I created the word ‘inter-membral’ as a way to break through the limiting boundaries of colonialist vocabulary. A conversation about “the refugee problem” set in the context of a country that delivers weaponry to aggressors to maintain exploitation that is beneficial to them, is an example of a conversation that can’t be held in a vacuum, but that needs to be discussed “intermembrally”.
“Precisely because they too are specimens of modern thought, the available critical tools cannot support an ethico-political intervention capable of undermining cultural difference’s capacity to produce an unbridgeable ethical divide.”- Denise Fereira da Silva
As the language these tools speak is created and pursued in and for a context of oppression, it is impossible to break out of them without changing our vocabulary.
And so I created a word that can signify that in a text or in an argument I am encompassing many truths and existants. As Da Silva says we; ´could image The World as a Plenum, an infinite composition in which each existant’s singularity is contingent upon its becoming one possible expression of all the other existants, with which it is entangled beyond space and time.´
If we can embody the belief that we are indeed connected to and entangled with all, we can start taking responsibility in our actions.
1 Da Silva, Denise Ferreira "On difference without separability", 2016
In this text I will be speaking from an inter-membral, place, so keep this in consideration when encountering anecdotes, mythes, conversations, pictures, graphs and other, all is part of this story.