The Postcolonial Tower

The postcolonial future is constructed by looking backward.

And for this we need a decolonial imaginary, that space that Emma Pérez refers to as “that time lag between the colonial and postcolonial, that interstitial space where differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated.”¹

We need the decolonial imaginary to enact anti-colonial politics. We need to continue undoing colonial imperatives before any ‘postcoloniality’ can be claimed.

From the Pulp Tarot by Todd Alcott

By the tarot, I call this towering, burning the oppressive regimes still standing in my psyche, or within my students or clients. Or I tell them about surviving buildings that may very literally may burn to the ground with them in it if they don’t get out now. I tell them get out of the burning building, out of the house of bondage. Or set it on fire.

The tarot can be a tool to engage and enact a decolonial imaginary with its intervention toward conditioned modes of subjected colonial consciousness through divine communion.

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Updates:

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Sign up for Tenz, my yr long tarot course in queer diginity and decans

TENZ teaches tarot a system of syncretization, connecting the decanic history in live classes, to the critical co-investigation of the new cultural terrain we walk on, done with lectures for each class which are interpreted through various queer, and critical theory.

This is a borderlands course. It aims to fuse relationships by honoring a narrative tradition which creates poetic coherence out of a life of movement and fragmentation, as is the case when modern readers traverse dissociative linguistic, colonial, cultural, psychic and physical borders.

The class is cut into 12 monthly units, following the cards / decans of the current zodiacal season. Payment plans are available to enroll now.

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Tower-ing becomes about the (de)colonizing of the psychic space, that is treating the body as a social entity and attending the psyche in asserting a self-determining subjectivity, for imperialistic, Eurocentric hetero-patriarchal values shape how we see ourselves everyday. The psychosomatic and spiritual dis-ease of the Tower is rooted in colonial and imperial trauma.

The Tower is akin to the “Fall” marking the time colonial conquest overtook the world with a categorical, dichotomous, hierarchical logic. With the two figures falling away from each other its obvious the fall instilled cis-hetero-patriarchy but also a separative and individualistic conceptualization of the self and other. Or it’s the Cartesian split between mind and body that characterizes Western epistemologies.

From the Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg by Yury Shakov

The Tower shocks you to shake you free from complacency, American exceptionalism, dissociative individualism.

The Tower is for the drama, for radical disorientation. We pull it with a sense of being swallowed whole by sudden darkness.

The Tower is an exercise in descent, a consequence of dissent.

It is a psychosocial exposition of colonial-based trauma. It signifies cultural destruction, fragmentation and social indeterminacy. It centers the ontological anxiety, that threat of a meaninglessness existence, that characterizes subjects of colonial trauma. For if the Tower is about violent destruction then it is the cis-het-white-patriarchal culture that splits and fragments bodies, psyches, and spirits.

From the Magarete Peterson Tarot

When at any moment you can simply cease to be, you walk around with generalized anxiety undergirding your very being. But while this colonial consequence of ontological anxiety may be theorized as universally experienced by all people, subjects of trauma really do directly face death daily.

Sarah Alicia Ramirez defines subjects of trauma as “groups of people who have been subjected to historical and intergenerational violence and subsequent trauma as a result of (neo)colonialism and imperialism.

Subjects of trauma experience symptoms—that is, physiological responses—that are the result of a series of prolonged, historical and intergenerational (systemic) events. The various manifestations of systemic oppression are indeed ‘stressors severe enough to threaten life or make one believe that one is about to die.’ Systemic oppression itself threatens the very existence of people of color.”²

Like all Tarot decks are constituted by the Tower, a death-encounter characterizes the daily reality of colonized, racialized subjects. So the Tower is for the damned, the wretched of the earth permanently struggling against an omnipresent death.

This is a pain which the reading is but one medicine developed to heal, which we will explore more later.