What, one may ask, are the implications of the effluent eye for changing reading practices in the wake of the genre of the human? How might one read in ways that are open to an extra-anthropocentric right-making? It might seem odd to insert an afterword on a practice that I have presumably been exemplifying in the previous five chapters! However, I would like to turn my attention here to how we might read writing—not just Carpentaria—in ways that exceed settler time1 and the genre of the human: What might artifacts look like biogeographically, with an effluent eye?

One of the most persuasive and distinct descriptions of settler time comes from a novel published long before the naming of settler time, at least in scholarly literature. I am writing here of J. M. Coetzee’s meditation in his 1980 Waiting for the Barbarians, focalized through his protagonist and narrator, a magistrate on a colonial frontier known only as “the Magistrate,” on what the state known only as “Empire” has done to time. The Magistrate’s reflection comes after he has turned against Colonel Joll, a visiting authority of Empire and expert in torture, whose sojourn on the frontier leads to the imprisonment of the Magistrate and then his abandonment in the small frontier town he used to administrate:

Calf-deep in the soothing water I indulge myself in the wishful vision. I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish. Without exception they are dreams of ends: dreams not of how to live but of how to die. And everyone, I know, in that walled town sinking now into darkness (I hear the two thin trumpet calls that announce the closing of the gates) is similarly preoccupied.

What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in the water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless; it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one: I, wading in the ooze, am no less infected with it than the faithful Colonel Joll as he tracks the enemies of Empire through the boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or if not his then his son’s or unborn grandson’s) to climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant that symbolizes eternal domination, while his comrades below cheer and fire their muskets in the air. (146)

Here the Magistrate reflects that, even though he has made a stand against Empire through his confrontation of Joll, his position against Empire’s abuse of land and fisher-folk and “barbarians” does not amount to a different way of being for the Magistrate. It does not model how he and others like him can envision life outside of the historical trajectory of Empire. While the magistrate calls his embeddedness in Empire a mad vision, he claims that he is no less infected with it than Colonel Joll. What he is infected with, I propose, is the genre of man, the normate, and its entanglement in colonial capitalism. Put bluntly, he doesn’t know how to be any other way. He can dream only of ends, he and his colonial-settler compatriots, ends both in the sense of conclusions and terminations and in terms of means to such ends. That is to say, the settler-colonial imagination is programmed toward ends that are always predetermined: accumulation through dispossession and winning the last battle, even though every battle is always potentially the last battle and must be fought accordingly, with no break, no reflection on the lack of change such battles produce, or on the claustrophobic bubble they both create and defend. This seems particularly valent in the United States currently, where the Trump movement and its associated fantasies and nightmares seem symptoms extraordinaire of fear at the prospect of increasingly challenged white supremacy. That there can be no whiteness without its supremacy, and no white life without Black death, is part and parcel of this “mad vision.”

Reading outside this imagination requires a radical break in the anthropocentric time and space of empire: the right to imagine an outside of human rights that encompasses right-making. What characterizes colonialist-capitalist time is the notion of the lifespan of the state and its citizens as the only form of being, and even then, only if that being is catalogued. For, just as the Australian state demands that Aboriginal peoples demonstrate ongoing/continuing inhabitance of their land to verify their land claims when conditions of proof are impossible (they have oral and not written stories, and colonization drove them from those lands and created interruption of that inhabitance), in that same way, the state places importance not on its citizens, but on what “it” knows about those citizens: “Whether the subject lives or dies is not a concern of the state. What matters to the state and its records is whether the citizen is alive or dead,” says the narrator of another Coetzee novel, Diary of a Bad Year (2007, 5). The citizen is no longer a subject, just an object, the knowledge of which is a means to the end of population control, in the sense of surveillance. He has an identity but not a subjectivity, whereas the state takes on subjectivity with no discernable identity.

One could argue that this is Coetzee’s Magistrate’s “mad . . . yet virulent vision” (1980, 146) taken to the extreme, in that the ability to be a subject is illogically projected onto the state to maintain the state’s subjects “on its side,” and in the process, subjects are rendered objects. In this sense, the Magistrate does not know how to live other than as abject, since being for or against the state depends on the fiction of the state as a subject capable of mutual constitution between state-as-subject and citizen-as-subject. It also depends on the fiction that being for or against something constitutes a creative introduction of novel forces. However, being against apartheid, for example, is a necessary but insufficient criterion for envisioning a postapartheid world. Strategic essentialism has its limits. What is risky, I suggest, is the acceptance of the fiction of the state as a beneficent or antagonistic subject, rather than a bureaucratic proliferation that operates on the fiction of being capable of mutuality. What happens, however, when Empire loses its clothes?

