Introduction: no room for the sacred

 by

Pedro Daher

If it is to be found everywhere in the terrain of the everyday as part of the continuous existential fabric of being, then it lives simultaneously in the daily lives of everyone, in spiritual work that assumes a different form from those I have engaged here, but also in daily incidents, in those ‘things’ we routinely attribute to coincidence, those moments of synchronicity, the apparently disparate that have cohesion but under another framework. The sacred precinct is at once vast, proximate, and intimate. In Kitsimba’s universe, the principle is quite simple: “You human beings have this fancy word—syncretism—for something quite simple: everything in the universe is interconnected!” — Pedagogies of Crossing, M. Jacqui Alexander

Sacred and violence

The sacred is stifled. Strangled. Mocked. Derided. Capitalism continues to execute its ceaseless genocides. The modern-imperial powers march forward through their ever-so-slightly shifting configurations and never-ending colonial and racial massacres. Before today’s and yesterday’s desolation, what is the sacred? What of its role? Where is it found and nurtured and felt and put into action? From its individual-internal practices and necessities to its collective-external actualizations and makings? Where is it grounded? If what has been sacralized is imperialism through the capitalist mode of assault1, if market “integration” through the invasion of state-capital imposed sanctions is the only normative sacred sacrifice2, if the sacredness of commodity and financial value is the only sanctioned mode of worship3, then the sacred appears as impossibly paralyzed by these strangleholds. And yet, it is from these strangleholds that the sacred must start from since it is already there— it is already here if one looks closely [and thoroughly]4. The sacred as a concrete relation to reality itself. From one’s own reality to the reality of all beings, all life, and back. The material sacred of (armed) struggle against violence for the liberation of all beings with a simple aim: to make violence unacceptable, to make invasion unacceptable, to make violation unacceptable, to make trespassing unacceptable, to make genocide unacceptable, to make killing in the name of unacceptable5. One must wait, ardently wait, and remember the teaching: “time is a god who does not hear prayer. If you fight time you do not tread on the earth. and if you do not tread on the earth where are you?”

            These are some of the questions this issue tackles and answers, momentarily. And it does so impermanently because [permanent] answers and solutions are not possible. And a certain (disguised? unintentional?) desire for purity — for the final explanation, for total determination, for the solving of life into a complete and exhaustive perfected actualized framework — is what The Road to Wisdom grapples with. The end of violence is what the sacred promises. Enlivens. Makes us, allows us to hope. And that end is always the illusion, the ilusión, the promise, the anticipation, the ground from which all must start.

            Perhaps it all starts from water and the streets’ screams, as Eleanor Smith and tofer Perkins offer in this collection. Bodies, lands, waters, air, and health, abused for centuries, cry to not only be seen but also to already create the path that denounces hegemony while unsettling it, displacing it stone by stone. Maybe one starts with the space of/for care and its articulations and deployments in late global capitalism, as Barbara Nappini, Christine Guiyangco, Nayla Ramalho and Maurício Chade’s explore throughout the issue. By deeply looking at the conditions under which individuals and populations are surrendered to abandonment and erasure while investigating the engineering of architectures for the circulation of humans and their objects of need for consumption (for the emotional, psychic, physical necessities of consumption)6, they demand to not only pay attention to the building of things but also to witness who, and what, sustains the possibility of the construction of these infrastructures in the first place.

