfinished, the fractured, the possible within the impossible. However, for the author, such work can only be done through art. On this point, I respectfully disagree with Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida; I think that the work of self-repair can and should be done in the most diverse spheres of life. I also think that the boundaries between self-repair, collective reparation, and politics are very porous, assuming they exist at all. It is about imagining our entire existence, in a world beyond the world as we know it—a free utopia that will finally allow the sublimation of every catastrophe on which we are founded.

We soon realized that there is no real decolonization without a rupture with internalized colonial structures. Although he does not use the term self-repair, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon shows that reparation cannot be achieved within the framework of colonial rationality: a process of collective "healing" of the psychic wounds left by colonialism, as well as a transformation of the subjectivity of colonized peoples, are necessary. The author proposes that the violence of the colonized, often understood as irrational, arises as a response to the foundational violence of colonization. In this context, catastrophe is inscribed in the body and spirit, and utopia consists in the creation of a new human being freed from symbolic and material prisons.

The tension between utopia and catastrophe can be understood as a fertile ground for rethinking history, the present, and the becoming in light of demands for reparations. Western modernity, often narrated as a civilizational project whose ultimate goal would be the utopia of a perfect world, is founded on systematic catastrophes—colonization, slavery, plunder, genocide. Before this memory and in combating the contemporary consequences of this historical process, proposals for reparations are not limited to legal arrangements or material compensation. In the face of the shattered world in which we live, we demand a profound reconfiguration of time, memory, justice, and politics.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay reminds us that “History as we know it is a mode of imperialism”2 and that the archives of modernity are permeated by imperial violence. In other words, what has come to be called “history” is, to a large extent, the product of a regime of visuality that normalizes plunder, capture, and erasure. Catastrophe, in this sense, is not a past event but a structure of continuity, since it is not possible to purge the archives of colonial violence that constitutes them. The imperial imaginary is sustained by a “colonial visuality,” a regime of images that legitimizes power by rendering violence invisible. “Visuality does not show the truth: it structures what is visible”3. In this sense, to repair also requires dismantling the aesthetics of power, creating counter-images, and rebelling against the ways in which the world is shown. The imagetic utopia is, therefore, the right to opacity, to visible difference without capture. In this way, we learn to think of reparation as going far beyond the material restitution of looted objects (from Africa or the Americas, for example), as the exercise of radical listening, capable of destabilizing the imperial monopoly of narration and gaze.

In any case, the movement for the restitution of works looted during European colonialism — the return of several objects to their origins, including the mediatic return of bronzes from Benin in 2021, already constitutes a collection of important, albeit insufficient, symbolic gestures — illustrates how the debate on reparations involves disputes over who has the right to tell and preserve history and reveals that utopia is not yet the sublimation of catastrophe, but only the refusal of its naturalization. It turns out that the denaturalization of the presence of foreign objects in European institutions starts from the obvious acknowledgement that if the objects are “here” it is because Europeans were “there”. Now, for a sublimation of catastrophe, the objects should be the only visa, the only passport, the only document necessary for those who come to Europe in search of what was usurped from them, symbolically and materially.

The dialogue about historical reparations is difficult, not only by way of invisibilization and naturalization of violence. In my view, this conversation is difficult because of what everyone knows, despite all the erasure practiced over time. Achile Mbembe states that “Slavery is the Achilles heel of democracy”4, and it is true that, no matter how much one denies it, tries to hide it, and justifies the unjustifiable, the memory of the millions of victims of this brutality hangs transversally over European societies, like a specter that, the more one tries to ignore, the more terrifying it becomes. Furthermore, the product of plunder and also the wealth generated by unpaid labor is visible everywhere, in the opulence of European metropolises, in their places of worship and leisure, and in their art. Colonial violence is not a deviation or a procedural error, but a constitutive condition of modernity5, because the production of the figure of the “racialized other” allowed European democracies to forge their notions of freedom and citizenship in contrast to colonial subjugation. And everyone knows it.

Reparations must therefore be understood as a project of reinventing the common and abolishing inherited hierarchies. This perspective allows us to think of reparations not as simple compensation—as some states do when paying symbolic compensation—but as a radical restructuring of social and political relations. For example, racial quota policies, although often treated as “compensatory,” can be read as institutional attempts to overcome, or at least mitigate, historical forces of exclusion, with a view to greater social equality. However, such policies remain trapped in the imaginary of the modern nation-state and its administrative and philosophical limitations.

This is where Nêgo Bispo’s countercolonial thinking becomes fundamental. By distrusting the language of “reparation,” Bispo proposes a refreshing approach to reparations. In his words, it is not about “correcting what was done,” but about “resuming what was interrupted”6. What is at stake, according to the author, is the affirmation of other worlds, based on indigenous and African cosmologies and collective practices, which were interrupted by colonization. Reparation, in this case, requires not only state policies, but a reactivation of silenced epistemologies and ontologies. In my view, it is about going beyond the recognition that the debt is unpayable and that, therefore, this world is irreparable. Based on this observation, the proposal is to try to think beyond the world as we know it, as Denise Ferreira da Silva tells us. To imagine a world beyond the Enlightenment world of modernity, which in addition to being irreparable, is unsustainable. Along these lines, Édouard Glissant had already proposed a way of thinking about the world departing from opacity and the relationship between concrete and situated beings, in contrast to the transparency required by Western universalism. For Glissant, reparation is not a return to an idealized previous state, but the cultivation of coexistence based on irreconcilable difference and shared memory. “Wandering memory” challenges the linear genealogies of Western history, proposing a rhizomatic time in which past, present and future intertwine.

When indigenous peoples demand not only the demarcation of lands, but the reoccupation of ancestral territories as a way of life, or when quilombolas demand autonomy over their ways of producing, learning and healing, they are not only demanding compensation: they are establishing a logic of an Other world. This is what Nêgo Bispo calls the “reorganization of the world,” in which time is not linear and progressive, but relational and circular, and where justice is not punitive or contractual, but restorative and communal.

Thus, utopia does not oppose catastrophe as a denial or escape, but as a form of response. To repair, in this sense, is to interrupt the continuous time of domination, to do justice to the dead and the living, to affirm that the future can be different from the past — but to do so, it is necessary to reopen the wounds, listen to those who have been silenced, and rebuild shattered alliances.