This is part of a serial experiment with and around Tanzil Shafique‘s ongoing writing project, A Thousand WetLands: Southern Thinking against the Gods of Coloniality.
আমায় ভাসাইলি রে, আমায় ডুবাইলি রে,
অকুল দরিয়ার বুঝি কূল নাই রে।
কূল নাই, কিনার নাই,
অথৈ দরিয়ার পানি।
সাবধানে চালাইও মাঝি,
আমার ভাঙা তরী রে।
You have set me adrift, you have drowned me deep—
The shoreless river seems endless, without return.
No shore, no boundary,
only the bottomless breath of water.
Row gently, o boatman,
for mine is a broken vessel.
Jasimuddin, circa 1930
Nietzsche said, "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?" “Which God, Nietzsche?”, we may ask. Enslaved, we remain, chained to gods that didn’t die, but rather only metamorphosed. Being free, perhaps, is like being dry–unattainable, always in view but never realised, a fate bound being in wetness, being in submission. Sherman Jackson coined the term “normalised domination” to point to our existence remaining in servitude, whether to our malignant capitalist reality, our nation-states and our own selves. The trifecta of hyperobjects to which we submit. We shall talk about these three gods in detail shortly; they are much too important to leave them alone. Their statues must fall.
It is this state of submission that the opening poem by Jasimuddin alludes to. Written in the Bengal delta in the days of the British colonial period, the poem is a metaphor for life, written through the terms of engagement within the wet landscape. Our thrown-togetherness reveals the invalidity of our claim of autonomy, of knowing, of being in control. The mighty Ganges acts as the lifeworld in which we find ourselves, without a clear idea of the shore, a mighty force that may drown us at any instance into the plurality of epistemic layers, and most importantly, our boat is broken, our tools are incomplete, we row with ineptitude to appreciate the landscape in its entirety of entanglements. And yet, we claim so much certainty of our ways, of our distinctiveness, of our rationality, saving us from the unknowable. Like Schrodinger’s cat, not knowing with certainty appears to be the human condition. As we navigate, are we to float, are we to drown? Are we to live well, even if our boat is broken or are we to fall into the depths of the murky water?
It is this in-between condition, where the potentiality of both ends remains equally alive, suspended yet possible, that is crucial for us to focus ontologically. The hyphen condition, as Pushpa Arabindoo commented. There is only the appearance of segregates—“wet” and “lands”—two nouns facing one another across a hyphen, pretending distance. The hyphen itself is a trick of grammar, a small bureaucratic bridge that makes us believe there are two things to connect. Two things apart, and it is this clean break from which wetlandic thought wants a clean break from. The superficial babble all around, following the relational turn, has been that of a “relational world”, where the ultimate claim is that things are related, connected across heterogeneous formations. This introduces additive analysis, where every paper reveals more relations, adding to the existing connections until it reaches the saturation point of mapped connections. What if reality were more? Instead of dry islands connected by strings to show relations, we thought of things being connected as through wetness, being alive in the relations, but that has the possibility of death at every instance? What I simply mean is, wet-lands points to both the possibility of interconnections, being alive, linked, in circulation, but also not. Also, the possibility of drying up, of evaporated water, of a gaseous state that loses circulatory power, or of being ice. There is a radical contingency built into water’s materiality, and thinging through wetness, a qualia moving between such possibilities, perhaps, is helpful to think through the gods of coloniality.
Water refuses to be bordered. It is received by the soil, exhaled by the leaf, and released into the air. It thickens into mist, breaks apart into droplets, and crosses frontiers without papers. Ontologically, the wet-land is never still. Everything seeps in, everything seeps out. The boundary of a lake is a momentary fiction; even as we stand at its edge, water is already leaving, turning invisible, carried off by wind in the light weight of vapour. A cloud is a refugee from a shoreline we forgot to draw. The border is undone before we can trace it.