            To be grounded instead of abstracted— as if these two are ruled by separation, just for the moment — I will be direct: the suffering in the world is beyond intolerable, beyond unbearable, beyond language’s capacity to contain. But one must name it. The state-capital twins sanctioned and financed murders all over the globe— carried out within their own borders and within the borders they (wish to) control, and their unmeasurable, unmappable, unknowable aftermaths— fundamentally and distinctively mark modern and contemporary life. Violence is not reducible to its capital, colonial, and racial actualizations (one could add gender, sexual, geographical, and ethnic violence, violence against differently-abled bodies, against animals, rivers, minerals, forests, and mushrooms, one could add the entirety of existence at this very moment). Yet there must be a thread. Something that knits all seemingly disparate modes of violence and their many deployments. Maybe the knitting that has been undone is what Aílton Krenak demands the return of through the “reforesting of our imaginary” — a metaphorical-poetic-philosophical call to be sure, but a concrete, social-historical material demand to change the organization of life under capitalism and its multiple assaults. Perhaps the knots that have been unmade are what we can recover with Lélia Gonzalez’s call for an Afro-Latin American feminism. By galvanizing Queen Nanny of the Maroons’s centrality in the anti-colonial struggle specifically through her role (along other women) of providing community stability and continuity via the building of a freed world broadly and for all beings, a leader who is-becomes an “originating mythical ancestor”, Gonzalez writes: “her great powers come from her intimate contact and knowledge of the spirit world, that is, of the ancestors’ kingdom (...) as the mediator between the living and the dead, she symbolizes the continuity of the maroon community in space and time”. Queen Nanny was a military leader who brought peace against the “imperialist cultural terrorism” perpetuated by the “ideology of white supremacy”— nowadays said ideology might not be as neatly distinguishable as it was in the Americas of the 16-19 centuries but nevertheless, and at the very least, its underlying structure of assault (domination via just violence) carries on unimpeded.

            Perhaps, then, one starts from the sacred in the land, in the space, built against the space-time of modern domination and built for the ones from before, the ones here-now, and the ones to come, as Ana Laura Silva Vilela, Alicia Carroll, Átila Augustos dos Santos and Joseph Coyle, and Paulo Ramos suggest in this issue. From them, one attends to the aspiration and devotion for the impossibility of justice, the suspension of assumptions when relating and staying with what appearances hide, the potency of communal spaces that open room for a questioning of the limits of organized religious practice, the honoring of those who bring us into the world as world for the world to be transformed. Resisting in the terrain of hegemony, necessary as it is given its overgeneralized rule, but already living, somehow escaping, differing from the terms and conditions of hegemony itself.

            And yet [hegemonic] violence is not reducible. One notes the qualification, the configuration, the turning of things into concepts and meanings. One notes what types of domination are attempted, are already concretized, and notes which modes resist and abandon the place of hegemony for something else— even if fleetingly or incompletely or always in the process of being built, rebuilt, of never-ending constitution. And then one must strive to relinquish the attaching of concepts and meanings at once— this underlying system of being-thinking, this cornerstone of structural violation must be overthrown, eradicated, wiped out. The attaching of, the certainty-[ful]filled statement, the declaration of what is proper, the proper itself, released from one’s own claws. After all, where one looks, one finds injustice— multilayered and incredibly complicated injustices. And simultaneously simple to witness-understand injustices, when one embraces contradiction-paradox as the nature of the world. The injustices don’t start in a particular moment— even if one can believe in the 16th century as the beginning of our specific ongoing mode of violent means and ends. They won’t end at another particular moment— even if one believes in the dream of a date in which violence is abandoned, set aside, unacceptable. There are no breaks, there are no lines, there is only life and the struggle for it against the (and our particularly modern) will to domination that has generally overtaken the globe for the last six centuries and with no apparent end in sight. One must imagine with, against, and beyond the universal and the particular, the structural and the specific, the answer and the question, the reading of things and the reality of things, the dream and the actual circumstances. Beyond one’s own vision. Perhaps, after all, one must go back to the bones that have been broken in the defense of the proper vision, as M. Niaraki, Suene Honorato, and María P. Molano-Parrado urge in this collection. Just war. Just conquest. Just coup. Just kill. They insist we do not divert the gaze from the weight of history and the bodies upon which we walk. When one’s own vision fades the clarity of avoiding human-made hells is the only imperative.

