Son[i]a #439

From the margins of language and the limits of the category of the human itself, Mikaelah Drullard Márquez (Dominican Republic) emerges as a disruptive voice: transvestite, Afro-Caribbean, migrant and untamed , tearing down the colonial scaffolding of gender and race as well as the inherited structures it supports. Having studied international relations but radically disengaged from the disciplinary codes of academia, Mikaelah constructs a fierce critique grounded in sensibility. In the trenches of the digital space (as a battlefield, not a display device), she develops an artistic practice that names the unnamed: the constitutive exclusion of non-white, non-cis, and non-normative life from the very frame of humanity. In black and white, her writing pulses with the urgency of a body that insists on living. Like an exercise in what she calls oralitura (a combination of the Spanish words for ‘oral’ and ‘writing’),which knows it is ‘wrong’ but seeks rupture rather than ‘rightness’. An affirmative gesture of disobedience of the master’s grammar.

In this podcast, Mikaelah Drullard dismantles the clichés of Western progressivism and reminds us that the plantation has not gone away. With words that cut like machetes, she shows how human rights are still the key to a house that only white bodies can enter. Against the impunity of a livestreamed genocide, Mikaelah takes up a radical gesture of decolonisation: the rejection of humanity itself. She also criticises white feminism, whose promise of equality breaks down when skin is in the game, and she draws on insurgent genealogies that invent other ways of living. Her defiance also fuels the power of transvestite technologies: fingernails as political accessories, beauty as revenge. A celebration of that which has been denied.