The Slow Death of Prometheus
A Blue Skies Conversation with Season Butler & Françoise Vergès for the International Curators’ Forum
On a hot, sunny day – 25 August 2020 – artist-author Season Butler met political scientist and philosopher Françoise Vergès on a patchy Skype call between Berlin and Paris.
Season Butler:
So, I’m Season Butler and I do a lot of different kinds of jobs. And I think that’s similar to a lot of people my age and a lot of people who are in my position creatively. I generally say that I’m a writer (so as not to make a super long list that sounds like a conference bio); and I wrote my doctoral dissertation on intersectionality and how the intersectional matrix can inform creative writing practice as well as literary analysis.
And…let’s see…at the moment I’m in Berlin with some fairytale puffy clouds I can see out of my window and the red roof tops that I really associate with Germany.
And I feel like I’m hustling a lot creatively and professionally – like I’m doing lots of different kinds of jobs and trying to satisfy lots of different kinds of demands and desires more than having a single project or even a single creative field right now.
And I have a troubled relationship with academia. So I guess that’s normal.
Françoise Vergès:
Well, how can I introduce myself?
The thing that keeps me alive is the fight – the fight against injustice and inequality. That fight is what has guided me and continues to guide me.
Nowadays, I am a public educator, an activist, a writer and a member of the collective Decolonize the Arts. I grew up in Réunion Island and this has remained my archive, this “small island” where the French State imposed slavery, colonialism and is still dominating the island. When I arrived in France in the 1970s, I did many jobs before becoming a journalist and an editor in a feminist publishing house. I left France in 1983, went to the USA, worked in small jobs before going to the university and getting a Ph.D. I was an academic for a while, but did also other jobs. What else can I say? I love to cook. I’m very interested in cooking, which means that I’m interested in what people cook and how. When I travel I always go to markets. I’m also very interested in weaving and textiles, in their beauty, in the ability of humans to create something with colour and texture. I love to dance and to party.
Like you, I’m more interested in doing than in being in an institution. I want to remain a very curious person and academia often kills curiosity. I want to remain a curious person in every aspect of my life, always asking questions. I want to be disturbed. I want to be questioned.
SB:
How wonderful to meet you. I brought a couple of poems to our conversation and I wanted to read one to you by Danez Smith for starters. This is a piece of a poem called ‘summer, somewhere’ and it just feels so resonate with the boiling intensity of racial confrontation, which seems very visible in the summer from Martin Luther King’s reference to ‘the summer of our discontent’, and a lot of Langston Hughes’s imagery…sorry for the rambling analysis. I should just read it:
somewhere, a sun. below, boys brown
as rye play the dozens & ball, jump
in the air & stay there. boys become new
moons, gum-dark on all sides, beg bruise
-blue water to fly, at least tide, at least
spit back a father or two. I won’t get started.
history is what it is. it knows what it did.
bad dog. bad blood. bad day to be a boy
color of a July well spent. but here, not earth
not heaven, boys can’t recall their white shirt
turned a ruby gown. here, there is no language
for officer or law, no color to call white.
if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call
us dead, call us alive someplace better.
we say our own names when we pray.
we go out for sweets & come back.
FV:
Thank you.
SB:
You’re very welcome.
FV:
So, I have to read one now?
SB:
If you’d like to. I would like it if you would.
FV:
OK. This one is from Aimé Césaire –
SB:
I was hoping you would choose one from Aimé Césaire
FV:
I think we’ve been deprived of kindness so much and for so long, and especially now with all that is happening in the world we need kindness.
So let me read and excerpt from New Kindness by Aimé Césaire:
to deliver the world to the assassins of dawn is out of the question
death-life
life-death
those who slap dusk in the face
roads hang from their flayer necks
like shoes too new
we’re not dealing with a rout
only the traps have been whisked away during the night
as for the rest
horses that have left nothing more in the ground
than their furious hoofprints
muzzles aimed with lapped-up blood
the unsheathing of the knives of justice
and of the inspired horns
of vampire birds their entire beaks lit up
defying appearances
but also breasts nursing rivers
and sweet calabashes in the hollows of offering hands
a new kindness is ceaselessly growing on the horizon.
SB:
Thank you so much.
I sent through some questions that I’m just interested in hashing through with you; were there any you were particularly drawn to?
FV:
Accepting your question is part of the art of conversation.
SB:
[Season laughs]
Yeah, for sure for sure.
I’m very interested in your idea of the Promethean way of life [‘the idea that “Man” can invent a mechanical, technical solution to triumph over any problem’]
and the potential of a post-Promethean way of life.
It just seems to me to be such a productive and emancipated shift from simplistic dualities. And so, it would be a real treat for me to be able to hear how you think about this distinction, and maybe how we might think about a post-Promethean recovery? From not just Covid-19, but also a very carceral white supremacy…the whole picture.
FV:
Well, European ‘conquest of the world’ is a story of murder, genocide and destruction in the name of “discovery,” science, progress and white supremacy. Promethean thinking drove European colonization and imperialism and is driving techno-racial capitalism, it’s motto is “extract everything from earth, air, seas, humans, accept no limits to expansion, do not mind about destruction and devastation, expand, expand, expand, dominate and exploit” and do it in the name of ‘civilization’. If we don’t overcome this thinking, I don’t think we will survive. I mean something will survive, some form of life, but – you know – it will not be human life.
The Promethean world is a world conceived as limitless, of endless extraction until the land is barren, the soil exhausted and people are famished, a world that trusts, embraces technological progress and science to resolve social, cultural and political problems created by this very logic, a world in which the engineer feels “he” does not need poetry or the art of weaving, a world where the economy of speed is king, where there is no place for the vulnerable, for the precarious, for the unexpected.
As Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said, and I find this very enlightening, racial capitalism is the fabrication of a differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Who died during the first part of the pandemic (and this is not finished): Black, indigenous and brown people, poor people. Why? Not only because they don’t have access to public health, but also because they have bad housing, bad jobs and high rates of co-morbidity – diabetes, heart problems, obesity –which are the result of racism but they had to work and were thus exposed to the virus. Their bodies were exposed, knowingly, to premature death.
The white body extracts his/her comfort from the exhausted black body, and when I say “Black” here, I connect it to the logic of anti-Blackness. The white bourgeois body has access to good health, good food, good housing – jog in the morning, yoga class, avocado toast, send the kids to the swimming pool, play tennis, have access to good transportation, bike to work, go to a sex worker, go home and enjoy your family in a big safe home, not because of some better talent or expertise but because of the long history of plundering and extracting care. Millions of Black and brown bodies make this world possible.
The environmental crisis is not just about extracting wealth from the soil and forest, it’s also about extracting life-energy from the Black and brown body. Racism is the extraction of the life energy of black and brown people who have been denied full humanity. This is the Promethean world, of endless extraction and exploitation, made possible by racial capitalism. It leads to utter destruction, it is anti-human.
It looks like a science fiction movie where a few are sucking the blood and the flesh of million others.
