I feel like a rhizome. I know Paul Gilroy said ‘routes, not roots’ but man, searching for routes is hard. Hybridity can’t be black and white. Sometimes I feel like being brown is being in the middle. That being hybrid is being a never ending series of hyperlinks.
It’s messy, this. I don’t want to be a buffer race. I want to think being South Asian means more than being an in between of white supremacy, of anti-blackness. Isn’t there something unique about the position we are in that means we can offer something else? But everyone is an in between of something. An in between of all the infinities which means we’re never the start or the end. In the social construction of binaries, of us and them, of seeming opposites. We know what it’s like to be oppressed and the oppressor. Our culture is one of the OG melting pots, as far as my knowledge of history goes - but isn’t almost every culture in human history? But I get caught up in cubist thoughts again, some of which are right for the moment, some of which are not. I’m looking for a thread through this. A truth. But maybe hybridity means there isn’t a thread anymore. That all of the truths are the truth. Maybe we have to be comfortable with all of the angles, the different faces of the polygon, even if there is an infinity of them. It seems like there are so many opinions and yet there are only two remaining polarised, fixed twin stars that we fluctuate in between. I want to escape their orbit but I can’t because I am made of them. What do we do?
I am a part of everything and everyone that I’ve met, so who am I? What is a rhizome? We studied it in university and I just revisited the theory to see if maybe I can find some answers. The paper says that the tree is the ‘dominant ontological model in Western thought, exemplified in such fields as linguistics (e.g. Chomsky), psychoanalysis, logic, biology, and human organization. All these are modeled as hierarchical or binary systems, stemming from the tree or root from which all else grows.’ Like family trees, trees that show the split in country and blues music (‘explained’ on Netflix has a fascinating episode on this), filing systems. The paper then goes on to say a tree ‘does not offer an adequate explanation of multiplicity. A political implication of the tree is that it reinforces notions of centrality of authority, state control, and dominance’.
A binary is just a narrow point of view. Zoom out and you will see it’s part of a wider network. A rhizome is a bit like a root system. Perhaps if you are in between two particular branches, rather than only looking from side to side, we have an opportunity to look up and down and see all the other roots around us. ‘Unlike the tree, whose branches have all grown from a single trunk, the rhizome has no unique source from which all development occurs. The rhizome is both heterogeneous and multiplicitous. It can be entered from many different points, all of which connect to each other. The rhizome does not have a beginning, an end, or an exact center… Although a rhizome can be broken or injured in one location, it will merely form a new line, a new connection that will emerge elsewhere.’ We will always be somewhere within an infinite system. And because it goes on forever, it doesn’t really matter where you are in it. What matters is that you know you are part of it. And your place is to be within it.
I’m uncomfortable with the idea that existing in an infinite system means that things don’t matter. Things, on whatever scale, have consequences and impacts. And I think part of our humanity is knowing when to zoom in and zoom out, to see things from different perspectives. I’ve been so lost within the cubist thoughts. Lately I’ve been shapeshifting too quickly across different planes, and before you know it I’m whiplashed. I know that when I zoom to the level of our world, that the very arbitrary binary we’ve decided to live between has real consequences for the people living in them. That makes me angry, and I fight against it. Sure, if I zoomed to the level of the whole system, we would scarcely register. And maybe I should not bother engaging in the injustices I see and just do whatever I can to enjoy my time here. The universe is violent. Galaxies are born a dime a dozen, stars swallow themselves, their scars pinprick the fabric of space time. You can’t (yet) sew up a black hole. But I don’t want to split the cosmos with the horror of my actions. To tear my part of the collective soul apart. We are bound to each other. Our essence is tessellated together and we are both fractions but also composites. It’s just about the level you’re seeing it at, and where you derive meaning from.
‘Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away–an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.’ In a way, this is how I understand Allah, and how we can all have godly elements within us. Allah is the rhizome - the all encompassing being that, because it is made up of everything, is Al Hakeem, Al Waasi, Al Basir, Al Aleem. I’ve always loved how you can call Allah specifically through their different names. Everything else will always exist without us. That continuity is God. No matter how far the universe or universes expand, God will always encompass it all.
This is the thing that gives me peace. The thing we try to conquer is nothingness. We try to find ways above it, around it, but never through it. It’s strange then that the thought of dying, and of simply ceasing to exist, doesn’t seem so bad. Perhaps I’m trying to convince myself that I’m content my body will find its way into other things - the bellies of worms, soil, nutrients, roots. We are born to be generous, to give away every single part of ourselves. It is embedded into our DNA. And so that we are not born to die but rather to live, we seek passions, reasons to be alive, reasons to be present in this form before shapeshifting into the next one. Even nothingness has a shape. It’s delineated by all of the things that are.