Learning to see in the dark
Grief, hope, and the end of enlightenment fantasies
Roanne van Voorst interviewt Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti voor futures reframed
In haar interview met Roanne van Voorst zegt Vanessa Andreotti weer veel zinnige dingen: over weven en verwerken in plaats van hopen, want hopen als moderne verandertheorie gaat voorbij aan een goede diagnose van wat er eigenlijk aan de hand is en daardoor worden we niet volwassen.
“Naive hope — what some have called hopium — is hope in the continuity of a projection. It is faith in a future imagined along familiar lines. […] It is deeply libidinal — bound up with desire. We are taught to believe that we must imagine a future first in order to act toward it.
But if we listen to Indigenous leaders such as Chief Nina Wahonikui in the Amazon, a very different understanding emerges. She suggests that the future depends less on our projections or teleologies — less on where we think we are going — and much more on the relationships we repair and weave in the present. In that sense, the future is not made of ideas. It is made of relationships. Woven, repaired, tended relationships.
[…] Hope, in this sense, is not neutral. It is a very specific, socially sanctioned theory of change. One that tells us: if you articulate clearly where we should be, you can already begin to live there — because the future will somehow manifest through that idea.
But nothing manifests through a should. What manifests is always relational. And those relationships are not only between people. They include our relationship with our selves, with other humans, but also with the whole shebang: the land, language, love, life itself.
There is also this obsession with being on the right side of history, with supporting the “right” voices of resistance. But if we don’t understand the problem — if we don’t have a good diagnosis — then there is no way to coordinate meaningfully. What we end up with are narratives that keep repeating themselves.
[…] Unprocessed grief is like carrying a cadaver with you. It rots. If we refuse to sit with what we have done — to the land, to other species, to ourselves — if we avoid the despair, the hopelessness, even the immobilization that comes with recognizing planetary limits and mass extinction, then that avoidance becomes cultural. And it prevents us from growing up.
But there is hope on the other side of grief — just not the same kind of hope. Not hope rooted in projection or teleology. It is hope rooted in processing together, in maturing — as individuals and as a species.
There is joy in that. The joy of eldering well. Of becoming good elders first, and then good ancestors for all relations. Grief does not negate joy; it deepens it.”
Lees (of herlees) haar boeken Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity deze zomer, of zoek een podcast waaraan ze heeft bijgedragen, dat kan heel erg geen kwaad.
