As populations across the world face authoritarian violence—from Kenya’s police killings to India’s “bulldozer justice” to US fascism to Israel’s continuing genocide of Palestinians—there is an urgent need to learn means of resistance that can breach seemingly impenetrable walls of domination. I argue that attuning to water and the way it wears down solid structures can teach us fluid ways of resisting power that are particularly useful in contemporary political contexts, where things are changing rapidly and cannot be linearly predicted.1 In this essay, I trace how Sofia Samatar’s Africanfuturist novella, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, uses knowledge about the ways water connects and moves to create forms of liquid resistance. Liquid resistance challenges structures of power—particularly colonial structures—in ways that are collective, emergent, and dependent upon relational connections.2 By using fluidity to wear away structures, liquid resistance opens futures beyond what domination deems possible.3
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain takes place on one Ship within a far-future spacefaring mining company where strict hierarchies keep laborers chained in the Hold and separated from those in the upper-decks, who are themselves segmented into the ankleted, who must constantly wear ankle monitors with blue lights, and freepersons with phones. When “the boy” is pulled from the Hold and given a scholarship to attend University, he must figure out how to connect with those around him to navigate this strange new world—and eventually resist it.
I focus on liquidity as there is nothing on earth that can hold against water, given a long enough timescale.4 Even though structures of power often narrate themselves as universal and invincible, Shingai Njeri Kagunda notes that “when you poke holes in a story, the story can no longer hold water.”5 Water always breaks through. This is why Joëlle M. Cruz and Chigozirim Utah Sodeke describe liquid organizing as not only something Africans are forced into by their marginalization in global economic systems, but what allows them to create new ways of relating.6 Cruz later writes that if coloniality considers “colonialism [as] the ultimate Organization,” then Africans are often dismissed as lacking organization completely.7 For our purposes, this means that liquid ways of organizing are usefully difficult for domination to perceive.
This may be because colonial thinking locates power in individuals, imagined to be separate from their contexts.8 If colonialism “is about severing relationships—to each other, to our lands, to hope and to our futures,”9 then one task of resistance is “to recover the continuities.”10 Water is all about connection. From the droplets that form a wave to the ways the composition of human bodies reminds us, we always carry water with us. These relations help us tap into the resistant power of water, as it “can connect the intimate to the global and move between scales effortlessly.”11 In her novella, Samatar gives us three insights into resisting in liquid ways that we can actualize now: attending to intimacies, widening the cracks in the walls of domination, and starting where we are.
Before being pulled from the Hold against his will, the boy was being taught the Practice. The Practice is a means of attending to intimacies. It’s described as “the longing for understanding” of the “something [that] linked you together, like the kneebone to the thighbone.” At first, the boy is only able to trace small linkages, kneebone to thighbone, but as he becomes more adept at attuning, he begins to understand how linkages are everywhere, extending in all directions: “It is the mesh. Entanglement . . . It is the bond, the chain that grows in all directions: for the Chain of Being is not up and down.” The Practice is about continually tuning into the multiplicity of connections that surround us. The boy begins by noting one link. Then many. Then feeling what others feel through those links. Then, finally, using those links to impact those around him.
By attending to intimacies, the Practice offers a means of liquid resistance. It’s referred to as the search for “the River that is also a Sea.” At the end of the novella, the boy realizes: “One [person] is a River. Everyone is a Sea.” A river can only move in certain semi-constrained directions, etching a path into the landscape around it. But by connecting with the other waters around us, we together form something multidirectional, powerful in collective width, breadth, and depth. The boy describes a feeling of being “held. He was held in the web . . . its contours folding him close.” A Sea is both composed of intimate connections, water droplets held tight in protective communion, and vast potential to impact the world around it.
Attending to intimacies helps us find cracks in the walls of domination—and widen them. One of the ways the boy starts to connect with others is through the anklet he is forced to wear, once his chain from the Hold is removed. The anklets are meant to be a mechanism of control. Not only are they constantly traceable, but anyone unrestrained can use their phone to control the leg movement of an ankleted person, for any reason. For those who have never had to wear an anklet or chain, these mechanisms are viewed as inescapable and impossible to resist—providing forces of domination with complete control. However, the boy is able to use the cultural knowledge of the Practice to find cracks in what power proposes as totalizing. He can feel other presences through them, even reach out to touch them and communicate through them—creating a means of communication and connection out of what was meant to control. Water can work its way into even the most solid-appearing of walls.
But once the boy realizes how deep and wide his connections to others stretch—moving through time and space to trace those connected through anklets and chains, from the past to the future—he is overwhelmed by the enormity of the network. He describes a “mesh so dense he could barely see,” making it impossible to know what, exactly, his actions will catalyze. He knows that he must act but is overwhelmed with possibilities for where to start. Eventually, he realizes that it doesn’t matter: He can start anywhere; he just needs to start. The boy decides to start with the intimate connections he holds with those around him: “each of his hands was held by someone and one is where to begin to be,” the novella explains. He starts small, with one hand that he is holding. When we’re faced with tragedy after tragedy, deciding how to intervene can be overwhelming. This can lead to freezing in the face of contemporary political contexts. However, our task is not to fix everything—it’s only colonial thinking that believes it can plan and determine all that surrounds us. Our task is to start where we are, however small and intimate our actions may seem.
The novella ends, as Sameem Siddiqui pointed out to me in a conversation, on the cusp of revolution. For those used to colonial thinking, this uncertainty may be frightening. But water reminds us that we have all the tools we need, in our intimacies and relations, to build new worlds.12 By deepening our connections, using them to widen the cracks in domination, and starting where we are, we become part of the Sea change of liquid resistance that enables better futures to emerge.
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Endnotes
- I’ve elsewhere extended John S. Mbiti’s work to explore how Africanfuturism uses nonlinear approaches to time. See John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Heinemann, 1989).
- I’m extending this from my previous work on liquid agency and liquid organizing in Jenna N. Hanchey, The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO (Duke University Press, 2023) and Jenna N. Hanchey, “What Water Teaches Us,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 11, 2024, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-water-teaches-us-on-suyi-davies-okungbowas-lost-ark-dreaming/.
- Hanchey, The Center Cannot Hold, 177.
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (Haymarket Books, 2025).
- Shingai Njeri Kagunda, “Black-Futurisms Vs. Systems of Domination,” Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction, edited by Eugen Bacon (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), 91.
- Joëlle M. Cruz and Chigozirim Utah Sodeke, “Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory: Marginality and Liquidities in Postcolonial Contexts,” Communication Theory 31 (2021): 528-548.
- Joëlle M. Cruz, “No-Organization: Confronting the ‘It’ of Antiblackness in Scholarship on Africa,” Organization 32, no. 2 (2025): 299.
- Kagunda, “Black-Futurisms Vs. Systems of Domination,” 87.
- Simpson, Theory of Water, 179.
- Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i (Duke University Press, 2021), 44.
- Simpson, Theory of Water, 8.
- Simpson, Theory of Water, 8.
Jenna Hanchey