“It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me.”
— Ursula K. LeGuin

Throughout my existence as a sentient being, then as a speaker of language, and then as a creator of discourse, I have gone from believing that profound knowledge of our reality was mostly found in books, databases, and institutions with limited access for most humans, to realizing that knowledge has always been there: in the emotional, cultural, and sensory transfers of ancestral communities; in the transcultural recipe archive that my grandmother knows and practices with her haptic, visual, and olfactory memory; in the embodied knowledge of the Andean-Amazonian peoples and their collaborative relationship with their environments; and even in the powerful intuitions of my mother, who inadvertently triggered the narrative sequences that I present here, thanks to an affectionate gesture she made several years ago. This movement, like thought, has been silently metabolized from the many experiences that have nourished the subsoil of my knowledge over the years, unfolding an invisible ecology of ideas, alliances, and synchronicities that flows underground and proliferates upward in the form of embodied thought. Despite the prolonged latency of this reflection (and its desire to emerge as language), I first had to make countless conceptual and geographical shifts and approach the theories of cultural internationalism, critical theory, and the ways in which late-capitalist normalization consumes all sensitive expression, emptying, repackaging, and thematizing everything. In the end, I returned to the essential task of situating my experience in order to reconstruct the ideas already present in my thought, in abstract and germinal forms. These ideas, woven from many subjectivities over time, waited silently but eagerly to emerge.

This text is a fable of hesitation, abandonment, and reunion. Hesitation (or doubt), as I articulate it in this text, is inspired by unexpected authors such as Alia Al-Saji, Henri Bergson, and Seigo Matsuoka, and notions from Zen and Taoism. Hesitation manifests itself in various ways: on the one hand, rushing to make a decision can constitute a form of doubt or, in a very different sense, it can express the traumatic experience of a racialized or oppressed body when inhabiting a foreign space. On the other hand, it allows us to preserve and nurture thoughts for a long time without them having to be consumed by the obligation of their current, absolute, efficient, or immediate enunciation, or by the need for their transformation into an artistic, informational, or academic product. on the contrary, these thoughts have the possibility of remaining con-fused in the most fragmentary substrate of consciousness, metabolizing other doubts and thriving until they can finally emerge as an utterance. This process can be daunting for those whose thinking has been shaped by technocapitalist imaginaries of knowledge, which demand the transformation of the sensible into collectible, indexable, and disseminable information, at a pace that makes hesitation impossible. As I move through my thoughts, I try to distance myself from this realm in order to encounter others, more sensitive to the integration of the somatic into discourse, achieving a collaboration rather than a replacement of one by the other.

The day I was moving to Chicago for a master’s degree, about twelve years ago, my mother surprised me with a gift: a large hammock, woven from raw fiber, with a white background and a brown geometric design. This combination of colors and shapes gave me a general idea of the hammock’s possible origin. As with Arhuaco or Wayuu mochilas—that object that almost without exception gives away a Colombian walking anywhere in the world—the weaving of hammocks, their colors and patterns, reveal the identity of their makers. This is how we can distinguish a hammock from the town of San Jacinto from a Wayúu chinchorro (an indigenous word for hammock), and understand the cultural practices that surround it: for some, the hammock is an aesthetic and syncretic craft, rooted in a community and with a commercial orientation. In contrast, the making of hammocks by indigenous nations is an integrative practice that embodies a multiplicity of meanings whose complexity reflects the textile structure of the hammock itself, as well as the sequences of collective labor that shape it.

The hammock my mother had given me seemed too big and heavy for my already excessive luggage. However, I decided it had to come with me and used it to protect the books that took up most of my largest suitcase. The place the hammock would occupy in my new life was highly uncertain, but it would allow me to inhabit a space simply, quickly, and economically: the hammock only needs to be stretched between two columns or hooks anchored to the wall, and it automatically fills a room and becomes a support and habitat for everyday life. For travelers, it is a practical solution for finding shelter, protecting oneself from the cold, and even keeping away mosquitoes that proliferate in humid regions, or isolating oneself from terrestrial threats, such as snakes and scorpions, in hot and desert areas. In the Wayúu nation, the chinchorro facilitates the transition between the womb and the outside world; the newborn is welcomed with a chinchorro and remains in it until it is too big to use it. Each new chinchorro woven for a person marks the beginning of a new stage in their life. The last of their chinchorros is buried with the person who passes away and the fabric decomposes alongside the flesh, like a second skin.

On the plane I thought about a conversation I had with Ricardo, a professor at the university where I studied art and education, between my undergraduate and graduate studies. During that last chat, he warned me that expressing myself in hegemonic academic contexts in the Global North, as a racialized person from the South, had dimensions that I might not have noticed in other travel and exchange experiences. His warning was, in general terms, that any expression of hesitation would be assumed—consciously and unconsciously—as a kind of “cultural defect”: it didn’t matter if my essays or oral presentations were consistently brilliant; if I arrived late to class even once, or wasn’t prepared for a session for whatever reason, any judgment of my character would be negatively influenced by my origin, my appearance, and the cultural and racial prejudices that organize them in the Western imagination.

