# "Medicines" I believe that my particular trajectory made me a specialist in articulating paradoxes at the interface of colonial encounters. I was conceived through one of these paradoxes and the experiences in my life led me to look for paradoxes in different contexts, such as in education, and in efforts toward social and global justice. Since people tend to turn away when paradoxes are presented through logic, I have learned to translate them into stories, images, metaphors, and pedagogical exercises. This is what I call one of the “medicines” that I carry. I might also say that I am a specialist in identifying some of the complexities of colonial violence, having witnessed how these complexities manifest within and around me over the course of my life. On good days I may also carry—for myself and others—the medicine of holding spaces where heavy things can be held and difficult movements can happen without relationships falling apart. This medicine is always necessary, both for keeping my family together and for safely raising painful, risky topics of conversation in academia without immediately being shut down. This book is an attempt to bring these medicines together. These may be exactly the medicines you need right now—or not. This book also presents teachings I have received when collaborating with other people, in particular the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts/research/ecology collective and the Indigenous network Teia das 5 Curas. It is important to say from the outset that when I engage with Indigenous knowledges in some of the chapters, I do not intend to represent or to speak for Indigenous individuals or communities. Indigenous groups are as diverse and complex as non-Indigenous groups; and questions about where, how, by, and with whom Indigenous knowledges should be shared are contested issues. In cases when specific Indigenous stories are shared in this book, permission was granted by Indigenous storytellers. What I present in this book are translations of what I have been taught about modernity keeping us in an immature state; and the need for a political practice of healing, of radical tenderness, that can enable us to step up, to grow up, and to show up differently. This involves unlearning our learned ways: of thinking and imagining; of sensing and feeling; of relating to one another, the earth, and the cosmos; of facing life, fear, pain, loss, and death. The stories are gifted as a compass that points to the need for us all to become healthy elders and good ancestors for all relations: to learn to live, to grieve, and to die well. This requires that we learn how to face our shadows, how to compost our “shit,” and how to weather storms together. For this to happen, we need a container where we can manifest unconditional regard for everyone’s being; while we commit to interrogating our thinking, our doing, our hopes and desires, and our ways of relating in order to breathe and to move together with maturity, sobriety, discernment, and accountability. This book is an attempt to create that container. I do not claim to be able to do all these things or even to be able to teach others what to do. In fact, I would be suspicious of, and encourage others to be suspicious of, people who declare that they have the answers. The mess we find ourselves in is unprecedented and we all have a lot of work to do. # The Idea of Hospicing Modernity If you can read this book, it is likely that modernity is like the air you breathe. You would not be able to access or read it without having acquired modernity’s literacies. Modernity is a single story of progress, development, human evolution, and civilization that is omnipresent. Modernity is full of paradoxes: of war and humanitarian support, of ongoing colonialism and reconciliation, of imperialism and education, of poverty creation and alleviation, of exponential growth and sustainability. Whether you and I identify with or are critical of it, it still conditions what and how we think, feel, desire, relate, hope, and imagine. Although modernity always sees itself and behaves as if “young,” it has grown old and is facing its end. Learning to offer palliative care to modernity dying within and around us is not something that modernity itself can teach us to do. In other words, most people will not willingly let go of the enjoyments and securities afforded by modernity: they will not voluntarily part with harmful habits of being that are extremely pleasurable. However, our collective unconscious knows that the enjoyments and securities promised by modernity cannot be endlessly sustained. This book is about preparing ourselves for coexisting differently whenever these enjoyments and securities may be taken away, whether this will happen in our lifetimes. The first time I heard the word hospice used as a verb was in Ireland in 2011, at an Occupy movement event. I had been invited to contribute to a conversation taking place outside the Central Bank of Ireland on Dame Street in Dublin. The word hospice was introduced through the book Walk Out, Walk On by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze.3 This word was used to refer to acting with compassion to assist systems to die with grace, and to support people in the process of letting go—even when they are holding on for dear life to what is already gone. Although the authors and I may have different perspectives about what is dying, why, and what needs to be let go of, I am very grateful for their work and for the gift of that word. Since that encounter, the idea for a book about hospicing modernity visited me many times. I postponed it as much as I could, but as with all stubborn ideas, the book had its own agenda. It is important to note that, as the book will be received through your cultural and affective filters and will start to interact with your experiences, it will transform into something different altogether. Please understand that your interpretations are the result of different traveling stories intermingling and spinning together in a direction of their own that happens in your time and context—they may have very little resemblance to my own interpretations. This is fine as long as we are both aware that there may be significant differences between what I