In “Funding Proposal for the Do-Nothing Plan,” Puerto Rican poet Ruben Ramos Colón satirizes a genre that is all too familiar for many: the grant application. His proposal is radical: He wants money to rest. He writes:

Greetings,

I estimate

that among the millions of millionaires this world holds,

there must be one:

So over having to have,

vastly supplied with all that money can buy,

who might desire to neglect

a minuscule portion of their surplus

for My Project

 

Objectives:

Have a boat, modest.

Weed in a metal jar kept in the fridge.

A hammock.

Cradle dreams past noon.

Eat fresh fish whenever weather permits.

Originally titled “Propuesta de financiamiento para el plan de no hacer nada” and translated in 2021 by trans poet Roque Raquel Salas Rivera for Guernica Magazine, the poem is a playful subversion of the grant application’s quasi-feudal, structurally inequitable mechanism of philanthropic arts funding. Ramos Colón illustrates a desire for a life outside the capitalist mandates of productivity that such privately financed funding systems require and take for granted.

Colón’s critique, though, is more specific than a mere refutation of what David Graeber called the “managerial feudalism” of grant applications, perhaps better understood, in Graeber’s parlance, as “competitive games.” Colón’s subversive call for institutionally funded leisure specifically seeks an escape from the ongoing colonial and neoliberal trauma of living in contemporary Puerto Rico, from physical and psychic exhaustion amid debilitating austerity, collapsing infrastructure, and the still-ongoing aftermath of Hurricane Maria. He has written often about the outsized role of migration on his generation and the difficulties of “choosing to stay” in Puerto Rico, where austerity and US colonial control make everyday life increasingly difficult. Indeed, these conditions prevent Colón from making a living through his poetry; instead he works and writes about work in neoliberal labor market spaces, such as drab office jobs. What Colón articulates in his “Funding Proposal for the Do-Nothing Plan,” then, is a poetics of exhaustion amid ongoing disaster, and a refutation of the performance of “resilience” that permeates contemporary life and culture in Puerto Rico and beyond. A toxic mandate that disciplines colonized people to endure structural violence and oppression through positive thinking and individual striving, Colón’s satirical poem pierces through the farce of resilience amid crises of climate change, ascendant fascisms, and heightened racial, gender, ethnic, and class inequalities, advocating instead for a radical investment in rest.

“Mejor No!” Best not, Colón’s speaker states, echoing Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” a foundational literary refusal. Not moving forward: with work, with life. An interruption, a nap, a rest. Ramos Colón’s refusal—best not—counters both a neoliberal mandate of resilience and the eerily similar call for forward movement, or echar pa’lante. Instead, he offers us a nontriumphalist possibility of public and exposed exhaustion as an aesthetic and political stance.

Success Is a Race to the Bottom

In today’s Puerto Rico, resilience is a sour joke. When the term entered popular discourse, most visibly after the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017, the most destructive event in Puerto Rico’s modern history, skepticism was in order. Given that the brunt of the calamity was a result of corruption and racialized colonial neglect, the individualizing framework of resilience and focus on Puerto Ricans’ “ability to sustain shocks and bounce back” helped to obscure the colonial leaders and institutions actually responsible for the intensity of Hurricane Maria’s devastation and the many crises that have followed, as Yarimar Bonilla previously outlined for Public Books.

The term resilience originates in the sciences, namely ecology, where it is understood as the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb shock and maintain functioning; shifting its usage from the natural to the social naturalizes human-made structures of inequality. As a naturalistic metaphor, according to Camila Fojas, it echoes the way financial capitalism has also made use of the language of organic cycles and natural phenomena, suggesting that capitalism produces inevitable conditions to which we must adjust and acculturate. The push toward resilience is but one part of a larger structure wherein capitalism makes itself ideologically dominant and naturalized.

In other words, requiring resilience only serves to normalize ongoing forms of oppression. Often advocated in the face of crisis events, resilience scrambles our understanding of the origins of disaster, making it appear singular and fleeting rather than structural and continual. As Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol Lebrón remind us, post-Maria Puerto Rico “complicates a linear timeline of disaster and recovery and points instead to natural disasters as cumulative and ongoing.” Even seven years after Hurricane Maria, we can’t speak about an “end” to the hurricane: Only 4 percent of recovery money has been spent, and the lack of consistent and reliable electricity has become a tragic part of everyday life. When living with disaster becomes a negligent norm, the expectation that Puerto Ricans have to be resilient is an exhausting insult.

One concrete feature of the post-Maria landscape is the normalization of a failed energy infrastructure. The energy system was long a public utility, its workforce composing one of the biggest and strongest unions on the island. In 2021 it was privatized, sold to an inexperienced company with roots in Texas and Canada called LUMA. Despite the owners making millions off this juicy contract, the energy system has only worsened, to the extent that power outages have become a regular occurrence, part of Puerto Rico’s daily routine. Although mass protests have shown Puerto Ricans are against this change, the government and advertisers push toward electric self-reliance. Those who can afford it convert their homes to solar energy and forego the broken grid. Many others have resorted to purchasing individual generators, which are extremely noisy and polluting. Advertisers promote generators in local media as though having one is a matter of personal responsibility, and many claim that complaints about the lack of electricity are uncalled for when the consumer knows that the system will fail and does not adequately prepare. This example illustrates how the discourse of resilience lowers standards for collective or social well-being, paving the way for the normalization of ever-heightening forms of precarity.

The framework of resilience discourages critical interrogation of the conditions and structures that produce adversity and instead valorizes the painful experience of surviving calamity as a personal virtue. Resilience shifts structural collapse onto the individual, who is expected to simply tolerate and overcome it: Whoever is not individually resilient has failed. Under these circumstances, success is merely a race to the bottom, to be the best at being exploited.

