Experimental Writing on Genocidal Times

Abstract

This editorial note to the second special issue Awry2, the Awry section devoted to experimental writing and form, introduces the three articles in the issue by two gestures. The first one is to create the political frame for these special issue as one centered on the current genocide suffered by the people of Palestine. The argument is that experimental writing unsettles the rigidity of the forms and that these forms, in academia, Palestine and the rest of the world, at all levels, are established by colonization, power, capital, whiteness. Thus, writing otherwise becomes a political responsibility. Our second framing gesture is to point to the common ground of our three contributions, they all seem to be expanding the experimentation from the writing to the doing, thinking, dreaming, and other aesthetic domains of revolution. The experimentation expands through the proposition of solid busviscus adventures with concepts, methods, and political reflections commented also in this intro. So, we act in aro ki te tanga - in collective memory and healing—a practice that refuses erasure, insists on testimony, and nurtures futures beyond violence. In genocidal times, we write to digest and carry our experiential - the pain, resilience and resistance of those targeted by colonial and state violence.