wrote and what you will interpret. The book is organized in two parts: the first part (warm-up/prep work) creates a container for the second part (hospicing modernity). In part I you will be introduced to a thought experiment about our current social and ecological predicament (warm-up), you will become familiar with different understandings of modernity (prep work 1), you will be asked to carefully consider the implications of reading this book (prep work 2), and if you decide to continue reading, you will be offered seven basic tools that will give you a new language (frameworks, images, and strategies) to navigate the rest of the book (prep work 3). In part II, you will find ten chapters addressing themes related to modernity dying, and what would be necessary to hospice it and assist with the birth of something new—without suffocating the “baby.” These chapters are collections of stories and exercises that invite you to sit with our collective shadows and “shit” and to stay with the storm, stay with the trouble.4 These chapters articulate some of modernity’s wrongs and the implications of facing these wrongs for different forms of social activism. These chapters offer insights on how to gradually part with habits of living that are harmful to yourself, to other human and nonhuman beings, and to the metabolic movements of the planet at large. Although the chapters are organized sequentially, each chapter is an independent bundle of stories and exercises that stands on its own. Thus, the chapters in part II could, in theory, be read in any order. However, I do not recommend reading the chapters in part II without going through part I first. Since this book is about expanding our collective capacity to hold space for difficult and painful things, I cannot say, “I hope you enjoy this book.” There will be parts of it that you won’t enjoy, and at some points perhaps you will even be angry at me. If you need to process what you are going through, the GTDF collective has created a peer support pathway you are welcome to use at decolonialfutures.net/hospicingmodernity. What I wish for is for you to learn to feel comfortable with the nausea and discomfort of difficult learning as soon as possible. Then, I promise you, it will be much easier to enjoy the ride. # The Gifts of Paradoxes I titled this preface “My Grandmothers’ Gifts,” in loving memory of my grandmothers, vó Vitória and vó Vitalina. They were both tremendously courageous, contradictory, stubborn women living complex lives in their historical contexts. Vó Vitória was a victim of political, sexual, and gender (forced marriage) violence who kept the photo of her sweetheart (whom she met at fourteen and was not allowed to date) hidden in her wallet until the day she died at eighty-four years old. She also reproduced gender violence toward my aunts and firmly believed in the superiority of white people over nonwhite people until close to her death. She gave my mother and other racialized people who joined the family a very hard time, yet despite my skin color being different from hers, she showed me only unconditional love and always had my back. Vó Vitalina was a victim of colonial, racial, gender, class, and sexual violence and her politics was one of unfaltering refusal to submit to modernity—regardless of the costs of that refusal, including her becoming homeless. As much as I want to romanticize her resistance, I know that—despite having been a victim of multiple forms of historical and systemic violence—she was not immune to reproducing it herself. Within modernity we are encouraged to idealize humanity and to look for faultless virtuous role models. However, my grandmothers’ gifts were crafted and offered mostly through their mistakes, their paradoxes, and the complexities of their lives. From vó Vitória, who was a seamstress, I inherited determination, endurance, and confidence to cross borders and to work through whatever life presented me (including becoming a teenage mum and writing in order to cope with and survive racism at the university). From vó Vitalina, who was a benzedeira (healer), I inherited intuition, free-spiritedness, and an unbounded source of vitality (the translation of her name). She also instilled in me the insight that the sense of separation and superiority implanted by modernity is a social disease in all of us, that requires collective healing. This commitment to healing is the reason I dropped out of school and later became a teacher aspiring (rather naively) to redirect education away from the reproduction of harm. The multiple forms of violence my grandmothers faced—and reproduced—in their lifetime have not disappeared, far from it. But hopefully, one day, the integration of the lessons of our collective failure to interrupt violence will become part of what reframes how we approach our human predicament. Although my grandmothers are not physically around anymore, they make themselves present in every aspect of my life as I process and integrate their teachings. They whisper persistently and sometimes annoyingly as I try to work. They both insist on asking, “What if?” # What If What if racism, colonialism, and all other forms of toxic, contagious divisions are preventable social diseases? What if the texts, education, and forms of organization we revere have carried and spread the disease, but also contain latent parts of the medicine that can heal it? What if learning to activate this medicine requires coming to terms with our violent histories (as painful as that may be); learning to see the world through the eyes of others (as impossible as that sounds); and facing humanity (in our own selves first) in its full complexity, affliction, and imperfection? What if the purging prompted by this medicine leads us to confront our traumas and learn to let go of fears of scarcity, loneliness, worthlessness, guilt, and shame? What if we must learn to trust each other without guarantees? What if the motivation to survive alongside one another in a finite planet in dynamic balance (without written agreements, coercive enforcements, or assurances) will come through being taught collectively by the disease itself? What if collective healing will be made possible precisely by facing—together—the end of the world as we know it?