Papii No Praxis
Agency is remarkably easy
to find when the
applause begins.
Two I’s. No Throne Between Us.
Siir arrived at the double I first.
I created the world to hold us.
Kiing.
Siir.
Two I’s, two eyes.
Each I has to find its own grounding—in a world we build or one we are thrust into—to remain sovereign and embodied. If I cannot center Kiing, there is no centering of Siir. The same holds in return. Neither of us becomes the material through which the other disappears.
Those eyes meet the autistic infinity: perception opening into relationships that keep unfolding. Yet there is hella attention paid to where our eyes land, whether they meet yours, what they will and will not do. The eyes are the beginning of the story. There is an entire world thinking behind them.
It’s hella unqueer but very clear cut, dick keeps getting elected the center of the universe in rooms advertising themselves as beyond the binary. Apparently the throne is gender-neutral now. The seating arrangement remains remarkably familiar.
The Social Rank of Fatness
Fatness is not the monster. Queerness is not the deception. And the grotesque is not an accusation disguised as art.
What interests me is what happens when identity becomes a social credential rather than an invitation into accountability. When the language of liberation becomes a performance that cannot survive the presence of another person’s experience. When being marginalized is mistaken for being incapable of exercising power.
I am interested in the social rank of fatness. In the ways bodies are positioned, protected, excluded, celebrated, and sometimes granted authority through the very identities that have historically made them vulnerable.
And I am particularly interested in what happens when the performance of liberation becomes more important than its practice.
The monsters in this essay are not bodies. They are the behaviors, systems, and contradictions that bodies can learn to inhabit.
Papii No Praxis
Who Gets to Act, Who Has to Answer
Papii has entered the community.
The community has not yet been consulted.
There is a name for the work, a language for the politics, a declaration for the body.
There is an audience prepared to recognize all three. Somewhere between the introduction and the aftermath, a question goes missing:
What does your presence require of everybody else?
I have been thinking about praxis. About what happens when a word that should invite examination becomes another title somebody expects us to respect. About the distance between announcing a relationship to liberation and being able to live in relationship with another person.
Papii no praxis.
Yes, there is some petty in the phrasing. The petty has a question.
What are you practicing?
I Hear Tings — Aural World
Grace Jones · “Send In the Clowns”
The name makes an entrance. The audience knows when to applaud. Somewhere in the performance, community becomes a costume and accountability misses its cue. Grace Jones’s “Send In the Clowns” enters this essay as an aural side-eye: papii has a part, a platform, a practiced delivery. What happens when somebody asks them to stay after the show and answer for the practice?
The Practice Is Already Happening
Thought becomes action.
Action enters a relationship.
A relationship produces consequences.
Then somebody has to answer.
That last movement is where the performance starts losing its choreography. The person who could explain the system in extraordinary detail suddenly cannot locate themselves inside the encounter. They can name every arrangement that has harmed them. Ask how they participated in an arrangement that harmed somebody else, and the vocabulary begins circling the room.
The action happened.
The harm happened.
The explanation keeps finding somebody else to inhabit.
So perhaps there is plenty of praxis.
A very consistent praxis.
A practice of entering, taking, declaring, distributing, and departing from responsibility while remaining available for recognition.
Unfettered praxis.
Devolving praxis.
Doing shit to do it praxis.
The missing practice is the one the introduction promised: reflection, reciprocity, a willingness to let the encounter change you.
The Belly Has an Interior
I still live in a fat body. My body is smaller than it once was. I inhabit it through that change. I have to listen to a body that keeps moving beyond the descriptions available for it.
I have spent most of my life in a fat body, including a body considerably larger than the one I inhabit now. I have also spent years encountering other fat people who treated my fatness as less legitimate because of how my body is read through colonial standards of beauty. Fatness has never been a singular social position. There are ranks within the room, and those ranks can be enforced by people who know what it means to be excluded from it.
Fatness can become a place where a person lodges their understanding of themselves. A descriptor can harden into instructions: what I am permitted to notice, what I must defend, which changes I can acknowledge without being accused of abandoning the community.
I think about fat as a layer within an ecosystem.
A layer carrying histories, relationships, protection, programming. I want to ask what is embedded there.
What has kept me alive?
What have I learned to repeat?
What am I holding because it serves my life, and what am I holding because questioning it threatens my standing?
