The woman spun round, her eyes under the brim of her cap flicking toward Rachel like the tongue of a snake. The two women stared at each other. The planes roared overhead.
Then the younger woman shot forward and, instinctively, Rachel reeled back. But she was too late and, anyway, there was nowhere to go. The younger woman had whipped her around in a stranglehold.
“Don’t move, fool.”
Rachel yelped from pain and surprise. But then she felt something cold and hard against her throat and froze.
Oh God, she thought, and inhaled sharply. If this is the end…
But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t. It was too cruel—too impossibly cruel. There was a tight feeling in Rachel’s chest. She attempted to breathe without moving any of the muscles in her neck. The tight feeling spread slowly. It became a hard knot in her throat—a physical pressure against the sharp blade.
She could smell the other woman, could feel the sweat from her shirt, feel it begin to dampen her own.
“Please,” Rachel said. “Please—”
The woman tightened her hold. “Quiet, fool.”
Yes, Rachel thought. Fool. She’d been a fool. A fool to have doubted. A fool to have believed.
She could hear the other woman’s heart beating—couldn’t help it. The woman’s chest was pressed up flat against Rachel’s ear and it was beating like a jackhammer. Rachel listened. So she, too, Rachel thought, is afraid. She, too, is thinking how small she is in all of this and wondering what will come next. The thought should have comforted her, but it didn’t.
Then the noise from the planes began to slowly fade. Of course, Rachel thought. They must be headed toward the landing site on the other end of the island.
The knot in her throat was nearly choking her now, but she didn’t dare swallow. She felt the woman’s grip tighten; felt the blade begin to tremble in her grasp. She felt her heart pounding, but then became momentarily confused because she didn’t know for certain any longer if it was her own.
The woman’s grip tightened still further; the blade wobbled; the planes in the distance droned their descent.
SEVENTEEN
At first the sound was indistinguishable from the hum of voices and the low drone of the AC. Lota sensed it before she could hear it. But then the noise sharpened slightly. Bruno lifted his head like a dog.
Then Mad Max heard it; then Hal; then Baby Jane. Their voices began to drop off. Lota’s skin pricked. She felt empty inside—hollowed out, like a shell.
Finally, Kurtz. She stopped pacing and her eyes brightened. She turned toward the wall at the front of the room with its narrow strip of windows, though nothing much was visible out there. Only the dull grey sidewalk could be seen, with its little tufts of couch grass that continued to grow stubbornly through the cracks in the concrete.
Even so, Lota, along with all the rest of Kurtz’s soldiers, followed her gaze. One by one they turned their heads. Lota, Hannibal, Alien, Killmonger, and Alex DeLarge. Then Hans, Mystique, Pinky, Khan. They peered together through the frosted glass as though there was actually something to see out there.
Then they turned back toward Kurtz, their eyes wide—expectant—waiting for some explanation, some command.
But Kurtz only continued to stare past them toward the strip of windows and the wall. She stretched her arms out toward the sidewalk, the couch grass, the dull orange glow that had just begun to lick at the edges of the cracked stone. Her eyes blazed. For a moment, she seemed to burn. Then she let her arms fall and turned abruptly toward the exit. She crossed the room without once looking back.
The soldiers stared after her, wondering what to do. Then they scrambled to follow. They felt for their weapons, scraped their chairs back—didn’t look at one another as they staggered, at confused intervals, toward the half-open door.
They entered the hotel lobby, drawn by the sound toward the sea-facing wall, which was made entirely of glass. The sound took shape there on the horizon in an angry cloud of helicopters and low-flying planes. When Lota first saw them they were far enough away as to appear indistinct—less objects in themselves and more an overall pattern in the air. But even in the time it took her to cross the lobby, to press her face against the glass, the horizon line shifted, and the planes could be clearly discerned.
She wondered if there’d been some mistake. Of course they’d anticipated some resistance—an Ø Com security force, perhaps, a couple of envoys from the Empire—but this!
Lota glanced down toward the hotel’s lawn and the street. Both were littered with the refuse of the night before. Bottles and junk food wrappers, a few trampled articles of clothing, shoes. A couple of stragglers—an old man and a middle-aged woman—tottered innocently together near the entrance to Josie’s canteen.
The sun was just beginning to rise. It occurred to Lota as she watched it—a discrete semicircle emerging like a yellowed thumbnail above the waves—how odd it was that, as opposed to the vibrant mix of colours projected by the setting sun at the end of a day, the rising sun projected nothing—was marked only by a gradual disappearance of darkness, an almost imperceptible increase of light.
She looked at the planes, then at the fluttering T-shirts and candy wrappers discarded on the lawn, and tried to feel something, but could not. She didn’t even feel hollow anymore. The drone was too loud—the planes too close and too low—to feel anything but their approach.
