From Destruction to Irrelevancy: Composting Colonial Cosmology through an Abolitionist Framework of Worldbuilding
In this piece, I propose a shift in our epistemological and strategic orientation toward systems of white supremacist colonial domination. Rather than framing resistance solely in terms of destruction or eradication of these systems, I offer "irrelevancy" and "composting" as frameworks of sacred abolitionist praxis—concepts that allow us to metabolize the rot of empire without centering its mythology. This is not a call to de-escalate resistance, particularly the armed and righteous defense of life by colonized peoples, but to reroute our cosmological energy toward regeneration, reworlding, and ancestral alignment. To compost is not to forget. It is to transmute. It is to return to Earth what was extracted, distorted, and weaponized. This piece traverses the theoretical, the spiritual, and the poetic to invite a more nuanced and liberatory relationship to abolition, rooted in cosmology and collective aliveness.
Introduction: The Empire is Already Collapsing
The Western colonial project has long relied on a binary: civilization or chaos, order or destruction, white or other. Inherently extractive and necropolitical, this project demands constant attention in order to survive, it feeds on fear, reaction, opposition. And so, it has taught us to believe that to oppose it is to destroy it. But what if we did not center it at all?
White supremacist cosmology is not eternal. It is not sacred.
It is already in collapse.
As scholars and organizers within abolitionist traditions have long asserted, the project of liberation is not merely the absence of oppression, but the presence of life-affirming structures that reflect communal care, ancestral wisdom, and collective self-determination (Davis, 2005; Kaba, 2021). Similarly, as decolonial thinkers have argued, coloniality is not just a system of governance, but a cosmology, an imposed story of who we are and what is real (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).
To challenge empire at the cosmological level is to stop organizing our lives around its collapsing center.
Abolition is Not Destruction, But Return
The language of destruction—while powerful and at times necessary—can still trap us in the gravitational pull of the master’s house. It assumes a monolithic center we must break, burn, or undo. But the house is already on fire. And we are not its firefighters.
We are gardeners of worlds to come.
In this moment, I propose a shift in language and orientation—from destruction to irrelevancy, from eradication to composting. These terms are not passive. They are deeply active, deeply embodied, deeply political. They reflect a refusal to replicate the logic of empire even in our resistance to it.
Let it rot,
so we may grow.
Let it become irrelevant,
so we may remember what is sacred.
To compost is not to absolve. It is to transform.
It is to break down the decaying material of supremacy so that something else—rooted, relational, wild—can bloom.
Sacred Cosmologies of Irrelevancy
The concept of irrelevancy is not merely rhetorical. It is ontological. To deem something irrelevant is to withdraw our life force from it. To turn our gaze toward the sacred. Toward the water. Toward the stories of our people, held in land and lineage.
The empire was never the main character.
It was a parasite in the narrative of life.
A detour, not a destination.
In Afro-Indigenous, queer, and diasporic cosmologies—those that precede and outlast colonization—the sacred is not found in dominance but in interrelation. These traditions do not require the destruction of the oppressor to thrive; they require only remembrance and return. Irrelevancy is thus a spell. A liberatory withdrawal of attention. A refusal to center the death-drive of coloniality.
Armed Resistance and the Right to Fight
This shift toward composting and irrelevancy is not a call for passivity. Nor is it a prescription for all. Any cosmology that denies the right of the oppressed to defend themselves—by any means necessary—is still colonized at its core.
Armed resistance by colonized peoples is a sacred response to sustained violence. It is not for the comfort of the privileged to question or dilute. Abolition does not ask the oppressed to be unarmed while empire is armed to the teeth.
Rather, this framework seeks to protect multiplicity. It affirms that some will wield fire, some will wield language, some will hold the line in legal systems, some will sing the new world into being. And all are needed.
There are those who destroy,
and there are those who render irrelevant.
Some of us are here to write the obituary
in the language of stars and soil.
Conclusion: Language as Worldmaking
Our words are not neutral.
They carry frequencies.
They conjure futures.
As we move deeper into the epochal shift many call the Age of Aquarius—a turning from separation to synthesis, from hierarchy to harmony—we are being called to refine our vocabulary of liberation. To discern what stories we are feeding with our speech. Destruction may be a necessary step—but it cannot be the only one. Otherwise, we risk becoming fluent in ruin, but illiterate in renewal.
Let us compost empire with care and clarity.
Let us speak irrelevancy over its crumbling towers.
Let us build with joy, not just rage.
Let us sing the soil into remembering.
The future does not require the destruction of empire to exist.
The future is already here, wherever we gather,
and say:
We are sacred. We are sovereign. We are still here.
Cited & Aligned Thinkers
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2005)
Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’Til We Free Us (2021)
Walter Mignolo & Catherine Walsh, On Decoloniality (2018)
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned (2020)
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (2007)