I learned about the mass grave in 2018. It is located about five minutes by car from the Texas house I grew up in. I had driven past it every morning on my way to school, in the last dark hour before the sun took to stage.
When I heard about the grave, I felt a slick iciness in my chest. I was angry. As if I had been the last one to learn a family secret, and the secret was about me.
But the grave, though hidden, was no secret. It was created after the Civil War, at a time when Southern states were desperate to rebuild and Northern states were eager to invest. The result was a shared interest in cheap labor, and, in the aftermath of slavery’s dishonorable discharge, convicts—or Black Americans who were easy to recast as convicts—became the solution. The conditions were horrible. But they were documented, even if it was in that slippery way that the marginalized are often recorded, counted, and bemoaned, but never quite seen.
Once I learned about the grave, I saw hints of its existence all over. There they were, in the city streets and institutions named after the men who orchestrated forced labor agreements. There they were, spoken from the mouth of a former prison guard who had tried to tell local officials about the grave’s existence. There they were, everywhere.
There they were, even though, in truth, the evidence was also nowhere. The grave was conspicuously absent from my town’s historiography. The same institutions whose names bore witness to it carried no direct mentions in their own histories. None of my friends or family knew about it. I, too, had driven by the grave multiple days a week for ten years without the barest hint of awareness. It was as though for a long time there was some quality of the grave that made it impossible to know about.
But what I knew then, even without being able to explain how, was that if the grave was unknowable, it wasn’t because of the remains it held or any haunting from beneath the ground. It had something to do with the town itself. It was the world above that rendered the grave below not just unknown, but unknowable.
“When what we know changes,” science historian James Burke once wrote, “the world changes, and with it, everything.”1 The world changes when a new thing is able to become known. But Burke didn’t mention that the prospect of the world changing can be staggering, even terrifying. Change carries uncertainty. One way to stave off upheaval is to—whether consciously or not—tightly draw the curtains on what is already established. What’s known can be managed. The unknowable can only disrupt.
***
Thinking about the unknowable takes some prep work, mostly because the idea of unknowability seems so vague. When I say “the unknowable,” you might picture a mass of nothingness, the blank white loading zone of the Matrix, or maybe outer space. With this, you are imagining an abstraction, the opposite of thing-ness. You’re envisioning whatever you think absence looks like. But the idea of the unknowable can be pinned down. To do so merely requires some distinctions.
First of all, the unknowable is not the same as the unknown. You may not know how to juggle, or how to speak Hausa, or how to use a scanning tunneling microscope. You may not know the number of Lebanese people outside of Lebanon or the name of the Chinese mariner who sailed an impressive amount of the world in the fourteenth century. These are all practices and facts that may be unknown to you, but you could learn them. Even more importantly, you know how to figure out what it would take to learn each of them. I’m not saying it would be easy, just that it’s possible.
Secondly, the unknowable is also bigger than what you don’t know how to know. Scientists don’t yet know how many exoplanets exist or are inhabited. This is missing information, not unknown information. That word “missing” implies an ought, for many scientists would surely like to know the details of exoplanet inhabitation. But a current lack of sufficiently sophisticated tools is what obscures the answers. In other words, scientists may not know not how to know the answers, but they clearly know the questions.
Further, when I talk about the unknowable, I’m not alluding to Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “unknown unknowns.”2 That phrase has always irritated me, because it treats the unknown as individual pieces of information that you might uncover in the same way a botanist in the Amazon might discover a new species of plant.3 “We didn’t even know that we didn’t know about this thing!” the imaginary intrepid explorer exclaims. Sure, there are some events that do exist like this—a fire, an earthquake, and a global pandemic are all events that can’t be predicted. But they are unknown mostly in the sense of being unexpected and unanticipated. They are not unknowable.
All of these unknowns fit into a familiar paradigm of the sequential way that knowledge operates within most fields, disciplines, and trades. Those who work today build upon the knowledge of those who came before. Those who come after us will know things that we did not, and so on. Everyone stands higher and higher on the shoulders of evermore giants, a wonderful (if rickety) tower of progress.
If this is the case, then the unknowable is the gust that sways the tower.