Baby Jane had her hands on the glass, was staring out at the planes. Mystique and Bruno were also nearby—talking together heatedly. Lota looked around for Mad Max—for Kurtz. The noise outside droned louder. Lota swung back in time to see the noses of the planes dip slightly as they continued their descent. A sort of visceral panic set in—a reflexive reaction rather than a genuine response. She leaned in toward Mystique, but too late. She was already moving toward the exit at a sort of trot.
“Where’s Kurtz?” Lota shouted at Bruno.
He shook his head. It was not clear if he’d heard.
“Kurtz!” Lota yelled again. “Where’s Kurtz? What’s going on?”
But by now Bruno was also moving toward the exit, still shaking his head. “The cable!” he shouted over his shoulder. “She’s gone to cut the cable!”
“What?” Lota screamed. She ran toward him. “What about Mercer? What about the code?” Cutting the cable had only ever been a threat—a bartering chip, a hypothetical last resort. It had never been presented as anything more than that.
Bruno half turned; he looked at Lota blankly—as if he really didn’t understand. Then he plunged through the door.
Lota followed. Baby Jane was right behind her. “What about the rest of us?” Baby Jane yelled after Bruno. “What are the orders?”
There was a terrific roar as one of the planes passed directly overhead—then a moment of relief.
“Where is everyone?” Baby Jane continued to shout. “Where’s Norma? And Mr. Joshua?”
Bruno turned to face Lota fully now—although still it wasn’t clear if he’d actually heard. He slapped at his face, which was unnaturally pale.
“Our orders,” Lota repeated.
Bruno shook his head. “There are no orders.”
Lota was gripping the butt of her gun in one hand. It felt smooth, and solid.
“What do you mean?” shrieked Baby Jane. “What do you mean, no orders?”
Bruno was slapping at his face again—tugging at both ears. Lota pulled out her gun. She flipped it over once, twice, in her hands, then she put it away.
“You stay here,” Bruno told them. “I’ll check in at the station.” He began to pick his way across the short lawn. Lota stared after him. She glanced at Baby Jane, who had her eyes closed tightly, leaning on her gun.
There must have been something about Baby Jane’s face in that moment—in her expression, which Lota couldn’t entirely read—that reminded Lota of her mother, because, for the first time since she’d heard the planes, she thought of her back in the village. Thought of her look
ing up at the planes, shaking her head, defiantly praising God.
Then she thought of her brother Marcus—who for all she knew was aboard one of those planes. And then of her other brother, Miles, and of her auntie G, who were not.
Lota bit her lip, hard enough to make it bleed, and tried very hard not to cry. She hadn’t cried—hadn’t really cried—since she was a child. Not since her mother had told her angrily one night that she couldn’t change things just by knowing about them—or by wanting to. That she had to accept both the good and the bad.
Baby Jane had opened her eyes. She was gazing at Lota and her old lined face looked tired—but she didn’t seem either frightened or sad.
Embarrassed, Lota winced. She began to pace back and forth along the short magnolia-lined wall that bordered the hotel drive, listening to the sound of the planes in the distance, diminished now to a low hum. As far as she could see in any direction, nothing stirred. Even the couple she’d spotted outside Josie’s canteen had tottered away somewhere. She glanced back once—apologetically—at Baby Jane, but Baby Jane wasn’t looking at her anymore. She was looking out—past the rough coral and scattered couch grass, the shuttered houses and the lead tree groves—toward the sea.
Everything looked as it had always looked, as far back as Lota could remember; nothing had changed. It was impossible, therefore, to imagine that at the other end of the island a dozen or more planes were preparing to land like a flock of angry birds. Lota tried to picture them descending but could not. They continued to hover, in her mind’s eye, above the empty lots and fields around the outer station. Try as she might, she could not bring them down.
And yet…they were descending. At that very moment, as Lota tried and failed to picture it, they were descending. The future was descending. But in a misshapen, unanticipated, and completely unrecognizable form. In another moment, Kurtz would cut the wire and the island would—more or less virtually—disappear. Or perhaps it had been done already, the moment passed. Perhaps they’d already been plunged, together, into…
Into what?
Again Lota’s imagination failed her. She followed Baby Jane’s gaze toward the water. She saw that the sun had risen fully now, a complete circle. It hung suspended, just above the waves, casting against the crooked shoreline its limited glow.
AFTERWORD
Everywhere in the world where knowledge is being suppressed, knowledge that, if it were made known, would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves—everywhere there Heart of Darkness is being enacted.
