The Algeria’s UN Ambassador Amar Bendjama, a schoolfriend of Franz Fanon, referred to those who draw maps in blood in the United Nations Security Council special meeting on Palestine. He characterised Israeli illegality, famine and genocide as an inhuman geography. He said, “our compass points in one direction only… only towards legality and empathy to all of those who are suffering… already suffering from an inhuman siege!” Bendjama’s retooling of the compass of compassion—and its inversion, impunity—asks how geographers of violence that use the medium of the earth must be held to account for the weight of the suffering they inflict as they dissolve cities into rubble. At the core of the reparative charge, he insisted on a grammar and “justice to call them by their names, and for accountability to be held.” Justice then must call through the noise and the dust, the rubbled and the disappeared to ask how heavy is a city when it is built on the bones of racial injustice? What are the shadow geologies of race through which a city is made manifest?
When all colonial cities are bathed in the blood of those that have been taken with the gun, bible, coercive culture and ecological violence of colonialism, what weight do they bear and inflict beyond their borders and city limits. What heaviness does Brazil, Cabo Verde, São Tomé, Madeira, Guinea, Macau, Timor bear on any account of the City of Lisbon? What heavy traces were left in the sea as the Lisbon 1755 earthquake shook the ground and loosened the stranglehold of the Portuguese trade in enslaved persons? What lightness arose in the defeat of the Portuguese by the Cabo Verdians, when Amilcar Cabral declared from the flatten earth of Portugese-induced famines in 1941–43, 1947–48 and 1958-1959 that “[a]s for the mountains, we decided that our people had to take their place, since it will be impossible to develop our struggle otherwise. So, our people are our mountains.’ (Cabral, Our people are our mountains, 1971, p.11). The weight of colonialism is heavy, materially and physically, beginning in a psychotic state of disassociation from the earth. We might call this colonial mentality and its psychosis of materiality in the forgetting of the earth, not just a social state of injustice (a question of the human) but a geophysical state that has changed the planetary (and inhuman geography).
We have only to recall the architectures; slave city, settler city, wharfs of the port trade in human flesh, castles with doors of no return, elemental genocide now. Building worlds of terroir, territory and terror unbuild bonds of relations, forms of cohabitation, communication across the living and the dead. All life and what it builds bridges geophysics, even those that proceed as if the earth were an externality that only became interesting in its commodity forms of metals and minerals.
In the ghost geologies of cities, the inhuman is a site for the reinvention of the dead within the living, as a way to reassert the interdependence of the inhuman and human, rather than seeing the dead as eliminated from the social realm. And so, the dead call for reparative justice as the earth remembers and asserts that it is the only non-negotiable ground of being. The inhuman ontologies of decolonial resistance, people as mountains, calls for a remembering of how these ghost geologies “rattle their chains” (as Édouard Glissant might say of the submarine human occupation of the sea between islands) to remind the colonial world that cities are heavy beyond their unfathomable measure with the violence of their making.
Kathryn Yusoff
Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London, where she interrogates the geologies of race, extraction and colonial power through critical environmental humanities. Trained in geography, social theory and feminist philosophy, her research (and her recent book Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race, 2024) surfaces how colonial geology constructs racialized geospatial forms and how Black, Indigenous and Caribbean thought might reimagine planetary subjectivity. She also authored A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2019), and leads work on “planetary portals” to dismantle extractive imaginaries and rethink coexistence across Earth systems.