Inhabiting The Portal
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
—Arundhati Roy, The Pandemic Is A Portal
The past few days I have been returning to Roy’s “pandemic as portal”, not the article itself, but the concept. We are in the in-between. The birth canal, per se. We remember before, we haven’t yet met after, we know only now. And now, is ever-changing here in the portal. There is no constant center, no linear narrative, no reliable logics. The recalibration is constant. Comprehension is impossible. It’s ever shifting, always changing.
Over the weekend, I wrote three notes to myself:
Draw the portal.
Inhabit the portal.
Take advantage of the portal.
As uncomfortable as this canal is, when we finally exit the portal, we will likely never have the opportunity to go back. At least not in this lifetime.
What does your pandemic portal look like? Mine is soft like a worm, on the outside. On the inside: prismatic, faceted, and filled with all of the colors, in a soft, hazy, and angular way. The colors refract and collide unexpectedly. Light waves bending. The aperture ever-adjusting. It is a dreamy and sometimes-dark rainbow tunnel—part Alice in Wonderland, part fun house, part underworld, part cosmic stardust. It is unreliable. It is remarkable.
For those of us in business, the portal presents ongoing challenges. Business thrives on stability, known variables, predictable constraints, customers feeling at-ease. The pandemic is none of these. We pivot and pivot and pivot again, creating new, zig-zagging roadmaps of our survival.
I don’t expect this will end anytime soon. So, what of it?
What is the value of thinking about our businesses in the context of the portal? How do we do our ecosystem and economic work, in this birth canal? What new economies are emerging? What old ways of doing business are dying? In the midst of widespread social change, how do we keep our tiny businesses afloat?
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WE'RE DONE WITH PATRIARCHAL
BUSINESS-AS-USUAL
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”
— Audre Lorde
Here in the portal, there is no business-as-usual. The calculus changes on the daily. There is: adapt, survive, improvise. Money is coming in to our businesses from places it has never come from before (government grants and loans, new customers who are ready to invest in small feminist businesses). Money is going out of our businesses to places it likely has never gone to before (non-transactional support like Venmo & CashApp, bail funds, protest supplies, political activists, antiracist influencers, and donations).
Capitalism is crumbling here in the portal. New economic ecosystems are popping up in real time. Capitalism has proved itself callous and uncaring in the face of widespread death. But the people have proved to be compassionate, generous, and eager to circulate their resources to those who need them. This is in spite and perhaps because of governmental inaction and corruption, and corporate greed. As the white supremacist patriarchy loots the national coffers, a democratic economy is emerging in its place. At least for now.
Here in the portal, we have given up on government and turned to each other for support. It’s working. Organizations and activists are receiving more funds than they ever imagined and in some cases, more than they are capable of allocating. When the government fails, we care for each other. Direct aid, mutual aid, donations, cash transfers to individuals, these all make sense in portal economics. Will they make sense after, I’m not so sure. But, that’s not really the point.
The portal is giving us the opportunity to experiment with new ways of using our money for greatest benefit. It’s giving us the opportunity to create informal economies of care and to observe in real time which will scale and which will not. We’re seeing whom are the most narcissistic among us, those who use this deadly crisis for personal gain. And, we’re learning if these new webs of wealth distribution will truly help the most vulnerable among us, or if, in the end, they simply service those with the most social media savvy.
The portal is not, in itself, an altruistic place. It is lawless. It is chaos. It is multiplicity and possibility. For better and worse, it seems to amplify, exploit and reveal the abject—the parts of ourselves and our society that we have pushed underground, deliberately hidden, ignored, dismissed, or diminished.
For the greedy plutocrats, the portal offers the heist of a lifetime. For abolitionists, the portal presents the real possibility of radical institutional change. For parents working remotely, the portal has revealed the punishing impossibility of being both a full-time parent and full-time worker. For the incarcerated, a standard jail sentence has become a death sentence. Everything that was before is now more.
As De La Soul say, stakes is high.
The word apocalypse means “unveiling”. The portal seems to possess a supernatural power of revealing truths we have too long chosen to ignore. Here in the portal, we can see more clearly how the government has been gutted to the point of impotence, how the judicial system is designed to benefit whiteness, we see the deliberate undermining of democracy, we see that executives do believe that capitalism is worth dying for (as long as they’re not the ones with their lives on the line). It was hard to see this all so plainly before, but we can see it starkly now.
Inasmuch as the portal gives us the gift of clairvoyance, the gift of clear sight, it withholds from us our traditional forms of recourse. It has taken from us the master’s tools, denying us the reliable but ultimately ineffective methods for holding power accountable (such as the judicial system, oversight agencies, and even free and fair elections). Institutional and incremental strategies for social change have likewise been unveiled as devices of the ruling class.
The portal shows us that the jig is up. As business owners, we should no longer play it safe while paying lip service to radical movements like “feminism” and “antiracism”. Our performative allyship will continued to be revealed as another one of the master’s tools. We will only stop being exposed when we get down to our most honest selves, when we tell the truth of who we are.
Where have you been wielding the master’s tools in your business, pretending they were liberatory practices?
The portal and the pandemic are intimately intertwined. The pandemic puts all human life in danger; forcing us to face our mortality and to contemplate the fragility of life, daily. The portal reveals the bargains we have made as a society, the places we have put something else ahead of life. We can now see clearly that white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, ableism, colonialism, and imperialism, are structures that don’t merely affect one’s quality of life. They determine who lives and who dies in 2020.
The power of the portal is to free us from our allegiance to these systems of power, so that all deadly structures can crumble, and life can flourish in its place. The portal is not permanent, it is likely not the place to erect fortresses. Instead, the portal offers us time-space to let go of outdated institutions and beliefs—to let them destroy themselves—while we experiment with new models, cultivate new economies of care, and to get down to the root of who we are and what we truly care about.
The portal presents us with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to re-conceive who we are, individually and collectively. It is asking us to choose: life or death. As feminists and entrepreneurs, let's not squander this moment by clinging to the machinery of Capitalism, white supremacy, and business-as-usual.
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THE SISTERHOOD ESSAY No. 14
This essay was written for The Sisterhood, our community for feminist entrepreneurs. Click here to be added to the waitlist and notified when we reopen membership for 2021.
