120 chApter three
Like the medical officer and like Singh, in my own inaugural moment as
a humanitarian in a house of hybrid Singhs, I was caught up in a series of
complex power relations that shaped my actions and reactions. Of course,
as a child I could not have understood, as I would later begin to, the com-
plex power relations and forms of mastery that were mapping the scene of
this inauguration: I was a child privileged enough to intervene on behalf of
a grown man; I was comparatively wealthy and he was undoubtedly poor;
I was able- bodied and psychically sound, while he—at least by my child-
hood memory—was both physically and mentally ill; I was a mixed- race
child staging an intervention in a neighborhood in which neither of us
were wholly welcome, or welcome at all.
The absolutely formative (and at times for me instrumental) narrative
of my emergent humanitarianism did not include these complexities, and,
like the protagonists of posthumanitarian fictions, I have hit up against
the limits of my own narrative. In place of sheer frustration or the howl of
madness, instead of throwing up our hands, tearing out our hair, or suc-
cumbing to a dialectic between humanitarian fetishism and madness, I am
proposing a praxis of dynamic narration that not only avows the inescap-
able complicities of the “good” subject but also refuses the ability to neatly
separate my humanitarian impulses from those less redemptive and mess-
ier qualities that have shaped me through the power of narrative structures.
Recalling Sanders’s etymological formulation of complicity as “a foldedness
in human being that stands as the condition of possibility for any opposi-
tion to a system that constantly denies it” (2002, x), complicity becomes
not something negative to be resisted and disavowed but something to be
affirmed in order to assume responsibility. By elaborating, upturning, and
reshaping those narratives that have cast us as particular kinds of subjects,
dynamic narration moves us beyond dialectical formulations toward a poli-
tics of entanglement from which other world relations can begin to flour-
ish. Dynamic narration is therefore a gesture toward dehumanism—an act
of narratively inhabiting the gaps and fissures of our own subjective con-
structions in an effort to refuse the violence of splitting ourselves off from
the less agreeable aspects of our being.