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  • Debt, the Precarious Grammar of Life, and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest
  • Jodi Kim (bio)

Life an’ debt freedom not yet

Mutabaruka, “Life and Debt”

What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

In the first epigraph above, Jamaican artist Mutabaruka’s pithy lyric captures freedom’s antinomies by questioning freedom’s content and temporality. To live a life excruciatingly tethered to debt is to live a conjunctional “life an’ debt.”1 In Mutabaruka’s formulation, life and debt are one and the same; debt owns your life, and in doing so, it owns your freedom. By taking residence as the content of formal freedom, debt works in this instance to vacate or evict the substantive meaning of freedom and to forestall the event and temporality of freedom as a “not yet.” In this sense, we can speak of debt as a “shifting grammar of life” (Rajan 2006, 14) that perpetually recedes before our horizon into a future tense, a vanishing point through which a “not yet” freedom is perhaps glimpsed but always foreclosed. Haunting this vanishing point is the term that Mutabaruka self-consciously substitutes debt for: death. A life of debt forecloses an intimacy with freedom, which is to say that it forces an intimacy with forms of social and physical death. Debt, in other words, can be a death sentence, and while some might be able to have their sentences commuted and still live a social death, others experience a literal physical death flashing blindingly [End Page 215] forward, a fatal present tense. If, as David Graeber suggests, a debt is “just the perversion of a promise,” a promise “corrupted by both math and violence,” then who can have their debt/death sentences commuted, who can have their debts forgiven altogether, and who must fully repay their debts with interest (Graeber 2011, 391)? Within this economy, who must keep their promises? Mutabaruka, and his Jamaican nation, must do so; they must pay their promissory notes. The reason lies in the “math and violence” to which they have been subjected, a history of colonialism and racial chattel slavery succeeded by more recent forms of neocolonial domination and an international uneven division and proliferation not only of gendered racial labor but also of debt.

This continued corruption of the promise by math and violence perpetually keeps Mutabaruka’s longing for freedom, the promise of freedom, in the future tense. His future tense grammar, as at once a specific temporality of freedom as well as a broader system of signification, calls to mind other similar grammars, such as that of Hortense Spillers. Tracing the total objectification of the captive body as flesh within the U.S. context of chattel slavery, she calls, and theorizes the symbolic order instantiated by the African slave trade as, an “American grammar.” One of the distinctive features of this grammar is that it “remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again” (Spillers 2003, 208). This, as Saidiya Hartman writes, is the afterlife of slavery, an afterlife not only symbolic but also crushingly material (Hartman 2008). That is, formal emancipation for the enslaved in the United States represented not a radical rupture but rather a “nonevent.” The whip of chattel slavery was replaced with the “burdened individuality of freedom,” constituted by the tethers of liberalism: a guilty conscience, notions of responsibility modeled on contractual obligation, calculated reciprocity, and most importantly, indebtedness, since “debt played a central role in the creation of the servile, blameworthy, and guilty individual and in the reproduction and transformation of involuntary servitude” (Hartman 1997, 9). The longue durée of the “nonevent” of emancipation from a range of distinct yet related forms of unfreedom throughout the globe—whether racial chattel slavery, colonial subjugation, racial genocide, debt peonage, contract labor, apartheid, or incarceration—has produced and continues to produce increased levels of privation and debt, as well as greater vulnerability to...

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