I remembered Ricardo’s words a couple years later when I had to fail a student in an art history course who had missed more than half the semester. The course, named World Cultures and Civilizations, completely omitted the existence of cultural expressions in Latin America over several millennia. In retaliation for his poor grade, the student wrote in my teaching evaluation: “The guy can barely speak English.” In retrospect, Ricardo’s words were an invitation to doubt, slow down my responses, plan my appearances and statements, and inadvertently, to modulate my body language; in short, to subscribe to an imaginary cultural etiquette. Although this warning can be understood as a call for performative assimilation (or invisibility as a form of survival), it is possible that his words can also serve as a pretext for instigating doubt, as a method of investigating the forms of appearance and enunciation of others in normalizing contexts, such as mainstream academia.

When I arrived in the city and finally found a place to live, I placed the hammock on top of a utility closet, saving it for a future moment when I would devote myself to organizing my new space. That moment was constantly postponed by new academic and personal emergencies that quickly piled up and pushed the hammock further and further down my list of priorities. When I moved to other neighborhoods in northern Chicago, I packed up the hammock again and repeated the process. A couple of years later, I moved to East Los Angeles to become a university professor, and even there, the hammock remained at the back of the closet, waiting to be unfurled. Although I never paid much attention to it, I always had doubts about installing it, because at the time I identified it as foreign to my domestic space. I could imagine it in Caribbean homes, on farms, or in the country houses of very wealthy people. But not in my home, perhaps because my conscience was still wounded by the question of assimilation, or because I had not yet defined which objects should be part of my personal space. Contextualizing and activating the hammock was a tertiary task in relation to the work and academic duties that occupied me at the time. Thus, it remained stored away until the moment I had to move back to Bogotá to fulfill the requirements of the scholarship that took me to  the United States.

I did not spend much time in Colombia, just enough to do a couple of important projects, but even there I repeated the operation with the hammock in my new home. Instead, the hammock’s place would be taken by a series of mid-century furniture, sourced from a second-hand store and then restored at home. Like all supposedly functionalist designs from the first half of the 20th century, the furniture was more beautiful than comfortable. When it was time to leave the country again, many of my things were left in boxes, between my mother’s house and the storage unit of Alberto, a friend who agreed to keep part of my library, as well as my publications and some personal items. My friend ended up saving the hammock, which he found while exploring the boxes that were eventually destroyed in a flood after a heavy rainy season in Bogotá. The fortune of my storage spaces and my book collections could fill a separate text. When I moved to Mexico City, I thought about taking the hammock, which continued to occupy my thoughts, as a kind of emotional responsibility that confronted my seemingly aesthetic prejudice, and although the impulse to include it was always present, I remembered that the hammock only left the storage unit when Alberto put it in the garden of his house. So I decided to leave it there, sustaining my latent curiosity about it and my hesitation to integrate it into my experience of living.

Over time, it occurred to me that the trajectory of the hammock could be thought of as a warp on which to weave a fabric of ideas and experiences that shape my subjectivity and open up a field of thought that I am just beginning to explore. The concept of weaving is important to me, as used by sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, because it allows for instances of collaboration, complementarity, and coexistence between different ways of feeling-thinking and existing in the world. Here, weaving is an alliance—or a matrix of alliances—that enables the emergence of complexity, but at the same time sustains and preserves subjectivity, a generous simultaneity in this world of antagonisms, xenophobia, and oppression. Returning to my relationship with the hammock, I suspect that the episode of micro-racism as a university professor that I recounted earlier is connected to my hesitation about whether or not to deploy the hammock in my new living spaces. Not so much because of the negativity of the incident, but because of how the construction of the subjective in contexts of frequent displacement can be influenced by a kind of desire to express oneself from an impossible cultural zero degree. Each new displacement, each arrival in a new city or country brings an experience of unfolding, a divide between a new being, constructed by desire, and a “negative-being”—a kind of complementary existence—subjugated and depositary of everything one wants to leave behind: a racial stereotype, a traumatic experience, a somber behavior or self-identification. And there too the hammock was deposited, as a potential for doubt, waiting to be unfolded and re-signified.

My skepticism about the possibility of getting rid of the hammock also has to do with a specific social and cultural stance. In her Phenomenology of Doubt, Alia Al-Saji reminds us that people with greater privilege tend to doubt less than people who suffer significant experiences of oppression or deprivation. This means, among many other possibilities, that not getting rid of a contingent object has to do with the future hopes that are placed in that object. Because less privileged lives are always susceptible to being undermined as a result of some tragedy or abrupt change in living conditions for which sufficient provisions cannot be made, discarding this object can compromise the chances of survival in an uncertain, imagined future. Hesitating is survival mechanism that creates time for the unpredictable unfolding of life and its reinterpretation. But it is also possible to understand it as a space for the emergence of a sensibility that opposes the frenetic logic of capital. For Seigo Matsuoka, hesitation is the inherently human quality of the mind’s wandering, where “the rhythm of a haiku or the design of a kimono flutter freely.” This type of behavior, which is more ecological than rational, cannot be imitated by a machine or integrated into the logic of design, production, or accumulation. Hesitation, as a fertile territory of thought, constitutes a paradoxical phenomenon, since by definition it eludes the efficiency of capital. This is not a hedonistic wandering that takes place in spare time, but rather an affective disposition toward thought that arises from an experience of the world determined by the conditions that precipitate hesitation; that is, from the experience of being a non-hegemonic subject and the consciousness, derived from it, of the multiplicity of worlds that exist other than one’s own. Following Al-Saji, this territory of thought largely excludes privilege in its most consolidated forms.

