In “Grounding Conversations, Part 2: The Jumbies of Capitalism,” Dev awakens in the present to see the insidious gnarled roots of capitalism that have grown to have a tight grip on Toronto—which are haunted by the jumbies (malevolent spirits) of the past.
In “Grounding Conversations, Part 2: The Jumbies of Capitalism,” Dev awakens in the present to see the insidious gnarled roots of capitalism that have grown to have a tight grip on Toronto—which are haunted by the jumbies (malevolent spirits) of the past.
Dev Ramsawakh:
This is Grounding Conversations with Dev Ramsawakh for Radio LUMI. This six part segment series will lay the groundwork for the conversations that'll be happening on our broadcast during Luminato 2023 and provide a background on the frameworks with which our audio experiences attempt to engage. Many performance shows and arts festivals begin their programming with your typical land acknowledgement. However, many indigenous peoples have criticized the practice for relegating their relationship with the land to the past, which does more to alleviate settler guilt and discomfort than to demonstrate real solidarity and progressive action. In my relationship to Radio LUMI, I want to acknowledge these criticisms as a way to use my platform responsibly. I don't want to just acknowledge the trauma indigenous peoples from all over have had inflicted on them, but to address how our society collectively is hurt by the mechanics of colonialism, I want to try to offer a demonstration of ways to actively engage with decolonial concepts in a practice to move forward on an interconnected journey towards collective liberation.
In grounding conversations, I reveal myself as a time traveler, as I embark on a journey that weaves in and out of the past presence and futures that are rooted in the festival's programming and our city's arts culture. Tying them to the themes that the host here at Radio LUMI will be addressing from their own perspectives. This journey will be created using excerpts from my body of work to address the ongoing impacts of colonialism on our collective society and the underlying principles of disability justice that the San Francisco based disabled arts collective Sins Invalid, imbued into the term when they coined it in 2005 in order to teach us how to resist our interlocking systems of oppression.
It's now time to embark on the second part of our journey, the Jumbies of Capitalism.
My least favorite part of sleeping is that split second after you've woken up when you're trying to open your eyes for the first time. No matter where I am, it's dizzyingly unfamiliar before my brain is fully let go of whatever dreams have been entertaining during my slumber. This time is no exception. If anything, it may be the most terrifying I've ever experienced. I'd fallen asleep, tucked under the towering dense canopy of trees, different kinds of ash, cedar, oak, maple and other trees, most of which I'd never seen before, not far from the banks of Lake Ontario, taking deep breaths of not just clean air, but air filled with a sense of earth and life. When I wake, the air is still thin, dry, and acrid, and I feel myself wheezing. I'm back in my present day home, dampen sweat under my comforter. I reach urgently for my inhaler and take two quick puffs as deeply as I can and hold it.
I feel aches in my joints most prominent in my right knee, ankle, and hip, and between the discs and my surgically closed spine. And remember that I'm several stories higher above sea level than where I'd fallen asleep. I'm surrounded by mementos and souvenirs of relationships, accomplishments, hopes and failures, a setting that usually serves as refuge and haven for me, but I can't shake a sense of dread that chills the sweat still clinging to my skin and clothes. I look at the large uncovered window that spills light across my bed. I usually hold a lot of gratitude for it in the large balcony that lines the street facing perimeter of my apartment, having spent years virtually confined to a cramped shadowy walkup until a couple years ago. But as I rushed to my balcony to confirm the site from my window, I suddenly feel a hang of resentment for the view, I breath in dust and fume filled air as I stare in horror at the familiar bustling Toronto Street below me.
The world is just as I remember it, but now I can see some kind of hazy organic hologram of the gnarled and tangled roots that have grown from the seeds of capitalism I've watched gets sewn like a forest in itself. And to my horror, I realize that this forest is haunted. Looking between the shadowy knots of industrial roots are hungry and malicious Jumbies is a Creole word from mostly English speaking parts of the Caribbean that encompasses all spirits and demons usually used to refer to monsters that evolved from the mixture of indigenous West African, Indian, Chinese, and European peoples there. But other parts of the Caribbean colonized by the French, Dutch and Spanish may say Duppy. Zombie or spirit instead.
