The Terrific Boomerang and a not-syllabus

a poem, an offering, and then a platter of hors doeuvrs to accompany the movie, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (2024, dir. Johan Grimonprez)

“The imperial boomerang is the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.”¹ The term was coined² by Aimé Césaire in the mid-20th century. In his work, Discourse on Colonialism (1950), he wrote:

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind—it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

I was brought to mind of the terrific boomerang when reminded of this article from The Nation, The Harvard Boys Do Russia. Though Césaire’s elaboration focuses on state repression and violence as manifestations of the boomerang, Elon’s DOGE is a clear manifestation of the boomerang as governance and economic policy as well. Decades ago, US actors sold the Soviet government off for parts literally creating the current oligarchy in Russia. Now, we do it to ourselves.

There is no there, only here.

So, I had to write a poem about it.

Terrific Boomerang

You stupid slut, of course all things come home to roost. 
You can either face it or let it crack against arch of your skull
praying that ignorance is palliative while holding your inside bits in.
I don’t know you you end and I begin—

if I could cleave us in two, be sure to know that I would.

All I know is that you’ve shot me in the knee 
in this god forsaken three-legged race and blood 
keeps getting fucking everywhere while you insist there’s not 
an anchor of bodies rooting us to right where we stand. 
Motherfucker, there’s no place you can go that won’t bring all of us with you. 
All this bloated, necrotic rot of history that refuses to decay because
we won’t let it die in peace. 

You, a stranger to death, estranged from life,
maybe this is why you find consequences so confounding, 
the terrific boomerang a perennial surprise as you skull keeps cracking.

Those bombs are our bombs in more ways than one. 
And you are wrong to believe it is a question of when, 
as if existence as targets is predetermined, on the horizon line, coming. 
It is actually a question of where to look. Your stranger neighbors already know this. 

Those prisons detention centers that black site that gitmo is not there. 
There is no there, there is only here. You can’t cleave this. 
No matter your means of vivisection there is no excising the fact of our coexistence.

As we bleed and rot, I must drag you along, you stupid slut—
Your blood or mine it’s all red and everywhere. 
Come make this bed so we’ll die in it.

After writing this, I read this interview with Mohammed el-Kurd in Mondoweiss discussing his new book, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal. Succinctly, he addresses the terrific boomerang and the fact of our coexistence as it relates to Palestine:

---

hors doeuvrs to accompany Soundtrack (i ain’t planning on learning how to spell that)

Sometimes, I encounter something and go, Yes—that—that is what is worth my time, that is worth my labor, this is something worth living in order to experience and create.

In recent memory, the first time I read Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, I was struck! Though I had studied history in my undergrad, it wasn’t until I read this book that I encountered something relating to the production of history that I wanted to also do (which is ironic considering that though this book is a collection of oral histories, Schulman and Jim Hubbard are not historians. Schulman is a journalist, writer, and playwright while Hubbard is a documentarian both turned archivists out of necessity.)

Soundtrack to a Coup D’etat had a similar effect on me — Look! something worthwhile created and shared using the archival and research skills I also possess! This is a project I can see myself joyfully contributing to, using my skills!

I will refrain from going on and on about the documentary as other’s have written about it quite well (whom I link to below), and instead, present a series of offerings for continued reading.

Antidote to Soft Power by Horne and Ballas, free jazz by Somayajula

History Repeats the Old Conceits, Zachariades

Across a Continent, Fletcher, My Country, Africa, Blouin for order

Selected Documents of Bandung Conference, Asian-African Conference Bulletin, Wilson Center Digital Archives

Return to Bandung.

What is Pan-Africanism? Andrewism; Kwame Ture on the History of Pan-Africanism, How One Word Killed Black Radicalism, F.D. Signifier, W.E.B. Du Bois was the father of Pan-African Socialism, Mullen

“to make revolution irresistible,” Somayajula, Notes on Craft, Tbakhi, Creating a Revolutionary Cultural Front, WAWOG

What is missing from this tray of offerings: links to coverage and commentary on the contemporary situation in the Congo now. If you engage with news and commentary on the Congo (and Africa more generally), please do share them with me. This part of the world is not integrated into my general media intake.

1. Thanks, Wikipedia! Also, this subtweet at the end of the first paragraph has me hollering: “It is sometimes called Foucault's boomerang even though Michel Foucault did not originate the term.”

2. Well, not exactly, he was writing in French (“a tremendous shock in return”) which was then translated into English (“terrific boomerang”). Lol @ the crude instrument that is english.