I think the other word to add to “resonance” and “vignette” and “dirty,” would be “score.” All of those words in themselves form part of the score, and then they are the actual larger score of that score. “Momentum” should sound like a gallop, for example. We imagined our reader to be essentially always a listener. From the gallop, the noise starts to come in and take over, and in “vibration” you’re shaken into sounds. The idea is to feel each of the words as they join one another, but also how they live singularly; the word “vignette” is one way for us to think of how to metaphorically play with the traps of representation mobilized by words, categories, colonial forms. In doing so, we were also trying to think about the borderless, the leaking frame. Or, how do you leak out of the frame, how do you move beyond it? We really wanted the vignettes to be edgeless. What would this all mean in terms of tempering the collective ear?

Smell of rubber returns tread to the road, where we expect open vistas and find the windshield fogs the road, breaks up—a preview of the next few years—a caravan of rescissioned expectations, crab walk of wish and detachment, inventories “looking to a future that wasn’t coming as expected.”

The singular image of the blue marble is now divided into different worlds which form a constellation that has nothing to do with celestial harmony. We are caught within it, where for each decision we must make, the gravitational attractions of the different configurations of earth make one’s head rotate as if on a merry-go-round. The model for describing this condition is not just some new form of dialectic (implying only two poles), but rather a configuration with a multiplicity of polarities.

Diasporic existence is a refusal, the refusal to choose between two worlds. This refusal assumes a singular form when the two worlds are in conflict. It summons a whole vital economy that contests a geopolitics founded on the logic of predator and victim.

Whereas most borders enforce separation, the shoreline is a threshold marked by ceaseless negotiation. It is a site of arrivals and departures, of safe harbors and hostile intrusions. At once embedded in local traditions and subject to industrial development, it hosts encounters between different populations and environments, the terrestrial and the aquatic.