If I speak, my voice will waver. The instructor’s remarks are an existential blow. In a way, the elision reaffirms how ungrievable Indigenous suffering is in the course’s conceptual frame. My body protests, I’m shaking. Will sees that I’m rattled and presses his leg against mine, then rests his head on my shoulder. I take in the aroma of his shampoo—pomegranate. We are together in our minor grief. That he exists, that he and I constitute a “we,” however budding and unstable, is enough of a counter, today, to historical ignorance. We aren’t overdetermined by the instructor’s politics of
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