Banning Shadows

as if they could conceal. another passage :: as if leaves :: retracting their molecules reseal :: the body into silence

—Guérin Asante, “cambium”

I recently began using a website to analyze the account status of pro-Palestine voices on X/Twitter after seeing a significant decrease in their posts (first through the shutdown of Palestine’s electrical grid by their oppressors, then through their returning messages’ steady disappearance from the timeline) coupled with the occurrence of accounts once followed being automatically un-followed with little more than a screen refresh.

The most common results for these accounts when tested returned what is known as a ghost ban—also called a conventional shadowban or thread ban, whereby a user is still able to post but their posts are purposefully suppressed or “de-boosted”. While one could easily write scores about the lengths to which social media companies go to purposefully curtail or manipulate information at the behest of governments and corporate entities (and quite a few have done just that), as a writer who is not a technology expert, there is a symbolism to this phenomenon from which I cannot seem to dislodge myself.

In particular, I find myself thinking in this moment about the banning of shadows. Rendering the shadow imaginary, then less than imaginary. Relegating it to aberration. To an endless horizon of periphery. To oblivion. The ban of shadows, I imagine, as the banning of life—of living and the forms who live—away from the shadows they cast against the fascia of this world. Banning shadows in this sense occurs not so much as a silencing as a form of extermination. The mattering of life made into lifeless, agency-less matter; unmade or un-mattered or undone. The ur-extermination persists regardless of lexical choice. Subjects once captured and cured in solar light is denied—robbed of—linear, political, and corporeal perspective.

All colonial projects feed upon the flesh of the colonized. Diluting the person until either subject or object subject to obsolescence. An un-marking of life by marking life unremarkable: literally to remove the reference of someone being capable of (and provided tools for) etching their story on the cheek of the world. Genocide, then, is not merely a banning of people and their shadows from life but their history and future as well. It bans the ghosts of their existence—which reach both backwards and forwards beyond the mirage of linear time.

In this sense, words cast their own shadows. Words of solidarity, of condemnation, of resistance and, yes, the words of the bellicose, the oppressive, the malicious. The words of génocidaires. Of anguish, amplitudes of truth and lies. The shadows of co-conspirators unifying their tongues against colonial plight, the shadows of which drench the Earth and all its atmospheres in gray.

Rendering the shadow of our collective horizon real, then—while preserving those cast before the colonial walls began to block the sun so long, too long, ago—is, to my mind, beyond the reach of technological partitions. Banning all of us, all our shadows, is as futile as wrapping a noose around that same sun. Is there hope in that idea? Perhaps. Is there promise? That remains to be seen. Here’s to whatever work which sheds light on the matter.