A Library Loyal to Students Offers Refuge and Fugitivity From the University

Raoni Muzho Saleh

A Library Loyal to Students Offers Refuge and Fugitivity From the University

A Library Loyal to Students Offers RefugeFromand

and Fugitivity the University

by Raoni Muzho Saleh

1 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013), 26.

It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of - this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.1

Raoni Muzho Saleh

Moved by Moten & Harney, I want to propose the library as a place of fugitivity, a place where fugitive planning takes place, a place where students come together to plan ways out of the university while abusing all its resources as long as they can. What does it mean for the library to function as a site of fugitivity? One would probably ask: what’s wrong with the way the library is functioning right now? Considering we can go there to borrow study materials, sit in silence and solitude to study for the exams to come. What if I suggest that it is exactly this current function of the library, as a site where students prepare themselves to be good professionals in the field, that is a disservice to what the library can really mean for students? One could ask, what else could students be doing if not preparing themselves to be fit for their profession? “To be a good professional. To be concise and coherent in the critique they offer to the development of the university and to be complete in their practice.” What else could students be doing? They could be gathering and sharing strategies on how to spite the mission of the university. The students could be organising and planning a way out of the university, in order to join the wayward communities of the university.

What if the library’s main vocation is not to purpose as a site of learning, but rather as a site where students gather to wander, exchange strategies of how to elude the grips of the university and its obsession with professionality? What if the library is the place where students gather to teach one another on failure, rest and radical love? What if the library could be a refuge for all the students who did not want to graduate and complete their studies but instead linger in the hallways spreading gossip about the

2 Ayana Young, “Transcript: Dr. BAYO AKOMOLAFE on Slowing Down in Urgent Times/155,” For the Wild, 22 januari 2020, https:// forthewild.world/ podcast-transcripts/ https/forthewildworld/listen/ bayo-akomolafe-onslowing-down-in-urgent-times-155.

university? To think of the library as such a place of fugitivity, one must ask the question: how can the library be truly loyal to the students and how does this loyalty naturally shape the library’s functioning as a fugitive site?

In order to work through these questions, I will first engage with the university’s function. Then I will offer a devotional dance examining the relationship between the library and the student, a library which is loyal to the students, and the students that are loyal to a slippery kind of studying, also known as “the bad student”. What is the difference between a bad student and a good student? How can the library join the work and forces of the bad students, the students in love with blackness and studying? What kind of potentialities does the bad student’s love and passion open up for the library?

Before we can wander anywhere, we must acknowledge the hardest but most vital task of the library: to evade the imperialist grip of the university. Bayo Akomolafe speaks in an interview about the university’s structure as an example of a colonial imposition “that sees study and learning as only one thing, if you’re not studying in some disciplinary manner, then you’re not studying. That is what is the meaning of learning, that’s what the university will tell you.”2 Born from imperialist colonial rule, the university’s structure as a “colonial imposition” means that the essence of such a structure regards “learning” and “completion of study” as its tools of mastery. The modern university performs the enlightened agenda of slave masters through the following: an assumed innocent belief in the idea of a so-called progression through the hoarding of knowledge; the

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apparent hierarchy between students and teachers as subordinates and superiors and the different research programs; journals and books that are hooked into a misguided subject-object relationship of study. The university regards studying as learning through the accumulation of knowledge and students as military puppets of this exact machinery. The university’s aim is to bring forth graduates who are there to play the game of the university, those who represent the university both in their compliance and defiance of the university, who use the university’s means to profit or make a name for themselves in the upcoming field. The university, which belongs to the state, the state as a master, wants to seduce the students to stay within hindsight of its reach and vision. As a wicked master, it wants to seduce students to use all the university’s possibilities in order to develop a strong position that the university can bear and can overview.

So how does the library, as a place devoted to study instead of learning, exist within the university’s colonial imposition but behave like a “non-place”, an unsafe neighbourhood and evade the enlightenment propaganda of the university? In riding along Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue I want to propose the library as a “banlieue”, the outskirts of the centre where those who have been banned, the illegal ones, the immigrant ones, the fleeing ones, reside. Kapil writes: “A ‘monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city.’ (Ban.) To be: ‘banned from the city’ and thus: en banlieues: a part of the perimeter. In this sense, to study the place where the city dissolves is to study the wolf”.3

Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieue (New York: Nightboat Books, 2015), 41.

4 Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 42.