Living with awareness of the state as a bureaucratic proliferation whose “offer” of mutuality is a guise, creates a crisis for the Magistrate. He can imagine himself only as an abject subject in relation to the state, whose end, envisioned in the slaying of the tiger rampant by the enemy of the state, will mean his end, because it means the end of his raison d’être as normate. In the context of such addiction to colonial histories, one can see that the myth of terra nullius is adjunct to the myth of the blank page before writing. The blank page is analogous to the birth of the normate subject, whose will is magically wrought into being either in writing or being written, erasing prior histories of Indigenous being, Indigenous labor, slavery, indentured and other forms of ruthless work, and working conditions that make the myth of the blank page possible—the slash-and-burn clearing of the forest, as it were, to make the clearing from which the blank page issues.

Yet, if we collect the threads of each of the previous chapters, a different subjectivity becomes possible from that of the liberal individual, the normate, the “human” in Sylvia Wynter’s “genre of man,” who writes his own ticket. First, we can read with the simultaneity of human generations in play: ancestor-living-yet-to-be-born. In this instance, we might apprehend an aesthetic narrative that centers storytelling that keeps open the pathways between the unborn, living, and ancestors, much as Wole Soyinka’s groundbreaking Death and the King’s Horseman, Es’kia Mphahlele’s African humanism, Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive enact such openings. All draw attention to openings through the aspect of ritual. In this sense, we might think of ourselves as readers not as, but akin to, old man Joseph Midnight, who remembers “a ceremony he had never performed in his life before, and now, to his utter astonishment, he passed it on to Will. . . . The song was so long and complicated and had to be remembered in the right sequence where the sea was alive, waves were alive, currents alive, even the clouds” (Wright 2006, 360). This takes us to the biogeographical space where, as Joseph Midnight warns Will, he “will only travel where the sea country lets you through” (360). The repetition of remembering can be read here in the simultaneity of the presence of the ancestors, living and unborn, as the dismembering of the human-as-subject and the remembering of the human-as-co-constitutive of the “environment,” not as an array of objects for extractive industry, but as they to whom Will must listen and with whom he must negotiate for their mutual well-being. The sea, the waves, the currents, and even the clouds are alive. This is not a reading in which the end of the novel coincides with the end of the simultaneous interrelationships iterated by the narrative; the narrative is an opportunity to remember and exemplify the simultaneous co-constitution of extra-anthropocentric being. The page was/is never blank and we-it-they was/is always there as an opportunity, as a ritual in need of practice.

The critical reading of the colonial in Western medicine reminds us that the constitution of the self as healthy in relation to the diseased other produces suffering, as does the simple reversal of this formulation; it reminds us that this is entangled with the assumption of Western medical conventions as healthy and all others as superstition. What the unreliability of these oppositional structures means in relation to co-constituted subjectivity is that we cannot compose the other as a knowing and knowable set of knowledges, embodiments, and attitudes that we merely have to inhabit to magically become that subjectivity. As Ravenscroft reminds us in relation to the Yarralin manngyin, “we make others’ objects of knowledge magic in a move that paradoxically tames and familiarizes” when we think we can simply shift into liberal recognition of those objects within the framework of the postcolonial exotic. What is required is first a recognition that the other as such does not exist: there is no amalgamation of otherness to the self of the genre of the human that makes sense. I am therefore not claiming in any way that African humanism and Waanyi being are fixed in time, interchangeable, or objects to be known, even able to be known, by the white reader. I am suggesting that they are openings whose performance in narrative ritualizes the invitation to realize the being-together they offer. This being-together requires both the patience of a Lindanathi in The Reactive, a patience to wait/be with, rather than to intervene to restore a putative genre of the human, and a receptiveness to bearing mutual if imperfect witness, rather than an occupation of “the other.” Disease is seen to be a deficit within the genre of man: they who do not conform to that genre are “naturally” ill, most spectacularly if they have broken the covenant: that belief in the genre of man and that its liberal-human practices offers a “way up.” This is the sleight of hand in which illness produces nonconformity to the genre of the human, just as the genre itself produces its “others” as ill. The trope of “tropical medicine” speaks to the remedy for decadence being a raid on the frontier. What this does is detract enormously from wellness as a mutually constitutive set of practices. It is reduced instead to the clinical scene of intervention as the magic bullet. In this respect, being with the nonhuman animals who may harbor and transmit Covid-19, for example, will tell us not only what animal or set of animals the virus came from, but more importantly, what practices led to our human–animal vulnerability, as such practices are likely to be the source of the next viral wave. Fifth-wave public-health theory is much more likely to be a comprehensive tool for community health in the future than “personalized medicine,” defined as “an emerging practice of medicine that uses an individual’s genetic profile to guide decisions made in regard to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease” (National Human Genome Research Center n.d.)

