Narrative Target Practice: On Insurgent Oneness with Earth

On why I don't need hope where we're going, I need better aim.

On February 14, 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe photographed our shared planetary homebody from approximately 3.7 billion miles away. The image—part of NASA’s “Family Portrait of the Solar System” photo series featuring Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Venus as seen through Voyager 1’s seemingly distant lens—shows Earth as “a tiny dot within a scattered ray of sunlight.”¹ Our entire world, digitally distilled into a pixelated speck of cosmic dust against the backdrop of a sunlit expanse of black. 

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives,” Carl Sagan explained in the introduction to Pale Blue Dot, his book inspired by Voyager 1’s photo of Earth.² Like Sagan, countless beings have shared narratives that illustrate the importance of embracing cosmic perspectives and understanding our complex relationship to the universe of which we are inextricably connected, an integral part, many colliding universes; with whom we experience life as we know it. 

In The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People, Neil Shubin shared that “each galaxy, star, or person is the temporary owner of particles that have passed through the births and deaths of entities across vast reaches of time and space. The particles that make us have traveled billions of years across the universe; long after we and our planet are gone, they will be a part of other worlds.” Further, during his return flight to Earth, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell mused that “[he] fully understood that the molecules in [his] body and the molecules in [his] partners' bodies and the molecules in the spacecraft had been prototyped in this amazing generation of stars—in other words, it was pretty obvious…we're stardust.”³

It is a matter of fact that our stellar kin provided the conditions of possibility for the iron in our blood. As clearly stated by planetary scientist Ashley King, “it is totally 100% true: nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star and many have come through several supernovas.”⁴ Be that as it may, before any blood flowed through mammalian river veins—before the existence of mammals, before the evolution of our last universal common ancestor, sometime between the Big Bang and the tail end of the Hadean Eon—infant Earth was a hot, volcanic body comprised mostly of molten magma until hundreds of millions of years of evolution led to cooling and the development of liquid oceans.⁵ It would take a few billion more years for so-called “humans” to evolve on and with our shared planetary homebody that was once a cloud of gas. 

Geologic history, stellar history, cosmic history, and nameless ancient histories that are more embodied than describable, are our story; a story of life, interconnectedness, and embodiment in a universe learning what it means to exist through and with all beings on our shared planetary homebody and beyond. We’re a collective of interdependent celestial beings grounded on and with Earth; our poisoned and chronically ill shared homebody who necessarily reflects the complex states of being of our cohabitants, ourselves, in countless ways. Dying soils, microplastics-laden waters, polluted air, and all beings of our biosphere are threatened by the myriad mixed media poisons of colonialism. We, beings of our biosphere, are part of perpetual feedback loops between planetary systems, social systems, learning systems, solar systems, organ systems. 

Acknowledging, feeling, and responding to the connections between colonial, respiratory, nervous, capitalist, digestive, and other—often theoretically, colloquially disconnected—systems enabled me to develop and experiment with new language and logics for thinking about what it means to be in an era of climate catastrophe, particularly while navigating life in a settler colonial prison state; as a marginalized, queer, multiply-disabled, Black, colonized person and parent living with a poisoned and chronically ill body. Put another way, reclaiming myself as Earth highlighted the dangers of essentializing, what I refer to as, dermal borders. 

Similar to those existing between so-called nations, dermal borders—the fleshy lines of demarcation that seemingly separate the “internal” from the “external” with respect to the “human” and the “other”—obscure our inherent interconnectedness and interdependence as necessarily connected beings of our biosphere on our shared planetary homebody. “Imagining the subject (us) and object (universe) to be distinct” is one of many barriers to healing and liberation in a colonial, capitalist, imperialist society governed by powerful people who manufacture disaster and knowingly perpetuate violent systems that harm all life on Earth. One of the goals of the present inquiry is to begin to add my voice to intergenerational, multi-species—“species”— conversations, histories, strategies for insurgent action, and theories that center paths toward anti-colonial methods of and approaches to healing that aim to liberate all life on our shared planetary homebody. An intentional and critical form of symbiopolitical praxis.⁶ A practice and mode of being that actively combats colonial “imaginations of the land and the people that belong to it.” A method for challenging norms and ways of living “bound up in and supportive of continued colonial power structures.”⁷