When the library, as a fugitive place within the university, performs as a “banlieue”, an outskirt of the centre, it is a threat to the imperialist agenda of the university because of its impermeability and impenetrability. Unlike the university, which hoards knowledge and power, the library as a banlieue accumulates the maroon communities of the university, which exist out of all kinds of crooked subversive intellectuals who “refuse that which the university refused them*” and insist on being ungraspable to the surrounding power of the university.

Kapil writes: “I wanted to write a book that was like lying down. That took some time to write, that kept forgetting something, that took a diversion: from which it never returned”.4 The library as a non-place, with a fugitive agenda, is full of study materials that are perhaps like Kapil’s “lying down” meaning that these materials provoke perverse embodied gestures of studying. Like keep on forgetting something and never arriving anywhere. Like having deep heated conversations about important matters where the object of study takes over the room and everyone becomes emboldened through this love-affair. Like teachers becoming bad students again, like no one trying to “progress” themselves or “complete” into a comprehensible professional, like gossiping about what else and how else one can steal from the university, like choreographing diabolic and multilingual dances about freedom, like writing journals edited by students who never graduated, etc.

The library is the place where “waywardness” is being practised. In Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments, Hartman writes: “Waywardness: the avid longing

5 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2019), 227.

6 Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 42.

Raoni Muzho Saleh

for a world not ruled by master, man or the police. The errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here. The social poësis that sustains the dispossessed”.5 When the library joins the horde of the bad students, called “the subversive intellectuals” by Moten & Harney, it exclaims to be an unsafe neighbourhood with its own infrastructure of errant pathways.

Studying as a criminal activity is taken seriously here. Criminal because it defies the policing grip of the university. Criminal because both students and teachers gather from a passion and love of teaching and being taught by one another. Criminal because in the library the fugitive way of studying entails that the subject of study behaves like the subject that studies and the object of study becomes a person all together with whom the subversive intellectual falls madly in love and runs away with.

For the library to function as a fugitive place it must insist on strategies through which it is dancing evasively from the university’s grip. The university presses upon the library to perform its professionalisation agenda by trying to make the library function as a bank. The students who represent the university, both in defiance and in compliance, are invested in the illusion of “learning” or “gaining knowledge” and use the library to charge their account. But the library has vowed, in secrecy, loyalty to the struggle of the bad students, the subversive intellectuals, and refuses to charge anyone’s account. Away from the credit system and credibility of the university, the library (and perhaps the librarian too) whispers to the students that they can leave their debt in exchange for someone else’s debt. Moten & Harney write: “But debt is social and credit is asocial. Debt is mutual. Credit runs

only one way. But debt runs in every direction, scatters, escapes, seeks refuge. The debtor seeks refuge among other debtors, acquires debt from them, offers debt in return. The place of refuge is the place to which you can only owe more and more because there is no creditor, no payment possible. This refuge, this place of bad debt, is what we call the fugitive public”.7

Indebted by Moten and Harney’s lyrical rap about debt versus the university’s modality of credit, the library as “a fugitive public” is where no payment is possible. Believing only in the accumulation of bad debt as a modality of exchange, the library refuses payment from students who returned books, journals or videos too late. Instead, functioning as a fugitive public perhaps the students exchange the object with a fake document, or with a lie that got them a grant, or a story of an artwork they are obsessed with currently. Perhaps the librarian archives these debts somewhere secretly and the next generation of troubled, poor and bad students accesses this archive in order to seek refuge in them. The library, as a fugitive public, is a place of mutuality. It’s a place where students engage with one another and with study material from a desire to create a common, an undercommon, pool of unprofitable emergent strategies.

Then at last, let me speak of the difference that Moten & Harney make between the bad students and the good students. The university aims to produce good students who are professional critics that offer critique in exchange for the credit and credibility of the university. The relationship between the good student, also known as the critical academic, and the university is transparent.

7 Harney, The Undercommons, 61.

8 Harney, The Undercommons, 41.

9 Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 7.

Raoni Muzho Saleh

Through their critique, the critical academic reveals the university to itself and this labour is recognised and respected by the university. Moten & Harney note how the critical academic points out the contradictions of the university, therefore forcing the university to make steps towards cleaning up or whitening its contradictions.8 In this way the critical academic is crucial for the rebranding and improvement of the university’s progressive enlightenment-based propaganda.