            The sacred can open the imagination to the concrete instead of the imagination to oneself— exclusively. Because it has already done so. For centuries. And it keeps doing so, [for] now. The sacred can allow a going back to where, what, and who one already is— that is, a return to imagination that is not speaking to itself or to whom it sees as their own, but imagination liberated from existing only within the shackles of global, totality-inducing system of social life, and freed from my idea(l)s. Imagination actualized in the concreteness of place and moment.

Forugh Farrokhzad is sacred. Frantz Fanon is sacred. Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Hind Rajab is sacred. Kehinde, Graça Graúna, Silvia Cusicanqui is sacred. Milton Santos, Beatriz Nascimento, Eliane Potiguara is sacred. Kitsimba and M. Jacqui Alexander is sacred. Leila Khaled, Fred Hampton, Sojourner Truth, Suzanne Césaire. David Kopenawa, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Eduardo Galeano, Georgina Herrera. And countless, many countless more beings, are the sacred made manifest. I name them for themselves and to honor their historical existence and who they wrote for, against, and about. They are not idols to be worshiped. They are not ends in or for themselves. They are not the end. They are somehow the endless. They are dimensions. They bring us to the sacred: our duty towards the human being as such, as Simone Weil insisted on as our one and only obligation.

The individual as (w)hole. Because the sacred is for you. And it is not you. It becomes the constant reminder of the simultaneity of the integrality of reality in no-time— greatly exemplified by Vanessa Andreotti’s multi-layered selves7. There are no fantasies about the sacred. No illusions. No guarantees. If one thinks of the sacred in terms of certainty, one has already abandoned it in the name of self-assuredness in a world that denies such possibility at every possible turn; less assumptions more question marks fewer statements more meanderings.

            Perhaps, thus, one starts from the intimate and the subtle, the suspension and the re-creation, the fear and the doubt, the affinity and the interrelation, as Steven Byrd, Bia Barbosa, Kaimé Guerrero Valencia, and Jackson Hunt delve into in this issue. With them, one notices the centrality of mobilizing history to tell stories taking place now, being-becoming a parent as rejection and refusal of the poison of the modern extinguishing of time, listening to everything as its own body and its own voice, and making a memory by telling a story to access memory itself. They ask us to see the time machine, now, because the markedness and distinction of the present can only be understood, and the future regained, by breaking the imposed lines of sanctioned time.

            The sacred already exists within modernity and its ongoing violences and is beyond it. It is confined and freed. The sacred without social and class practice is empty self-aggrandizing repetition of (essentializing) identities as things are. The sacred with the embrace of the concrete reality of all peoples and beings in their particular moment through the largely universalized structures of modernity without reducing anything to something(s) is struggle for justice. In the myriad of ways this can take place — a protest, a classroom, a reading group, a gira, an organizing effort, a conversation, an act of support for someone vulnerable, a vote, a denunciation, a demand, a refusal. It is individual freedom and collective responsibility.

One fights in the now. There is no other time or place. And yet one also must fight for the other time and place with the other time and place— material revolution and sacred transformation can be one and the same. Since, arguably and after all, what matters at the end is what mode of power will dominate and determine what is sacred and, more importantly perhaps, what is not.

Perhaps, finally, one starts and ends by remembering Octavia Butler’s and Lauren Olamina’s emphasis on the now of the future, and the creation of the future now:

God is neither good nor evil, neither loving nor hating. God is Power. God is Change. We must find the rest of what we need within ourselves, in one another, in our Destiny. (...) “And why should people bother about the Destiny, farfetched as it is? What’s in it for them?” “A unifying, purposeful life here on Earth, and the hope of heaven for themselves and their children. A real heaven, not mythology or philosophy. A heaven that will be theirs to shape.”

Parables of the sacred are of our making, however impossible or improbable or squashed or trampled they might be. Will the shaping continue to follow fanaticism— more pronouncedly than ever perhaps in this very moment, September of 2025, in which the fanaticism of capitalist imperialism propelled by just wars attempts to annihilate and to genocide peoples and populations from the globe — in its countless manifestations and deployments? Apparently, yes. Can the shaping turn away from fanaticism and move towards being, beings, isness, honoring and promoting the fundamental dignity of all life? Of all life? Certainly, because it already is in all possible scales in the face of unscalable violences and violations. 