And yet we insist on drawing: on reports, in registers, on GIS maps, in the neat polygons of conservation plans. We insist because administration requires borders. After all, language craves nouns. After all, politics rewards ownership. “Wetland” then becomes not a place, but a pause in circulation. A temporary entanglement of flows, a slowing that produces the illusion of location. What we manage, conserve, and destroy is not a thing but a rhythm, not a unit but a duration. And yet, we talk of nature in units, in acres, in spreadsheets. (In the future essay on AI, we will pick why this numero-technicity will be the Achilles heel in the coming future, for everything that is countable, mappable, linkable, translatable will enter into the domain of algorithmic hyperspace, fed into data that can breed more data, just because we assumed there is a transparency to reality, that things can be articulated in their relation). Thankfully, something more always seeps out, evaporates, escapes, becomes excess, defeats intention, remains opaque and hidden, and cannot be reduced to relational linearities.
For now, our job is simply to upend such linearities, to hide our intentions, for that is the most human thing possible. This is why the title “A Thousand Wetlands” is a lie, a double agent. It admits the deceit of countability, it fakes a discreetness, a neat stack of wetlands, a neat multiplication of units. And yet it also gestures to what exceeds number: to the infinitude of wetness that resists enclosure. If there are wetlands, they are infinite; if they are infinite, they cannot be one. All our attempts are only acts of subtraction from an oneness which exceeds our grasp, permanently, and it is that finitude which primes us to think thought differently.
Instead of valuing exactitude of articulation, refusing the comfort of stability, of naming and pinning things by their identities, perhaps we can see things in transience, in motion, in seepage, in transformation. To think with wetness is to think with instability as a method. It is to allow ontology to be slippery, method to be porous, politics to be leaky. It is to inhabit the refusal of clean lines as a generative space, to find in the lie of the title a way of practising truth otherwise.
The lie, then, is also a gift. It unsettles us, forces us to linger in the in-between, to recognise that what we study is always already moving away, and that our categories are only ever late arrivals at the scene. Wetlandic thought is born in this lateness—in knowing that we arrive after the border has already dissolved, after the vapour has already escaped, after the count has already failed. Wetlandic thought begins with the failure of capture as the given.
But why do we need wetlandic thought now?
Because the ground beneath us is no longer solid, if it ever was. Because floods come earlier, not just because of climate change-induced changes, but because we transcended borders we failed to see for what they are, we took on rivers and swamps as potential land that can be made dry, spatialising epistemic arrogance at city-scale, only to be set up for a wetness that we cannot resist. Because we can see that our nation-states will never be able to unsee the borders they have created, and the politics of the now will be too late for the politics that are needed for the future. Because wars linger longer, not just in action but in mental portrayal–images of violence repeated endlessly by social media algorithms to serve an insatiable need for serving our own desires. Because communities are fracturing into marketable fragments that take over commons, of collectivities, of pluralities, that is depleting the self as a vital node of a larger cohort, and recasting subjectivity only as an individual customer.
Because even before we knew it, we have spent centuries kneeling before these three gods, mistaking them for truth, for the real, forgetting that such gods themselves created, they are only ever idols carved from particular times and places.
Harfouch (2023), in Against The World, calls them by name:
Capitalism Realism — the conviction that there is no alternative, that markets are eternal, that the ledger is scripture. (We will discuss whether Capitalism is dead, as Yanis Varoufakis claims, with the rise of technofeudalism, or if it's only the latest stage in a long-brewing malignancy)
The sovereign individual — the fenced-off self, property and proprietor, master of fate, unit of measure.
The nation-state — sacrosanct, armed, imagining itself eternal, drawing borders as if rivers obey lines of ink.
These three gods appear separate, but they share the quintessential aspect of coloniality – “normalised domination”, and each is made more powerful by the others. Capitalist realism needs the individual as its primary consumer and worker; the individual requires the nation-state to guard its rights and borders; the state needs markets to legitimise its power, and capitalism needs the state to give it the regulatory backing to use financial violence. Together they form a trinity that feels inevitable. Impossible to imagine otherwise. Can you imagine 2050, where a federation of 13,473 bioregional municipal commons, governing our worlds together after the dissolution of the nation-state in 2045? Can you imagine humans becoming more-than-humans, developing a collective consciousness moving beyond the spectre of the individual, from being human alone? Can you imagine a world where more-than-care is developed as an alternative logic of value beyond profit, of institutions forgetting about the bottom line for once? An incredulous gasp, I hear, and it is precisely this resistance to thoughts being otherwise that is their power. As Mark Fisher (2009) noted, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And we shall attempt to do precisely this impossible task in this series, and while we are at it, we will add the sovereign individual and the nation-state to the list of statues to be felled. A thousand wetlands against the gods of coloniality.