The question belongs to my relationship with my body. It also reaches the social arrangements built around bodies.
Within Black fat spaces, I have encountered a demand for relief that leaves the appetite for rank intact. Stop humiliating me. Recognize my humanity. Make room for my body. Necessary demands. Then, within the room we have made, somebody begins deciding whose body carries authority, whose experience deserves attention, whose pain is inconvenient.
The belly of the beast has an interior. You can arrange furniture in there. You can get comfortable. You can find a position from which the teeth seem farther away because somebody else is standing closer to them.
Relief arrives. The arrangement survives.
Fatness becomes a costume of authority when the declaration is used to rank other fat bodies, dismiss their experiences, or exempt one’s own conduct from examination. The fatness is real. The hierarchy is the performance.
My body deserves care. That care has to remain available to the person encountering me, too.
Papii Beyond the Binary
I am nonbinary. I know that living beyond the binary can involve a profound examination of what we have been taught to be.
I also know that patriarchy can travel through a body that has examined its gender and left its entitlement largely undisturbed.
Papii names that possibility here: the authority someone appoints themselves to, the accommodation they expect, the exemption they reach for when another person asks them to account for their conduct.
The pronouns can be correct while the distribution of power remains familiar.
A person can ask to be understood in their full complexity and offer another person only a role: admirer, caretaker, audience, obstacle. A person can refuse the gender assigned to them while assigning everybody nearby the labor of maintaining their importance.
That is a very small room to call freedom.
When a question about conduct gets converted into an attack on identity, the conversation is made to defend an identity that was never the question. Meanwhile, the conduct waits untouched.
An identity cannot perform a repair. The person has to participate. Blackness, fatness, and nonbinary life carry histories that deserve care. Those histories also exist in the person receiving the harm. Their body belongs in the account, too.
The Door Opens in Both Directions
An opportunity has an ecology.
Somebody identifies it.
Somebody makes the connection.
Somebody writes, arranges, advocates, follows through. By the time a person receives institutional recognition, a whole network of labor may have made their arrival possible.
Higher education is especially skilled at making arrival look individual. A name on a program. A person before an audience. Payment. Prestige. The institution becomes visible; the labor that opened the door can disappear behind it.
I know what it means to help somebody enter a room and then encounter an account of their legitimacy with my work removed from it.
The degree is not the measure of whether somebody belongs there. The relationship to the labor matters.
What happens after access?
Can the person recognize how they arrived?
Can recognition deepen their responsibilities, or does it become permission to treat the people who helped them as disposable?
Papii claims authorship of their legitimacy while assigning authorship of their harm elsewhere.
The opportunity becomes proof of their importance. The conflict becomes proof of somebody else’s failure.
Their agency is remarkably easy to find when the applause begins.
Autopilot Still Has a Passenger
There is another disappearing act: entering a situation through your own decisions, then telling the aftermath as though you were placed there entirely by somebody else.
Kindness can become the material for that revision. Someone accommodates an entrance. Later, their accommodation is rewritten as responsibility for the whole encounter. The person who entered keeps their grievance and loses their verbs.
There is another kind of confusion that arrives after the encounter. Information withheld, information revealed, information that changes the meaning of what came before.
A person can introduce you to somebody as a friend, invite you into a relationship of community and collaboration, and later reveal a history that fundamentally changes how you understand the introduction. That history may be painful. It may deserve care. It may also have been entirely unavailable to you when you were asked to participate.
I cannot be responsible for knowing what I was never told.
I cannot be made the mediator of a history I did not create, or assigned responsibility for a relationship whose terms were presented to me differently.
Compassion does not require accepting authorship of somebody else’s experience. And accountability cannot operate backward through information that was never available.
A revelation can change what I know. It cannot change what I knew then.
They chose.
They entered.
They assumed.
They continued.
Those verbs matter. They give an account its depth. Without them, another person becomes the container for every consequence.
Autopilot describes a way of moving through a situation. It still leaves us with a question about what we do once we can recognize the movement.
Can the person return to the encounter and see their participation?
Can they recognize where another person’s kindness ended and their decisions continued?
Can they acknowledge harm they experienced while retaining an honest account of their own actions?
Reflection requires enough room for more than one person’s agency. A hierarchy keeps narrowing the frame until only the preferred account fits.
The Audience Is in the Room
The audience participates in what becomes possible.