My father once told me about a Jumbie called the moon walker, a tall, pale, lanky spirit that roamed the land gazing at the moon. But the intergenerational connections that held the origins and motives of many Jumbies from my family's culture had been interrupted. I needed to carefully and intentionally research the Jumbies back home to understand who they are, but the Jumbies that leer hungrily from the shadows here are almost instantly recognizable to me. These ghosts and monsters are the remnants of a past that's caught in the purgatorial competition to be buried in an earth seemingly forever. They take the forms of policies, institutions, and cultural values that persist to this day.
My colonially informed and educated language. We refer to them as legislation, bills, laws, systems, or any number of other words easily found in English dictionaries. But as Wiidaaseh, an alternative hiphop rapper, writer, producer, and engineer based in Toronto and from Wikwemikong First Nations reservation made me realize in an interview recorded in 2021, they may be called many different names from any of the hundreds of languages and cultures that can be found in so-called Canada.
Wiidaaseh:
The version that we would have here is probably the Windigo that's more local to Canada because it's popular in the Great Lakes. The planes, the word wendigo go comes from an Ojibwe word, which is a part of the Algonquin languages. So it has a huge history there. The wendigo story, another malevolent spirit that feeds on a weakened soul and a weakened soul is usually a soul that's been corrupted somehow by things that actually came with colonialism. A lot of ways to weaken the soul was like greed or starvation or gluttony, any kind of thing that we really did not partake in or we looked down on a lot, especially greed or a sense of isolation or putting yourself above someone else or above a group of people.
That wasn't something that we practiced a lot. We obviously had a very strong sense of community, and the way the Windigo story was phrased was like, if you were to become isolated, like let's say just to tell a child, right, like an urban legend, don't go out into the forest when it's cold and you're alone because you're away from the safety of the community and the windigo might get you and your soul's weakened out there.
Maybe you're hungry and it's a spirit that when it takes over you, you just want to eat and feed and consume and you just want to keep going and going, and no matter how full you are, you can always eat more. I feel like we never used to really think that way. We always used to be like, please do not consume more than you need. So it was a good way to just tell kids to be grateful and whatnot. But obviously when colonialism comes over and it's a huge big issue and we get introduced to all of these greedy practices and stuff like that, it becomes more relevant.
Dev Ramsawakh:
As I peer at the phantom route. They wrap their strangling reach around every structure. I can see. Some of the slavering Jumbie faces are so uncannily familiar. I can instantly recall their names and stories. Scarcity is a Jumbie that tricks us into believing our survival hinges on the demise of others so that we'll rip each other apart for it. Individualism is a Jumbie that isolates us by trapping us inside mirrors that obscure our visions with images of ourselves. Eugenics is a shape-shifting Jumbie that'll take whatever form it needs to infect us with an apathy or even a hunger for the eradication of groups based on how we feel about them. Binaries are twin Jumbies that eat away at nuance and multiplicity until all that's left are two cages they force us to shove each other into. White supremacy is a powerful Jumbie that erases history and wisdom to create whatever narrative is convenient for its purposes.
And there are others still that I could continue to name. They cackle and howl and snarl as they rollick on and through the lecherous roots of capitalism and colonialism like some kind of demonic jungle gym. Some are hulking and undeniable while some are deceptively small, hard to find, scattered around like specs of dust until they're corralled together in indistinguishable packs. And some seem like mirror wisps of smoke on the wind until you realize their microscopic spores have attached themselves to everything. They work alone and together and breed with each other to create specialized hybrids capable of evading detection. I see another that I recognize from my conversation with Wiidaaseh, alcoholism.
Wiidaaseh:
Growing up there. You see it all the time. It's totally normalized. It's sort of like it's not a part of our culture at all. Obviously it was used for trading and that's where it got introduced to us. Also, there's stories that were being used to manipulate native people, right? Because you'd get us drunk and you get a little loose, things happen. So there was trading. There was that allegedly. And so it's always been not a part of our culture, especially now. We have certain practices and certain ceremonies that you're supposed to be completely sober. You don't smoke, you don't drink or anything. But it's still such a huge part of our culture like it's not supposed to be at all, but it is.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I recognize it. Alcoholism is a family of Jumbies that haunts and feeds on so many people's, like the Indian indentured laborers that were lured or banished to the Caribbean to work the sugar cane fields or manufacture the subsequent products from them, such as my own ancestors. They were promised privileges. They undermine labor movements from the Africans that liberated themselves from enslavement and were paid with bottles of cursed rum made from the molasses, harvested from sugarcane. It's a curse that doomed them to such extreme poverty that they'd rather drown themselves in liquor to escape from, even as it lets loose the violent demons that have anchored themselves deep formative corners of their beings. It's also a curse that can be inherited, some pridefully and others shamefully by their descendants even when they've climbed on the backs of their ancestors and community to middle and upper classes.