SVEN LINDQVIST, Exterminate All the Brutes
This book represents my own effort at exploring the way that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness continues to be enacted in our everyday lives. It is an effort that began for me back in 2009, when I encountered an article, published in The New York Review of Books, that quoted the military expert John Pike as saying that the U.S. military’s goal was “to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015.”1
I was both fascinated and appalled by how clearly Pike was able and willing to articulate the way that modern imperialism has reversed the expansionist aims of the recent past while, at the same time, keeping them wholly intact. Pike declared that the United States’ current strategy for controlling as much of the world as possible was “by holding, directly at least, as little terrain as possible.” By 2015, according to Pike’s prediction, both power and capital would become literally “utopian” (from the Greek, “not-place”). America would give up its claim on actual peoples and territories—but only apparently. By becoming—that is, rather than merely conquering—“the biggest, the most blank, so to speak”2 space on the map, the U.S. could, Pike suggested, run the entire planet within, and as, what Giorgio Agamben has referred to as a “state of exception.”3
By the time this book project was in full swing, 2015 had come and gone. It is written, therefore, as it could perhaps only be written, in a sort of timeless state, where the near future collides with both the present and the past. My goal was to explore the many questions and problems that arise when considering the legacies of cultural imperialism, otherwise known as modern-day global capitalism. This book is also, therefore, a book about the “logistics” of whiteness and the hidden elements and/or bodies that “the science of whiteness” endeavours to control. It seeks to expose the materialities we take for granted in the concepts and systems that structure and support our everyday lives—thereby calling attention to “the full entanglement” of our experience on this planet with what is both visible and invisible, with others, and with otherness.4
I believe it’s our collective responsibility to think about this entanglement—and try to identify, and dismantle, the logistics by which Heart of Darkness continues to be enacted not only all around us but by us. It’s our responsibility to ask ourselves: How can we recognize each other outside of these concepts and structures? How can we become aware of our own invisibilities and the invisibilities of others—especially when our own seemingly “innate” processes of self-awareness are what often stand in the way? How can we encounter “blank” or unknown spaces or ways of being without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to conquer them? How can we escape prescribed narratives without simply reinscribing binaries? How can we acknowledge the hidden materialities—and the hidden costs—of abstract concepts like subjectivity or our “wireless” world? How, finally, can we imagine a future that does not run along the exact same lines as the past?
1. Jonathan Freedland, “A Black and Disgraceful Site,” review of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, by David Vine, The New York Review of Books, May 28, 2009, www.nybooks.com/issues/2009/05/28.
2. From Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there.’ The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour’s off. Other places were scattered about the hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and…well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet—the biggest, the most blank, so to speak—that I had a hankering after.
“True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness” (Chapter 1).
3. The “state of exception” described by Agamben is an expression of the essential paradox at the core of our modern concept of sovereignty. It is the blurring of inside and outside, life and law, the exception and the rule. “The paradox of sovereignty,” writes Agamben, “consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order.” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 17.
4. In an interview with Niccolò Cuppini and Mattia Frapporti, Stefano Harney states: “Logistics delivers humans, animals, energy, earthly materials to an end, to a point, the point of production. But this includes, crucially, the point of production of the settler, the production of the entrepreneur, the banker, the slave trader, and the investor.” Logistics exists, in other words—in reaction to and defence against entanglement and indeterminacy—as a way of accounting “for what goes missing.” It is, in this way, also “the science of loss, the science of…lost means, which is to say it will always be the white science and the science of being white.” How, Harney asks, do we remain “radically open” amidst all this, amidst “the war against us waged by logistical capitalism”? His answer? By remaining “open to each other,” by allowing ourselves “to explore the full entanglement of our lives together and our full entanglement of this love
, pain, and joy with each other in and of the earth.” Niccolò Cuppini and Mattia Frapporti, “Logistics Genealogies: A Dialogue with Stefano Harney,” Social Text 136 36, no. 3 (September 2018): 99–100, 97, 109.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Julie Iromuanya, Samson Verma, John Melillo, Erin Wunker, Farid Matuk, Janet Shively, and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, who read this manuscript at various stages and offered me their invaluable insights and suggestions. Thank you also to my editor, Nicole Winstanley, for her guidance, and for her belief in this work, as well as to Deborah Sun de la Cruz, Shaun Oakey, Karen Alliston, Stephen Myers, and everyone at Penguin Random House Canada. Thank you also to my agent, Tracy Bohan, for her encouragement, and to John, again, for his patience, love, and tremendous support.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
Selected speeches and texts in this novel have been either inspired by or adapted from The United States Declaration of Independence (1776); “Manifesto of the Equals,” by Sylvain Maréchal (France, 1796); Francisco Indalécio Madero’s proclamation to the Mexican Army (1910); Antonio I. Villarreal’s article “Mexican: Your Best Friend Is a Gun!” (1910); Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (1928); Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); Jacques Soustelle’s speech to the Algerian Assembly, Algeria (1955); the Caravelle Manifesto, Vietnam (1960); Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s film Letter to Jane (1972); the Manifesto of the New Jewel Movement, Grenada (1973); James McTeigue’s film V for Vendetta (2005); Zack Snyder’s film Man of Steel (2013); and Christopher Reeve’s speech at the Democratic National Convention (2016).
I am also indebted to feedback from Joshua Polachek, to Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network (Duke University Press, 2015) and to the research of the many scholars whose work is included in Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho’s edited collection Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
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