Exhaustion as Resistance

Neoliberalism is designed to disorient and wear down rapidly, as Naomi Klein explains in Shock Doctrine: The onslaught of privatization and austerity central to neoliberalism requires “speed, pushing through a flurry of radical changes so fast it’s impossible to keep up.” In Puerto Rico, the cumulative effect of shock doctrine accelerated during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, producing “desperation, distraction, and despair” among Puerto Ricans, hindering the possibility of organized political action. In a neoliberal scenario that is predicated on wearing out, shocking, and confusing, the truism of forward movement needs challenging. Klein’s attention to the affective results of neoliberalism is important: Much like in the whole US under a new federal administration, psychic and emotional distress are politically cultivated feelings that fragment and disempower political action.

To react, then, is clearly not enough. The triumphalist rhetoric of echar pa’lante has been historically crucial, but neoliberalism has rewritten the script of the political game. The forward push has been coopted into an individualized bootstrap narrative of uplift with historical amnesia. As Rocio Zambrana has written, the cooptation is “a version of neoliberal self-as-enterprise in the context of collapse, capture, dispossession.” Similarly, in “Echarpalantismo,” Miguel Rodríguez Casellas critiques the forward-motion direction of echar pa’lante, which Zambrana translates as “forward-facing resilience,” a thrust to ignore the historical structural conditions that have created the crisis in Puerto Rico that “stigmatizes critical conceptions of the past while it pushes an optimist framework of the future.” Exhaustion allows us to sit with history and critically examine it. It forces us to stop and reconsider reactive and easily coopted resistance and make the debilitating effects of ongoing neoliberalism and centuries of colonialism visible. It’s about time we failed.

requiring resilience only serves to normalize ongoing forms of oppression.

Framed as a virtue, the affective register of resilience is typically positive. Yet a flurry of new works in Puerto Rican literature instead cling to the negative aesthetics of resilience—similar to what Sianne Ngai has termed “ugly feelings” that dwell in the mourning of neoliberal collapse. The feeling of exhaustion produces a refusal to move forward or be virtuous. Like Ngai’s ugly feelings, it is “amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release.”

While the political landscape demands action and movement, the aesthetic realm becomes a place for the ludic exploration of alternate temporalities and possibilities, which in turn may expand our political horizons. Exhaustion is commonly understood as a symptom of capitalist modernity, but those of us who are colonial subjects are exhausted by the demands of living under capitalism and colonialism for centuries. Embracing exhaustion implies abandoning teleological drives toward success. Its performance makes evident the wear and tear of five hundred years of colonialism and four decades of neoliberal assault. It is a refusal of the self-help capitalist wellness that follow the productive logic of the “grind” and encourages us to move ever forward.

Puerto Rican poet Nicole Cecilia Delgado presents a handy manual for exposed exhaustion in her poem “Hack.” From her book Periodo especial, whose title likens Puerto Rico’s current circumstances to the Cuban Special Period of economic crisis in the 1990s, “Hack” plays with the temporal contours of mid-emergency life. It begins:

I am in a hurry for almost nothing.

I settle into slowness

As a form of cheating

What life expects of me, for example

 

Me instalo en la lentitud

como una forma de hacerle trampa

a lo que la vida espera de mí, por ejemplo

The English title of the poem evokes the recent trend of “life hacks,” advice that offers shortcuts to make daily tasks easier. In the poem, slowness is a shortcut, a coping technique, amid the fast-paced transformation of life after Hurricane Maria and the crisis. Reflecting on the temporality of that phase, Yarimar Bonilla has discussed what she calls “the wait of disaster,” stating that even though “the temporal mode of emergency comes with a heightened state of awareness, a surge of adrenaline, a perceived need to move fast, to act quick, to save, to repair, to restore” and “emergency is not expected to be an enduring state” in Puerto Rico, “this feeling of urgency was met with a crushing wall of inaction” that created a “frenzied state of repetition in which each day felt eerily like the last.”

When disaster does not move swiftly into recovery—when it does not end—the heightened adrenaline of postemergency and the mandate of immediate reaction (read: resilience) are expected to become permanent sensations. The expectation of triumph over adversity in a context of colonial dispossession results in a permanent state of stress. Delgado resists this affective state by proposing the counterintuitive reaction of lethargy as a response to disaster (the poem is included in a section of her book titled “Huracán que no viene,” or “Hurricane that does not arrive,” which references life post-Maria). Positioning slowness as cheating challenges the temporal contours of life in Puerto Rico today. The title “Hack” implies the breaking of a traditional script of politics and our reaction to it. Slowness is thus a survival mechanism, but also a form of resistance. The poem continues:

if I wake up early

I spend two hours drinking coffee

 

There is always time to

smoke some more

and to identify

the layers of sound

that cohabitate in my environment

the length, width, depth

of my field of vision

 

si me levanto temprano

tardo dos horas en tomar café.

Siempre hay tiempo para

fumar un poco más

e ir identificando

las capas de sonido

que cohabitan en mi ambiente,

el largo, ancho, la profundidad

de mi campo visual

For Delgado as for Ramos Colón, resistance to the grind results in meditative contemplation, a kind of grounding. Meditation here is not merely a coopted self-help strategy but rather a deep engagement with the body and landscape as sites of political resistance. It offers an embodied widening of the political and imaginative possibilities of passivity as resistance.

Refusing the terms of resilience in the aesthetic realm thus opens up the possibility of alternative political formations that do not merely react or respond to a system designed to shock and disorient. It becomes urgent to examine the political and aesthetic potential of other temporal configurations that don’t push us hastily forward on a path to nowhere. Slowness becomes a temporal tool that encourages interruption. It challenges our understandings of the linearity and verticality of our political reactions and organizations.