Chapter 3 proposes that we can critically approach the settler-colonial relation to the genre of the human as an addiction. One of the points of this chapter is that settler colonialists do not tend to think of themselves as deprived; nor, in the decolonial context, do anti-colonials think of settler-colonials as deprived. Yet I think of settler-colonials as deprived differently from colonialist-capitalists’ “others” in relation to liberal governance, as the comparison between the novels of Haigh and Ntshanga suggests. To be motivated to believe in the colonialist-capitalist state, to believe that there is no “outside” to that state, produces what we might call the pathology of acquisition as both fetish and addiction: the material goods do not produce everything humans require in the alignment of stuff and body as object, and self and mind as subject. This puts figures like the three glue-sniffing youths of Carpentaria into the position of harm reduction. While some may argue that they “choose” to sniff glue, thus demonstrating the resilience of the liberal human as mastering the world through individual choice, this “choice” is not choice, but a secondary effect of living under conditions of extreme structural violence, as highlighted by the case of Kevin Phantom in Heat and Light. The addiction to beginnings and endings, and to acquisition and consumption, is proposed as answering an urge to fill the existential gap created by the Cartesian split, an urge to ward off fears of invasion and death, but Kevin’s story exposes that urge as an ongoing and repeated failure to win or be satiated, since the extreme of bubble safety is never safe, or safe enough.

When I worked on the material that forms the ground of chapter 4, on sexual assault, I received specific criticism for applying a harm-reduction lens to gender-based violence (GBV) in the rural areas, such as encouraging networks of women to stay in touch though cell-phone networks and to text one another if they knew they were entering dangerous territory with partners or other community members. They developed a set of strategies like calling the texter for help or to borrow some sugar, or to come to an “emergency” women’s church meeting. I never understood the lack of practicality that critics of harm reduction in contexts of GBV seemed to embody: the idea that, because there should be no GBV, there should be no harm-reduction strategy. Such a strategy, they imply, would somehow “suggest” that GBV is ok because we would be working toward reduction rather than simply demanding eradication. Yet the denial of harm reduction is a way of outsourcing GBV without any intervention in communities without resources; and it’s a way of saying that any search for resources that does not result in the elimination of GBV forever and everywhere immediately falls short of the mark and is therefore somehow unethical. The practice of simultaneous reading teaches us that this is not so. If colonial reading is about linearity, anticolonial reading is about simultaneity. Aboriginal peoples can be in the state of colonization but have a sense of their co-constituted subjectivity as that which exceeds this time, into seven generations “before” and “after” now, and exceeds the current “landscape” as well, into decolonized relations with what we call the “environment,” through various practices and rituals, rural, urban, and in-between. Mphahlele’s African humanism also requires such simultaneous reading in its commitments to the unborn, the living, and the ancestors.

Simultaneous reading, however, is not the property of all those who are “others” to Western culture, as though they were all one and the same and interchangeable: the Other, the Indian, and the Black come into being only as spurious amalgamations necessitated by settler-colonial and colonialist-capitalist tunnel vision in their joint racism. Indeed, simultaneous reading cracks open the paradigm of the Other, insisting on the importance of simultaneous differences, not the binary. As Éduoard Glissant puts it, “the West is not in the West. It is a project, not a place” (1989, 52)—a project of normate, biopolitical subject-making.