In order to “[reclaim] our embodied connection with the more-than-human world” and “cultivate a sensory-informed world-view of interdependency and hence, responsibility,”⁸ it is imperative to think, feel, plan, and dream beyond dermal borders, anthropocentric frameworks, and self-destructive colonial modes of being, relating, and knowing. Further, it is necessary to accept the fact that “the conceptual binary of self/other, or inside/ outside, is not supported by biology”—and, more importantly, any Indigenous and anti-colonial epistemologies, cosmologies, and theories of mind—and embrace the material reality that “we live permeably in and with an interdependent habitat with which we exchange information on any level: molecules, viruses, thoughts and ecosystems. We ourselves are many habitats.”⁹

The boundaries between bodies are not fixed at the so-called “physical” surfaces of whatever forms of material covering, encasing, or fleshy lines of demarcation that create an imagined border. Therefore, conceptualizing healing and liberation as modes of being, as habitats—as Earth, as a planetary collective, as shared planetary homebody—enables thinking and feeling beyond the confines of colonial logics that seek to separate (literally and figuratively), other, and isolate—and enslave and oppress—interconnected life forms.

Thinking of our shared planetary homebody–and more expansive cosmic self–as a mode of being, learning, knowing, and becoming, has impacted how I respond to and make sense of the ubiquity of colonial, capitalist, ableist violence. Not only as a witness to global violence and widespread manufactured disaster—resulting in mass graves full of children’s dismembered body parts, multiple genocides, mass disabling events, multi-level carceral spaces (from the structural to the [inter]personal), and other “zones of undeclared [domestic] war, zones that are inextricably linked to imperial and officially acknowledged wars”¹⁰—but also as a victim-survivor of colonial, capitalist, ableist violence myself; as “me,” as Earth, as a planetary collective, as shared planetary homebody.

As potential worm food. As a hopeful post-transition feast for detritovores.

Even as ancestors we are likely to poison. In addition to the estimated 827,000 gallons of formaldehyde-based embalming fluid that enter our sacred waters and soils every year from cemeteries that threaten local ecosystems and drinking water sources, the destruction of approximately 4 million square acres of forest—for burial materials, an amount of trees capable of sequestering nearly 65 million tons of carbon dioxide—per year on occupied Turtle Island, and the fact that a single cremation uses the energy equivalent of powering a 2,000 square foot home for a week and requires 20 gallons of gas, there are other burial- and decomposition-related harms that deeply impact our shared planetary homebody. Many are under-researched and others are yet to be discovered and understood.¹¹

Colonial necropoliticians continue fine-tuning ancient designs for domination. Our shared planetary homebody actively works to overcome and combat ongoing quotidian terror. Living under the constant threat of violence is an experience known to many. I am neither uniquely affected nor primarily targeted. Poisoned, burned, drowned, drained, cut, bombed, choked, invaded, abused, harmed, maimed, massacred, starved, hunted, suffocated, silenced, murdered, and otherwise terrorized kin know ongoing quotidian terror.

I am neither alone nor helpless in my fight, in my struggle, in my resistance and I am not writing to “convince a non-radicalized audience of the need to resist.”¹² I am writing to help shape, inform, create, and offer my own perspective—though “no intellectual work is authored alone,”¹³ just as all that exists is a necessarily collaborative cosmic project and experience of being and knowing—on insurgent narratives aimed at encouraging principled, radical direct action in opposition to oppressive colonial regimes. To participate in what Orisanmi Burton refers to as “mundane rebellion”¹⁴ as a multiply-disabled, colonized person living in poverty whose writing and culture work, at the present moment, can be practiced and developed more consistently than my budding combat and weapons work.