People watch.
They affirm.
They circulate an account.
They reward the confidence with which it is delivered.
A claim gathers standing through repetition, and the person it concerns can become increasingly absent from the conversation about them.Cyberstalking Accountability: A Public Record
I have felt the harm of being made into material for somebody else’s public account. I know the distance between what I lived and what an audience can be persuaded to recognize.
Sometimes the traces left behind are described as breadcrumbs. I am thinking about brick walls: accumulated acts, repeated accounts, consequences substantial enough to reorganize somebody’s life.
The surrounding people have decisions to make, too.
What do they ask?
What do they overlook?
Whose complexity can the room tolerate?
Who must become simple enough for the preferred story to remain intact?
An audience can supply the exemption that a person could never maintain alone.
Community is already being practiced in that exchange. Its terms become visible through who receives protection and who is expected to absorb the cost.
The Aftermath Has a Body
The account cannot end with the person who acted. There is somebody living in the aftermath.
That person has a body, a day to get through, work they were trying to make. The consequences enter a life already in motion. Meanwhile, the person distributing harm may continue receiving recognition from people who never have to encounter its cost.
I have been cyberstalked. That word alone does not explain the material weight of what happened. I experienced sustained harassment and public bullying while already navigating circumstances that threatened my stability. My ability to work, promote my practice, and support myself was profoundly disrupted. The harm reached the conditions through which I could make a living and sustain my life.
I was putting labor into community. Helping people access opportunities. Making connections. Supporting work while carrying work of my own. I helped people I now wish I had left where I first encountered them. I thought I was meeting people who could practice care. I was supporting community monsters dressed as something else.
The care I extended became access. The access did not return as care.
People participated willingly in the accounts circulated about me. Their participation helped give those accounts power over a life they did not have to sustain. What they treated as conversation, affiliation, or spectacle had material consequences for the person being discussed. I was that person. I had to survive what they could move on from.
These experiences changed my life. They diminished my capacity to provide for myself while people involved in those encounters continued receiving the benefits of being understood as community.
My willingness to help does not make me the author of what they did with that help.
Their conduct—and the participation that sustained it—belongs in the account.
A person can be made publicly available as material while their actual voice is treated as an interruption. Other people get to narrate them, interpret them, decide what happened to them. When they speak, suddenly the room has concerns about how much space their account occupies.
I am keeping my place in this account. The work I did belongs here. The harm I experienced belongs here. My capacity to think beyond the role somebody assigned me belongs here.
There is an entire life beyond the version of me that makes somebody else’s conduct convenient.
A Community With Room to Move
Six years later, where is the manifestation of the work?
Mycelial Sankofa. Go back and get it. Return through more than one point: the opportunity, the relationship, the public account, the labor that made access possible, the life left carrying the cost. Let each encounter bring its own information. See what becomes visible across them.
The breadcrumbs have become load-bearing. Enough accumulated material to hold up a persona whose account requires other people’s lives to be edited out.
What happens when someone demands that their context be understood while repeatedly stripping other people of theirs?
The world gets smaller.
People become functions.
Care becomes a service owed to the authority in the room.
Disagreement becomes a failure to understand them.
Their own understanding never has to grow large enough to hold the person disagreeing.
Five years is time for a practice to leave a landscape.
What has been cultivated?
Who can live there?
Whose capacity to sustain themselves was diminished while the language of community kept flowering?
Papii has a praxis. Its consequences have been giving an account.
I return to recover the relationships their preferred story cannot hold. My work before their arrival. The labor I extended. The material losses. My life continuing beyond the role they assigned me.
The name made its entrance.
The practice has already answered.
Papii No Praxis
From goddess to papii.
Flip the coin. The face changes; the currency remains authority.
The liminal space could have held an examination of the self. Instead, other people’s bodies furnish the crossing: their labor, their care, their lives made available to support the next declaration.
From zero came two. Where is the third—the possibility that changes how we relate, rather than which position we occupy?
A nonbinary identity is real. The practice still has to move beyond the binary of who gets to rule and who is required to absorb it.
Two sides. Same coin.
The throne survived the transition right along with niggas and flies.