It's a curse that you can't just break. You have to exercise the Jumbies over and over again. Other Jumbies like trauma and individualism will taunt you into releasing the curse again and again. It's a curse I have to choose to break every time I take a drink. These Jumbies love to work in cycles. As I learned in an interview I did with Trevor Stratton, a board director for 2-Spirited People of the 1st Nations in Toronto for an article I wrote for Vice earlier this year titled What the Fight Against HIV Can Teach Us About Surviving The COVID Era.
Trevor Stratton:
In all of our generosity in the West, in pharmaceutical producing countries, we pride ourselves on our official development assistance and we support the global fund to fight HIV, TB and Malaria. So most of that money goes into buying the drugs to treat HIV, which is paid to American, Canadian, another western pharmaceutical producing country. So it's like the leaves fall from the tree and they rot and it's a cycle, most of the money comes back to our country. It's actually an investment in our own pharmaceutical companies which are charging exorbitant rates for the drugs.
If they cut the drugs in half, like the HIV drugs, we would have enough to treat everybody in the world. Those intellectual property rights are really hurting us, especially after it's often government, not always, but often government money that goes into the initial research and then we hand the profit over to pharma to control, and then we try to negotiate with them to lower the price. It's not sustainable. And from an indigenous perspective, the whole idea that this world economy is dependent on continual growth and we have a finite world and that is not sustainable, and now we're seeing the effects of that. They're looking to indigenous people going, "oh, you may have something there about protecting mother Earth, about thinking of the seven generations into the future before you make any decisions in your community and your people." That's not happening.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I can hear the echoes of the grinding gears of the disability-poverty cycle under his words. It's simultaneously disables the poor through unhealthy working conditions, access to clean water, nutritious food, and attentive comprehensive healthcare, while it also impoverishes the disabled with higher healthcare costs. Even here in Ontario, as OHIP fails to cover most ongoing medical supplies, higher rent for accessible housing or expenses for retrofitting homes to make them accessible and exorbitantly high price tags on accessibility devices or services that suddenly become affordable when non-disabled people create the demand for mass production, like Text to Speech Technology and weighted blankets, or as demonstrated in the early months of the pandemic, food delivery fees and virtual conferencing software, each Jumbies origin is connected to one gnarled root or another that traces its whining way back to the seed of capitalism it erupted from. This is why when Sins Invalid defined the principles of disability justice, they demanded, we adhere to an anti-capitalist politic. Capitalism sees our bodies and minds as righteous sacrifices and tributes for its proliferation.
Equating our worth with the profits we're able to exploit off of each other, any of us not able to keep the invasive growth alive are labeled as disabled in body or mind, and systematically eradicated. We have to dismantle and destroy capitalism, set fire to the very roots of it, to build a truly just world for all disabled people on its scattered ashes. It's also why they remind us to build on a foundation of sustainability, not just ecologically speaking, but along with our own bodies. We must rest and recharge, physically, mentally, emotionally, creatively. This is why Audrey Lorde coined the term self-care as a reminder to black women to include care for themselves as part of the caregiving responsibilities as often placed on them by family, partners, employers, coworkers, and their own community at large. These core practices are integral for resistant capitalism, as a trans led grassroots organization, QTPoC Mental Health, details on their website, and is called Rest for Resistance.
And the rest of the most marginalized of us should be prioritized and woven into the very fabric of our movements instead of burning us out to prioritize the comfort of the most privileged. Fear and anxiety can take as much energy as action, which I feel now as I retreat from my balcony view of a parallel haunted Toronto, I must rest before I can take action. So I slide back under my plush purple comforter to fall asleep, hoping that I'll dream up whatever I need to do next to slay the monsters that wait hungrily outside my window.
That was part two of the six part segment series, Grounding Conversations, the Jumbies of Capitalism. This segment was produced by Dev Ramsawakh for Radio LUMI as part of Luminato 2023. This segment included audio excerpts from interviews with Wiidaaseh recorded in 2021 and re-released in 2023 as part of the Remastered podcast, Jumbie: Colonized Monsters and Trevor Stratton recorded in February, 2023 as part of research for an article for Vice published in April.
The music used in this segment is by G.R. Gritt. Sound effects were either from freesound.org or fully produced by Dev Ramsawakh.