“I don’t need hope where we’re going, I need better aim and the right words at the right time as urgency outgrows our clocks. I wonder where else this rage can go, where else it can live outside of me, this being that isn’t all mine,” I read while reciting my poem (shared at the end of this essay) during Poets for Gaza, a virtual poetry reading and fundraiser hosted by

Shaira Chaer

in honor of Khalil T. Zeyara (to whom you should send money if you’re able) and the Sameer Project (to which you should also send money if you’re able).

Better aim.

I know and respect that hope enables, emboldens, inspires, and empowers countless comrades, beloved kin. I love that for them. I am enabled, emboldened, inspired, and empowered differently, though, and I love that for me. I don’t where I’m going. I won’t know where we’re going. I don’t know if I’ll wake up tomorrow and the next day, or the next day. All I know is that I need to develop practices and ways of remaining perpetually engaged in insurgent warfare to the best of my ability, in community, with beloved kin.

For us all.

the bedrock is weathering 
beneath our feet,
collapse is imminent 

and yet

here we are,
cradled in the bowels 
of the empire,
enclosed in steel
cutting our way through 
the estuary 

where the river meets the sea,

every
single
squeal 
sends me off the rails

the thought of drowning 
in a train crosses 
and crosses and crosses 
my mind.

I know the smell of death. 
I remember. 
I live in and with you 
there, and our kin.

our body is in orbit,
we tether our wounds to 
what bonds us,
in spirit, by blood.

How many of us are breathing together now?

within
          this













                pause 












                   that
           needed 
prayer 

blessed be cells with wills of their 
own, part of us, source materials 
for our own shared becoming.

blessed be the mechanisms
of respiration 

every
tired
muscle 
is an agent 
and I thank them 
for their service 
in these fights for my being.

Which cell will mark my end?

I’m not yet ready to feed 
detritovores. 
I’m not yet drained of
lifeforce. 

Every breath roots me here. 

Still, the city crumbles
around us.
The neglect knows no bounds,

the enemy owns a 
diverse portfolio 
of slaughterhouses,

an imaginative array of weaponry. 

I don’t need hope where we’re going,
I need better aim

and the right words 
at the right time 
as urgency outgrows 
our clocks.

I wonder where else 
this rage can go,
where else it can 
live outside of me,

this being that isn’t all mine.  

1. First-Ever Solar System Family Portrait (1990), NASA

2.  Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

3.  Overview, Planetary Collective 

4.  Kerry Lotzof, Are We Made of Stardust?

5.  Formation of Earth, National Geographic

6.  “…symbiopolitics, refers to the densely political relations among many entangled living things—not just microbial—at many scales. Symbiopolitics is the politics of living things coexisting, incorporating, and mixing with one another,” (Stefan Helmreich). 

7. Lucchesi, A. H. (2018). “Indians Don't Make Maps”: Indigenous Cartographic Traditions and Innovations. American Indian Culture and Research Journal , 42(3).

8. Laidlaw, B. and Beer, T. (2018), ‘Dancing to (re)connect: Somatic dance experiences as a medium of connection with the more-than-human’, Choreographic Practices, 9:2, pp. 283–309, doi: 10.1386/ chor.9.2.283_1

9.  Kussmaul, Kerstin and Longley, Alys (2021), ‘The queer habitat of fascia’, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 13:1&2, pp. 145–52, https://doi. org/10.1386/jdsp_00043_1

10. Burton, Orisanmi. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2023.

11. Spade, Katrina M., "Of Dirt and Decomposition: Proposing a Place for the Urban Dead" (2013). Masters Theses 1911, February 2014.

12. Montgomery, Nick (Community organizer) and Bergman, Carla and Aluri, Hari. Joyful militancy : building resistance in toxic times / Nick Montgomery & Carla Bergman ; foreword by Hari Aluri AK Press Chico, CA 2017

13. Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution is colonialism. Durham [North Carolina], Duke University Press.

14. AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 123, No. 3, pp. 621–632, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. © 2021