Interestingly, this week, imagination as a response to traumatic events has been raised again. Anzaldúa had already proposed it in Light in the Dark, and this time Denise Ferreira da Silva, in her article, states that to get rid of what she calls “unpayable debt, ” “a metaphysical move (…) a task for the intuition and the imagination” is required (110). Imagination also sustains Kindred, Octavia Butler’s novel, from beginning to end. On the one hand, there is the imagination of the author who, as Ferreira da Silva analyzes in her article, is able, through the creation of a story, to show the repercussions of slavery on contemporary black bodies. On the other hand, it is imagination (along with intuition) the only mechanism that Dana, the novel’s protagonist, has to try to understand what is happening to her. It is so bizarre what is happening, these space-time trips between Los Angeles in the twentieth century and antebellum Maryland in the nineteenth century, that the telling and retelling of the story is the only thing that begins to put the pieces in place. In the face of the confusing situation, imagination allows her to understand that time is not as linear, nor are people’s bodies as far apart in space and time as the Eurocentric worldview makes it out to be.

Of course, at the core of Kindred‘s story is a new illustration of trauma. Dana, thanks to Butler’s imagining, can see directly how her body carries events of the past. She also sees that, as other authors on trauma have mentioned, the perception of time of the traumatized person is different from the normal one: what for Dana are days or months, in the “real” plane are only seconds or hours. Ferreira da Silva’s concept of “unpayable debt” is also about trauma, specifically that exerted on African Americans since the time of slavery in the form of extraction, exploitation, and violence. While the Brazilian scholar refers to a specific context, it is perhaps worth considering how much the trauma feels like a debt. There is the debt owed by society to the traumatized person who, in a certain way, did not protect them, but there is also the debt that the traumatized person may feel towards themselves and others. Unable to remember or to put into words what happened, the person who bears the trauma seems to remain in debt: they cannot reintegrate or satisfy what they have received.

It is, ultimately, thanks to the imagination that Ferreira da Silva, through Dana and Butler, can explain her concept and demonstrate how the fiction of the linearity of time, which separates events and determines bodies, keeps specific populations in a state of vulnerability and precariousness. It is imagination, in the end, that allows us to understand what Eurocentric “rationality” does not reveal.

da Silva, Denise Ferreira. 2017. "Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time" The documenta 14 Reader. Edited by Quinn Latimer, and Adam Szymczyk. 81-113. Kassel, Munich: documenta and Museum Fridericianum, Prestel Verlag,