Introducing The Road to Wisdom

In this issue, the reader finds four sections: “Justice and Utterance”, “Justice and Contemplation”, “Justice and Bodies”, “Justice and Service”. Within them and between multiple genres and their flexibility— poetry, research papers, experimental essays, short stories, among others— we bring a collection that opens with a denunciation and manifesto for the sacredness of water [life] and ends with a reflection on motherhood grounded in Umbanda’s spiritual guidance and practice. What follows is a quick, and necessarily unfair and incomplete, summary of what the reader will find in The Road to Wisdom: Manifesting the Sacred Towards Justice.

            In the first section, “Justice and Utterance”, the stifling of the sacred, and the multitude of practices that enliven and pose it as always already a fundamental guide to displace violence, open the way. We begin the issue with Eleanor Smith’s “Pipeline Through Navajo Perpetuates Environmental Injustice”, a denunciation of the new, yet ever-repeating, resource extraction and dispossession of indigenous nations in the Americas. A community organizer for Tó Nizhóní Ání (Sacred Water Speaks), Smith recalls the ceaseless promise of “economic prosperity” which never materializes but that, rather, always brings most, if not all, “the environmental and health costs” to indigenous nations— in this particular case, to the Navajo nation and, more generally, the repetition of which we see played out throughout the Americas. The writing questions why Diné Fundamental Laws — “founded on a deep respect for the Earth and for maintaining relations with all elements of life”— cannot be the basis for political, economic, and cultural principles for overcoming extractivism and the violences of modern life. Grounded and grounding political and economic organization through the sacredness of all life comes to our attention as the struggle for justice in Ana Laura Silva Vilela’s “Mulheres de Axé, Justiça e Outra Coisa”.

            Vilela revisits the concept of justice and right/law to not only highlight its originating violence— in its liberal/modern architecture — but to also point to how (the) other thing (“outra coisa”) can articulate a sociality that refutes and recreates justice from a different stance-collective construction. Reflecting with and alongside “mulheres de terreiro” (“women from terreiros”) and their sacred, justice-oriented practices, Vilela offers (the) other thing as the struggle and demand for the reinvention of justice as system of actualizing the impossible, that is, making the impossible, endless insistence for justice itself possible given that material, sacred justices are a shared responsibility. After this theoretical excavation, we move to the drowning and releasing power of words as sacred actions. Paulo Ramos’ “Corpos D’água/Bodies of Water” asks the reader to submerge themselves in the (bodies of) words and follow the text’s poetic breaths. Here, facing truth is placed as imperative to bring to light, and defy, the (state-capital-collective) structures that decide which bodies— human and nonhuman — are continuously uprooted. The section ends with Marília Librandi’s “Way-Seeking Mind: “nem todo o trajeto é reto, nem o mar é regular”. Through an experimental-poetic autobiography and critical essay, Librandi explores the force of writing as a return to the sacred — as individual and collective practice. Writing to remember the multitude of voices that one mobilizes when bringing words and (modes of) being together. Writing to witness return to self, to disarm the knots that occupy it, and to finally t(h)rust it into life’s infinite, concrete entanglements. Writing to breathe.

            In the second section, “Justice and Contemplation”, observation and breaking the assumptions which come through observing are the impulse. Alicia Carroll’s “Big Falls” wanders the reader toward awakening away from the givenness of the immediacy that surrounds us— gently jolting one away from self-consciousness as rule on a path to feeling the ground, being the ground. Carroll’s rupture from assuming fixity by dislodging appearance as congealment leads to an investigation of communal spaces built within and beyond presuppositions. Átila Augustos dos Santos and Joe Coyle’s “The Otherwise Possibilities of pentecostalismo preto bicha/sapatão/travesty” highlights the role of actually inclusive pentecostal theology spaces that function as political acts because they can offer critiques of class, gendered, and racial norms and exclusions from a daily experience lens through their religious-shared practice. In these communal spaces, a collective life is imagined to embolden and uphold commitments to justice and social transformation invigorated from what the authors name as the “place-making” process generated by a “queer Afrodiasporic Pentecostal strategy”.