With simultaneous reading, we can start to think about a nonlinear imaginary in which we can hold that there should be no structural violence (racism, GBV, ableism, etc.), while at the same time making communal efforts to reduce the harms of colonial capitalism. In extreme cases, harm reduction might mean slow death, as in the case of the youths of Carpentaria; but in others, it can mean slow becoming. In this sense, harm reduction does not mean “giving in,” but creating microgeobiographies of livability, in which slow death does not always win against slow becoming. I do not mean this proposal to replicate the notion of telling the poor that they will be rich in the next life as a tool of making material deprivation palatable; nor am I saying that the marginalized are so resilient that they survive and overcome structural violence. I am saying that the binaries of illness and health and living and dying are not opposites, but a continuum within a frame that enables simultaneous reading as persistence. We can admit the GBV that is right in front of us, in us, and around us, for example, without conceptualizing such acknowledgment as defeat. We need not to suppress GBV through judgment; we can do harm reduction while at the same time being faithful to a vision of a geobiography that does not support GBV as a sustainable practice. Simultaneous reading is, then, the very epitome of sustainability. It does not suggest denial of current violence, but it equally does not predict suffocation in the bubble. In many cases, it enables an engagement with the here and now that can be, simultaneously, a substantive contribution to a different geobiography. It is a place of slow becoming, both in its multiple temporalities that take energy to navigate, as Will navigates the sea, and in its multiple achievements, which are the opposite of Morton’s hyperobjects. In any case, these achievements are not objects, but co-constitutive collaborations, and their naming as yet often eludes those of us inured to the grammar of colonial capitalism precisely because they are unrecognizable as valuable within that sphere and may be toxic to it.

The idea that what drives sexual assault is settler capitalism and state interests in it, as enunciated by Wright and Million, instead of individualized and racialized pathologies, is just one such observation that escapes visibility. In particular, the fact that the naming of Indigenous victimhood within a global economy of trauma takes place within the same sphere in which appeals for Indigenous sovereignty are heard may well place the realization of the desired sovereignty beyond grasp. “The international law that enables Indigenous trauma to appeal for justice is the same sphere in which we articulate political rights as polities with rights to self-determination. I don’t see these as necessarily compatible projects,” Million argues (2013, 3). Indeed, it is the very instantiation of the child, the Aboriginal, the Black as victim that is liberal humanism’s indexing of its “generosity” in a rhetoric of conjoined apostrophe, pathology, and apology. Million’s rejection of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s reduction of colonial harm to the period of residential schools and the children abused there, and of healing the traumas of colonization through the individualized care of survivors through individual Western trauma models, points to the inadequacy of the liberal, individual trajectory to “rehabilitation”: it is an obstacle to Indigenous health and sovereignty. Instead, Million draws on Indigenous feminist models that deploy what I call simultaneous reading to intervene in settler-colonial pathologizing of Indigenous peoples as perpetual “victims.” Million describes a process of “(Un)making the Biopolitical Citizen” (146), which Dara Culhane describes as Million “push[ing] toward collective and politicized movements for healing in everyday lives and in political structures, and against individualized, privatized, and medicalized strategies” (2015, 401). How could this be toxic to the state and its colonialist-capitalist structures? Simultaneous reading enables us to ask questions like: If the invitation to minorities to instantiate themselves as victim-survivors extended by the nation-state and the U.N. discourse is a strategy of continued pathologizing, may not the very recognition received by those the state purports to benefit under normative human-rights regimes indeed be traumatic to those same (supposed) beneficiaries? Here traumatic would not mean the instantiation of the individual citizen as traumatized. Knitting together Million’s observations and my conclusions, we can see instead the structural violence that colonial capitalism and its associated rights regimes inflict on apparent beneficiaries. In a cumulative sense, the capitalization of objects and humans as extractive resources cannot hide the toll on the co-constituted subject of human–nonhuman-animal–geological life in all the complexity of that damage. Slow becoming as harm reduction disarms the despair, on one hand, and cynicism, on the other, that encourage and enable “self”-harm of our co-constituted subjectivity through its Cartesian disambiguation. To refuse simultaneous reading as a neocolonial appropriation of “the other” is to fall back on the concept that, if those “normates” the genre of the human purports to serve dream of any other way of being, this is a disavowal of privilege and benefit. Within a simultaneous reading of it, however, if “normates” don’t envision slow becoming as an antidote to extractive production, their supposed gains will themselves render the genre of the human a threatened species, not because of poetic justice, but because we can attain sustainability only through the co-constitutive subjectivities of slow becoming. It is not “A Requiem to Late Liberalism” (Povinelli 2016) that is called for, I suggest, so much as an affirmation of slow becoming, with communal refusals to outsource safety to the neoliberal state. Normal Phantom and his singing-fish model presents an aesthetic trajectory for the process. The fish die within normate readings that mark confusions between biological life and death as incapacity; we slowly become when we experience this joining not as confusion, but as artfully curated contingency and propinquity, capable of offering the transiently realized but nevertheless dependable pleasures of slow becoming.