It is extremely difficult to weave a hammock individually, as it needs its surroundings as support to extend the weave; it depends on the prosperity of trees and the flows of life, human growth, and travel. To weave a hammock, there must be collaboration, either human or with a tree that extends its arm to temper the warp. For this reason, many indigenous peoples carry out this process collectively. In The Weaving of the Cosmos, researcher Juan Camilo Niño Vargas describes in detail the collaborative and choreographed process followed by the Ette people in northern Colombia to weave a chinchorro. During this process, the women ask the men to drive two stakes into the ground at a certain distance, which the women then walk back and forth between, over and over again with great precision, to achieve the warp, which will then be woven collectively by several members of the community. The task, which involves a large group of people in arduous and affective labor, is intended to provide support and shelter to each individual in the community. This process is more than material and, therefore, difficult to dismantle into separate components. It also reminds me of the story that Vale, my partner, told me about how in southern Chile, there is a tradition of relocating a whole house by hand, a collaboration that requires the physical labor of an entire neighborhood. This action, called “tiradura de casa” (house pulling), is part of the Minga de Chiloé, an ancestral practice of community work for mutual benefit, which also exists in different indigenous communities in Colombia. These forms of resistance and their cross-cultural affinities remind us that there are alternatives to simply inhabiting the infinite acceleration of necrocapitalism, which captures our work, our imagination, and our desire, while showing us its atrocious consequences, broadcasted live, through our personal screens.

One day I returned to Bogotá to be with my grandmother through her dimensional transition; she had gone through a very rapid cancer process and it was the first time that someone so close to me was going to leave the world since her mother, my great-grandmother, had done so thirty-one years earlier. I hadn’t been back to Colombia in four years, during which time I wanted to negotiate my tensions and disagreements with my country, but I had also left them at the back of the closet, waiting to be revisited at some abstract future. During that trip, I stayed at my friend Alberto’s house and had the opportunity to use the hammock for the first time. At the end of each day of accompanying my grandmother and my family at the hospital, Alberto and I would take turns sitting in the hammock, trying to unpack our life experiences across the years and distance. Later, as I wrote the words I would speak at the funeral, I used the hammock to write and then to rehearse the words that only through tireless repetition could I pronounce fluently that day. For the Ettes, the hammock is ontologically positioned as a container; but this containment is always-already relational and ecological: the hammock is support, protection, habitat, representation, writing, and refuge.

The reason I postponed my decision about the hammock is not very different from the reason I delayed visiting Colombia: appealing solely to rationality implies a kind of mutilation. That is why I was able to delay those decisions, which later unraveled after my untimely visit, or ignore the violent comments of my history student years ago. If knowledge has intrinsic somatic components, then it cannot truly exist without a body through which it travels and manifests: purely functional thinking is a kind of evasion that allows us to carry out language transactions but frees us from their consequences. This explains, for example, the environmental catastrophe of our world, but also the way my practice developed over several years. When I moved cities, my artistic work came to a complete halt and I focused on my academic practice, which flourished rapidly, but its political power was diluted due to the weakening of the relationship between discourse and experience. It was only when I reintroduced bodily practices into my daily life, such as baking bread and organizing solidarity communities around cooking, that I was able to reintegrate into my consciousness the relationships between the intellectual, the social, the ecological, and the affective. During that time, hesitation remained as a potential, acknowledging that artistic practice remained in the memory of the body, against the pragmatic will of its denial.

Sociologist Anibal Quijano said that work, as a transforming force of the material, in turn transforms the subject of work. However, this transformation is not exclusive to the physical realm; therefore, we must inhibit or mutilate our experience in order to participate in most labor markets, which demand our labor but not the expression of our subjectivity or our experience of the human. For this reason, it is important to understand discourse and embodied action as complementary forces that produce power in their encounter at the weave. This is hardly a novel idea, as it organizes the thinking of different indigenous peoples of the Global South; but it is important to mention it as part of my experience, because it was the hesitant fabric of my trajectories, my thoughts, and my relationships with different people and ideas that allowed me to mitigate the spiritual “contracture” that came from dedicating myself solely to discourse for a long time. And all of this arose from the recomposition of the memories of the hammock’s trajectory. From then on, both the history and the structure—material, social, and ontological—of the hammock as a thought model became platforms for the proliferation of a renewed practice, supported by intercultural knowledge and ecologies, but also by embodied memories that I hesitated to integrate into my discursive activity for a long time, but which are now entangled in the heart of my practice and the expression of my subjectivity.

[End of Part I]

—David Ayala-Alfonso.
Edinburgh and Mexico City, August-September 2025.

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Sequences of Hesitation, Part I © 2025 by David Ayala-Alfonso is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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