            Place and body are blended in Kaimé Guerrero Valencia’s “Bodies of Voices”. Through and with the memory of what already is, Guerrero Valencia turns lingering into patience, cosmic-infinite-here-now remembrance, and careful attention. The echoes of voices that refuse silencing and demand the rebuilding of a sociality with, and through, their recovery. Returning from these bodies, the section ends with a critical questioning of the (self-)certainties of memory. Jackson Hunt’s “Parts of Some Hole” halts looking inwards for memories. Externalized, making a memory is no longer a seeking for self-assuredness — not because one does not need to enter, recover, heal, and affirm memory-making but precisely because one is nothing alone. Memory isn’t ours. Creation and repetition aren’t ours. Seeing again, forgetting, remembering, being alive before, after, and now are perhaps ours. The collection is a reminder to be less sure about perception and firmer about suspending one’s own vision. 

            In the third section, “Justice and Bodies”, attention turns to the making and sustaining of bodies and spaces beyond what is immediately visible— that is, one is directed to look after the appearing of bodies and spaces to uncover some of the concealed structures that shape what appears to be solid reality. M. Niaraki’s “Search” tells the story of a small group of military personnel tasked with assessing a landscape and recovering bodies after a chemical bombardment during war. As the protagonist urgently states, in war “horror was inseparable from the event” as he feels the need to “escape the earth (…) to disappear at once” in the face of “those bloody bastard preachers of death” who keep dominating global life— through external imperial and internal wars to dominate populations. Here, the sacredness of life cannot be respected by any attempt at domination but can only arise in the subtle and tender moments of recognition within indescribable violence between characters amongst themselves and with nonhuman beings and the landscape itself— that is, what the landscape could be if the preachers were not the ones deciding what happens to it.

            The need to burn, to escape, to (re)build, to denounce, and reject the preachers of death returns with tofer Perkins’ “The Divide Merging 2o/2o”. There, tofer sings about the violence and punishment that often goes unnoticed, the voices and bodies-lands who scream in return — all contained and expanded within the refrain “I’m coming home”, as he reminds us of earthlings, hombres pérfidos en traje y corbata, climate catastrophe, surrender to Pachamama, scarred land, el violador eras tú, and the fire machine, the queer fire machine. Is there time. For whom is there time. To “harvest our space-time threshold”, tofer calls. These thresholds are brought into focus by Suene Honorato’s philosophical and historical critical excavation of Brazil’s ongoing colonialism. In “Metamorfoses Diluvianas Em Uma Letra De Coco Do Mestre Matinho Fulni-Ô”, Honorato revisits three deluge narratives— the biblical one and two from the Taurepang and Fulni-ô peoples in Brazil — to explore some of the fundamental philosophical-social issues that plague the country. The “etiological narrative of capitalist society” originated from the biblical deluge and its ensuing modern discourse of exploitation, domination, and separation of/from nature, Honorato suggests, is struggled against by marking the anteriority and the ongoing presence of the Fulni-ô (and other indigenous nations) in Brazil via their own deluge narratives — in the case of the Fulni-ô, the voices of the article, the time before colonialism is constantly rebuilt through “orality (...) in complex processes of transmission and recreation (reelaboração) of collective memory and knowledges”. The theoretical-political implications of the ongoing relations between colonial history and present-day resistance and differing from its system are found in Steven Byrd’s weaving of time and its aftermaths.

