Mombaça, Jota. “2021.” The Present Is Not Enough – Queer Histories and Futures, Hebbel am Ufer, 2019, https://www.hebbel-am-ufer.de/en/hau3000-archiv/2021-by-jota-mombaca/.
Jota Mombaça is an artist from Natal, Brazil, whose work focuses on the impacts of coloniality, among other topics. Excerpts from their 2019 short story, “The Time Has Come, In Which The Lights of This Epoch Were Lit Everywhere,” were published under the title “2021” in the accompanying publication for a festival called “The Present is Not Enough – Queer Histories and Futures.” This festival was organized by Hebbel am Ufer, a theatre in Berlin. The piece is framed as a series of journal entries set in 2021 and sets an almost apocalyptic atmosphere, although Hebbel am Ufer describes the work as “less a dystopia than a poetic description of the status quo.”
In the piece, the narrator describes life in dark tunnels that were originally created by the current residents’ enslaved ancestors and currently being expanded by the new generation. The tunnels are a place for people of color (perhaps specifically Black people) to escape from the world above, where white supremacy reigns and oppresses. The residents have learned to live with heightened senses in this dark, subterranean space. The residents lose track of time, and death does not seem to faze them as they consider themselves half-dead already.
The piece seems to be a metaphor for the oppression of people of color—specifically, the descendants of enslaved Africans in Brazil, as the reference to Zumbi dos Palmares, a leader in the resistance to enslavement of Africans by the Portuguese in Brazil, implies—who are hoping for a new world, but are struggling in the oppressiveness of the space they occupy. At one point, the community realizes and sees its own strength, but fatigue comes crashing down: it is difficult to fight against oppression when one is stuck in the cogs of oppression, fatigued by the millions of day-to-day obstacles to overcome first before fighting against the bigger issues.
One of the most poignant paragraphs from “2021” is the following:
“We are tired and we are also furious. There are moments when we desire so firmly the abolition of all things done through our social death that we feel the earth to start trembling around us. We then hold hands, refusing the fear, in order to wish together that the earth finally vibrates their apocalypse this time.”
This paragraph can be read as a poetic expression of the wish to abolish white supremacy, the system and structure that has caused the speakers’ apocalypse that has forced them into these oppressive underground tunnels.
“2021” ends on a hopeful note, with the speaker expressing that they were alive and they would live. The speaker remembers a phrase that they heard on January 1st, 2012, which is, “’May the victory reward those who have made war without loving it.’” Colonizers/Enslavers often made/make war and inflicted violence and enjoyed the spoils of war—which they did not need—and sometimes even explicitly enjoyed watching the suffering they were inflicting. In the case of oppressed groups fighting against the status quo, they are doing it to fight the oppressive, unjust status quo: it is out of necessity, not unchecked and oppressive desire.