We know these gods are solidified masses; they appear obdurate, and yet, water can carve out canyons into the igneous rocks. Inevitability is only a trick of repetition. These gods are not eternal. They are inventions that have hardened into faith. They are kept alive by ritual: development reports, growth statistics, national flags, graduation ceremonies, voting booths. To question them feels heretical. And yet the evidence is everywhere: catastrophe after catastrophe. Rising seas, endless displacement, wars over lines that rivers refuse, loneliness made destiny, progress turned desert. No, it does not have to be this way. We need a change of heart.
Half of wetlandic thought is negation: refusing to accept these gods as final. The other half is affirming an otherwise: opening toward lives and logics that slip through their grasp. But negation here cannot be a single stroke. The gods are not outside us. They seep into us, animate us, whisper in our categories. To overthrow them with force is to repeat their logic of conquest. The Hegelian theatre of thesis and antithesis only crowns another sovereign. Wetlandic thought does not storm the temple. It seeps into its foundations. It softens stone until it crumbles from within. It erodes categories, not with dynamite but with porosity. It makes the walls leak.
Consider capitalism. Its dream is drainage: the channelling of flows, the acceleration of circulation, the drying of soil so profit can take root. Progress means speed, liquidity means capital, wetness means waste. But every drain leaks, every canal silts, every ledger forgets what cannot be priced. Wetlandic thought slows the rush. It lets water linger, lets nutrients accumulate, lets value appear in forms no balance sheet can recognise. Capitalist realism says: this is the only world possible, only me. Wetlandic thought replies: worlds are always in flux, always seeping into one another, already more-than-one. There have been many worlds before you were born, and many will be after you are gone.
Consider the individual. Its dream is enclosure: a fenced pond, self-contained, master of its boundaries, owner of its depths. But the fence rots, evaporation escapes, the soil beneath seeps, and all these moves ignore ownership. The pond was never singular. It is tributary, always fed by unseen flows, always dependent on rain, always porous to air. Wetlandic thought insists the self is not sovereign but saturated, always more-than-one. The sovereign individual says: I am whole, I am master, I am one. Wetlandic thought replies: you are porous, tributary, carried by air you cannot command, fed by aquifers you cannot own.
Consider the nation-state. Its dream is the dam: concrete certainty, holding back floods, mastering rivers, deciding what passes and what stops. But dams silt, crack, and collapse under pressure. Water seeps through spillways, trickles under foundations, and bypasses control in underground streams. Wetlandic thought is this trickle: patient, persistent, undoing the illusion of mastery drop by drop. The nation-state says: this border is sacred, this territory eternal. Wetlandic thought replies: the cloud has already crossed, the aquifer flows beneath your fence, belonging cannot be mapped but only lived.
So, the “why” is not abstract. It is urgent. To continue worshipping the dry gods is to drown. The flood is not metaphorical; it is already here. Wetlandic thought is not salvation, not a cure, not an escape. It is a way of breathing differently within catastrophe, of lingering with porosity, of living in unfinished worlds where futures are already germinating in mud, seepage, cloud, but remain unknown.
The lie of the title—A Thousand Wet-lands—is also its truth. There are no countable wet-lands, only wetness. The thousand names gesture toward infinitude, toward the refusal of closure, toward the reminder that the world cannot be held in a ledger or fenced by a dam. To negate such gods, we must encounter wetness itself: unmastered, leaking, ever present, ever alive—whether we can see it or even if it remains outside of our view.
References:
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.
Harfouch, A. S. (2023). Against the world: Towards an Islamic liberation philosophy. Ekpyrosis Press.
Jackson, S. A. (2011). Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking toward the third resurrection. Oxford University Press.
Jasimuddin. (circa 1930). Amay bhashaili re [Poem].
Nietzsche, F. (1974). The gay science (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1882.)
Varoufakis, Y. (2024). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. Penguin/Vintage.
How to cite this article: Shafique, Tanzil (2025). "Wetness against the three gods (A Thousand Wet-Lands)," Interrogations, doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17647469
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Read the first installment: Rivulet 1 / Let us be wet…