            In “A Journey with No Return”, Byrd puts the reader in a time-travel state by mixing the reality of the brutality of Spanish colonization in Tenochtitlán, its ongoing and immeasurable aftermaths and reorganizations, and the spaces of continued resistance and political-economic struggle in the city. By placing us in the perceptions of a young narrator who is lost and uncertain, and simultaneously comfortable and confident, as he navigates a land unknown to him, Byrd brings the concurrent nature of class, sexual, and racial politics from the viewpoint of someone who identifies it, rejects it, and benefits from it given the fact that what actually stimulates and excites the narrator ends up being somewhat relinquished in the name of an ‘easier’ and more ‘exotic’ pursuit. As if the sacredness of collective, difficult purposeful uprising must be given away for the sacred of my own manageable, more easily controlled rebellion. The section ends by highlighting how decisions about space(making) in urban environments are inherently political and philosophical undertakings. Nayla Ramalho’s and Maurício Chade’s “Interrupções inconsistentes: o tempo, a pose e um pouco de natureza” looks at the care that goes into public spaces to ask a fundamental question about which aspects, parts, and lives receive meticulous attention while others are relegated to abandonment, forgetting, and attempted erasure.

            In the fourth section, “Justice and Service”, attention is brought to the landscapes of meaning attached to care for bodies, lands, and hearts in early 21st century— from intimate relations (beauty, family, memory work) to their external consolidations (monocrops, absence, dictatorships) and required sacred revolutions. Barbara Nappini’s “La Natura Bella Delle Cose” gives to and shares with the anticapitalist imagination the land and sacred as couple to break from ceaseless colonization of bodies, lands, minds, and being(s). Highlighting the inventions and violences of the capitalist mode of assault and centralizing “consciousness-filled pleasure”, Nappini explores the relation between the domination of bodies and land, hearts and minds, in the name of capitalism’s version of industrial capacity, and the potential for a new collective-minded life through food as centerpiece — liberating human bodies and liberating nature must be one. It is this intimacy between care, capitalism, and the body that gets heightened in Christine Guiyangco’s haunting form of storytelling that must take shape to witness the sacred/wisdom when dying and death are redefined by the present-day circuits of capitalism. Guiyangco’s “Etherreal: In the Depths of Debts in Deaths” forces the reader to witness death from the most intimate of spaces— of an immigrant caregiver providing comfort and care for a family who belongs to the (American) economic elite — to the larger global economic and imperial structures which prohibit most, if not all, (care)workers from being present for their own (family)care. The debt is material, the debt is emotional-spiritual, the debt is (inter)national: the formations of love-the sacred constrained and released through ruptures and expected manifestations of already presupposed ethical commandments themselves imposed via centuries of global-colonial, racial-capital structures of being. In a very real, concrete way, the reader must face the destruction of the sacred through the circuits of capitalism.  

            Departing from the death-debt intimacy cycle, the reader is turned to the vastness and presentness of history through visiting the desert as a site of violence and the sacredness of memory. María P. Molano-Parrado’s “Desiertos espirituales: necromancia y necroviolencia desde Sonora hasta Atacama” looks to the desert to find the relation between death and life as a point of return and departure to critique and overcome capital, colonial, and racial violence through the Americas as historical site. By staying with the material specificity of what remains (bodies and bones), Molano-Parrado argues that the desert has the capacity to deny the total death attempted by global capitalism through a sacred recovery of the life that has been targeted by colonial modernity and its borders, which makes possible to articulate/envision a new mode of life that would be marked by a return to justice (which has never arrived). We end with Bia Barbosa’s “Minha filha me ensina a rezar: o tempo, o medo e o sagrado” and return to time. Return to self(-lessness). She tells us to remember: the body knows. It doesn’t know it knows. It just knows. In a recreation of the Wheel of Fortune, we are thrust back to here and to the eternal cycle of remembering, forgetting, and remembering. No being, no beginning, no ending. Fullness of being, wholeness of beginning, fulfilling endings: “the fear that is only cured with presence that is the nourishment for magic that sours with the fear that is only cured with presence that is the nourishment for magic that sours with the fear that…”

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We hope this issue provides some respite and encouragement for the days ahead.

Notes