The bad student, also known as the subversive intellectual, is the marginalised subject, who, because of her marginalisation, behaves more as an object and thus becomes an undefinable monster. As monsters, the subversive intellectuals gather in the library to study one another’s perverse diversions, curious and wayward dances. For Kapil “the monster is that being who refuses to adapt to her circumstances”.9 The subversive intellectual is exactly this, a monster to the university, because despite her labour as an intellectual she refuses to belong to the university. Her mission is to spite the university’s quest of progressing the education models by creating critical curricula. Instead of busying herself with providing critical theory to the university, the subversive intellectual goes to hide and make love in the library among the other dissidents.

In the words of Saidiya Hartman, the subversive intellectual is a wayward student. Wayward: the unregulated movement of drifting and wandering; sojourns without a fixed destination, ambulatory possibility, interminable migrations, rush and flight, black locomotion; the everyday struggle to live free. The attempt

to elude capture by never settling. Not the master’s tools, but the ex-slave’s fugitive gestures, her traveling shoes. Waywardness articulates the paradox of cramped creation, the entanglement of escape and confinement, flight and captivity. Wayward: to wander, to be unmoored, adrift, rambling, roving, cruising, strolling, and seeking. To claim the right to opacity. To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. To be lost to the world.10

It is important to note that the inherent nature of Hartman’s waywardness is black, which makes the subversive intellectual inseparably black as well. She uses black not only racially but also ontologically, meaning looking at nature of meaning through black life. It is through the black labour of the subversive intellectual that errant pathways are created. It is through these escape routes of maroon communities where one can practice living free from the whitening and enlightening nature of the university.

At last, let us sway backward to the questions proposed in the beginning of this essay: “what does it mean for the library to function as a site of fugitivity and how does this function naturally shape the library’s loyalty to the struggle of the students?”

For the library to function as a site of fugitivity it means that the library, as a public site, performs within the university, but refuses to belong to the university. Instead of being a public place for learning, a site where knowledge is hoarded and accumulated, it wants to be a non-site; meaning to be impenetrable to the imperialist and colonial agenda of the university. The library as a 10

Hartman, Wayward Lives, 227.

Raoni Muzho Saleh

non-site is akin to the banlieues of the world. Within the heart of the university it performs as an outskirt. It is there where the defiant students gather in secrecy to come up with choreographies of refusal of professionalism, critique and credit. Instead of hoarding books and other study materials that prepare students to successfully enter into the professional field, the library collects gossip of non-graduated students that teach a new generation of defiant subversive intellectuals how to continue stealing from the university.

The library as a non-site, as a wayward public, is inherently black, meaning that its fugitivity is emboldened by how refugee encampments and maroon communities continue surviving. The library as a fugitive public place has sworn loyalty to the students and thus it is there where the banned, the bad students, come together for resting, loving and slandering while hiding from the clutches of the university. The bad student performs like Kapil’s Ban: “Ban is a portal, a vortex, a curl: a mixture of clockwise and anti-clockwise movements in the sky above the street”.11 In loyalty to the clockwise and anti-clockwise curling of the bad student, the library archives secretly this dance that is full of debt, in the form of love stories, complaints and gossip, for the next generation of fugitive students ready to create cracks in the thick walls of the university.

11 Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 42.

/ 50 jaar ATD bibliotheek

Raoni Muzho Saleh

Opleiding SNDO Lichting 2019

Raoni Muzho Saleh (1991 AFG/NL) is a choreographer/performer based in Amsterdam. He graduated from University of Amsterdam in 2015, bachelor in Literary and Cultural Analysis. In 2019 he graduated from SNDO, bachelor in Choreography. He also has formal training in Theatre of the Oppressed through Formaat, based in Rotterdam. Born in Afghanistan and raised in Pakistan, his work is shaped by fugitivity as a revolutionary movement. By dancing through the gender spectrum, he has generated a movement practice of becoming other, a continuous becoming of incompleteness. His recent works are materializations of “the backspace”, a concept that provokes

transformational multiplicity and aims for liberation from the oppressions of solid subjectivity. Moving and thinking through the idea of “the backspace” he insists on the stage as a sanctuary that holds the possibility for transformation. Thus he insists on the magic of the stage being the ability to activate a serious kind of play where one can be possessed by the stories and voices of the dispossessed. Where one can practice “becoming other”, becoming someone or something ungraspable. In his works, he approaches the voice and materiality such as textile and dough intertwined intimately with the human body. In the recent years he has performed for Teo Alaruona (FIN), Benjamin Kamino (CA), Joy Mariama Smith (US/NL), Keyon Gaskin (US), Eoghan Ryan (IR), Carly Rose Bedford (AUS/NL), Ghita Skali (MOR) and Elisabeth Raymond (SWE).