Papii No Praxis
Cosmos Watershed
This essay enters through Turbulent Water, where authority, public narratives, and displaced responsibility distribute harm through relationships. Deep Water holds the body’s record and the labor erased from someone else’s account of their arrival. Tidal Water follows the repetition that turns conduct into a recognizable practice. Still Water makes room to discern what happened without surrendering the witness’s position. Flowing Water protects the body’s capacity to change beyond an assigned identity or role. Sacred Water asks whether care, reciprocity, and repair remain present after recognition has been received.
Watershed | Tributaries |
Watershed | Turbulent Water moving through Deep and Tidal Water, with Still, Flowing, and Sacred Water carrying discernment, bodily change, and accountable relationship |
Relationship | Body ↔ identity ↔ protection ↔ hierarchy ↔ institutional access ↔ audience ↔ harm ↔ accountability |
Hom(e)ie | The person living in the aftermath: a whole life that exceeds the role assigned by somebody else’s account |
Origin | The contradiction between a declared communal ethic and repeated conduct that transfers its consequences onto others |
Expansion | Fatness as an ecological layer; patriarchal entitlement beyond the binary; erased relational labor; self-appointed authority; audience participation |
Application | Keep agency visible across achievement and consequence; recognize the labor that enables access; let another person’s account alter the arrangement |
Lineage | Mycelial Sankofa; Black nonbinary embodied knowledge; Black ecological thought; relational examination |
Counter Currents | Identity used as exemption; relief pursued alongside rank; kindness rewritten as total responsibility; recognition detached from reciprocity; public repetition treated as proof |
Cosmos Coordinates
Coordinate | Placement |
Primary Portal | I Know Tings |
Connected Waters | Turbulent Water; Deep Water; Tidal Water; Still Water; Flowing Water; Sacred Water |
Tings Connections | Afro Tings; Trans Learn Tings; I Move Tings |
Primary Methodology | Mycelial Sankofa |
Methodological Practice | Return across bodily change, encounters, relational labor, and public narratives; examine what repeats and what the preferred account leaves out |
Embodiment Movements | Intuition; Regulation; Integration; Movement |
Cosmos Concepts | Agency; hierarchy; identity; accountability; reciprocity; embodied record; recognition; protection; aftermath |
Geographic Coordinate | Communal, institutional, and digital spaces; no specific geographic location is named in the essay |
Relational Coordinate | Who receives recognition, who supplies the labor, and who is made to carry the consequences |
Temporal Coordinate | Accumulated encounters ↔ repeated public accounts ↔ present discernment ↔ a practice capable of changing |
Orientation | Structural inquiry grounded in lived experience; the person receiving harm remains a participant in the account |
Core Refrain | Papii no praxis. |
Core Inquiry | What are you practicing? |
Expansion Principle | A declared identity or liberatory ethic must be examined through the relationships and consequences its practice produces |
Calabash Relationship | The vessel carries bodily knowledge and the record of relational labor; responsibility remains attached to the person whose conduct produced it |
Wata(ring) W(hole) Relationship | Bodies, identities, institutions, audiences, and care form a living circulation; recognition in one area cannot erase harm moving through another |
Cosmos Constellations
Constellation | How it enters this essay | What it makes visible |
Mycelial Sankofa | Bodily change, remembered encounters, institutional access, and audience conduct enter relationship through return. | Repetition becomes perceptible across different settings without making every encounter identical. |
Social Rank of Fatness | Fat identity meets protection, belonging, bodily change, and internal hierarchy. | A demand for relief can coexist with an appetite for rank. |
The ecological layer | Fat is explored as a layer carrying histories, protection, relationships, and programming. | What sustains a person can also become something they need room to examine. |
Papii beyond the binary | Nonbinary identity meets patriarchal entitlement and self-appointed authority. | Gender identity does not complete the examination of how power is exercised. |
The opportunity’s ecology | Institutional recognition arrives through connections, advocacy, preparation, and follow-through. | An individual achievement can conceal the relational labor that enabled it. |
The disappearing verbs | Decisions remain visible in success and vanish from the narration of consequences. | Responsibility is redistributed through the way an encounter is told. |
The audience | Watching, affirming, and circulating accounts help establish what a community permits. | Exemption can be sustained collectively. |
The body in the aftermath | The witness’s life and experience remain present beyond the preferred public narrative. | The account must include the person carrying the cost. |
The Wata(ring) W(hole) | Identity, care, movement, recognition, and harm travel through connected relationships. | A communal ethic has to sustain the whole circulation, including the lives it affects. |
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