The unknowable is not disruption for disruption’s sake. To understand the unknowable, you must abandon the comforting fantasy of facts and information as things that can be picked up or put down like boxes of cereal on a grocery shelf. You must be willing to entertain the idea that knowing is not so straightforward. It can be a murky, quiet, loud, shadowy, difficult, contradictory process. To understand the unknowable, you have to shift your focus away from information and towards the knowers. What you know defines what you cannot know. What you have internalized to the point of naturalizing—the kind of knowledge that infuses your whole life, self, and orienting structure—defines what you cannot know.
The unknowable is that which demands you change the very way you make sense of yourself or the world around you. It lies just beyond the frameworks that structure your understanding of the world. This is why it is so difficult to perceive: you simply are not used to doing so. This is why it is so inherently discordant: if it weren’t, it would merely be unknown, not unknowable. The unknowable is confrontational and dissonant by design. It’s the thing that requires a massive rearrangement of your understanding to grasp. It’s the grave you grew up with that couldn’t let you know it existed. The unknowable is all of the information that, although it isn’t hidden, cannot be acknowledged or assimilated due to the contradictions it poses to the fundamental precepts upon which your system of knowledge rests.
We—whoever your “we” is (or, as Nandita Sharma puts it, “the ‘we’ that both celebrants and dissidents recognize themselves as belonging to”)—are the ones who make a thing unknowable.4
***
I am searching for a practice of detecting the unknowable.
In reality, this means that I’m searching for a way of detecting the boundaries of the structures of understanding I’ve been raised in. The reason why I search has much to do with what the unknowable holds: the ability to restructure everything.
I’m drawn to the unknowable because I am still in the wake of the grave in my hometown. What the presence of that grave finally shouted out is the extent to which Sugar Land, Texas was home to some of the most violently racist forced labor systems that the United States has ever seen. This unknowable truth could only be whispered while I was growing up. Today, the city is diverse and thriving, full of upwardly-mobile immigrants in search of a safe place to raise families in the richest country in the world. They are able to be there, in part, because of the fortune raised through the industries that defined a town once known as “the hellhole on the Brazos.”5 And while I distantly felt the brutality of Sugar Land’s history while growing up, seeing it be clearly acknowledged has rearranged me.
My Nigerian parents brought me to Texas when I was nine and I left as soon as I could at age eighteen. I never publicly claimed to be from there, and retained few ties to the place. But the grave changed my relationship to my hometown. When your feet have trudged a land for nine years, over soccer fields and parks, through gas pedals and bike tires, with friends and family and sometimes alone, how can you pretend that you exist outside of it?
The grave undermined the way that I was raised to think about my hometown—as sleepy, perfect, uniquely “Texan”—and it allowed for a new understanding that was somber and painful, yet more expansive. It allowed for an understanding that felt like it could include everything, even the difficult bits. The indigenous massacres, the heaving racism, the blood-stained battles, the hot and cold violence, the swamps and the plains, the layers of migration, the ever-shuffling industries: everything. I hadn’t realized that the city’s bullheaded and narrow projection of itself was what had left me convinced I had nothing to do with it. But once the sanitized story of my hometown crumbled, I could see it as it was. Paradoxically, I could finally see myself as part of it.
Endings and beginnings: these are what the unknowable threatens and promises. I have the sense that we need both, especially now. Author Dougald Hine argues that in the wake of irreversible climate change, an end to the type of world that could bring about such devastation is required. “The end of the world as we know it is also the end of a way of knowing the world,” he writes.6 Theorist Sylvia Wynter says that, as we grapple with the imperialism that has shaped the modern world, we need “a new mode of experiencing ourselves in which every mode of being human … is a part of us,” rather than just a minority of experiences (and people) being upheld over the many. Whether we search for new ends or new beginnings, the keys to both lie in pulling the strings that might unravel the structures that organize what we presently know the world to be.
All this said, detecting the unknowable is an enormously difficult thing to do. Consider how much easier it is to discuss the formerly-unknowable than the currently-unknowable. The formerly-unknowable has already been incorporated into collective understandings, so it’s possible to perceive it in a way that feels like a triumph, not a challenge.
A classic example is the work of Galileo Galilei, the sixteenth and seventeenth century Italian astronomer. Galilei brought the unknowable of his time to the forefront when he supported the Copernican theory that Earth revolved around the Sun. In doing so, he implicitly challenged the Aristotelian beliefs that were prevalent at the time. The Aristotelian description of a Sun that rotated around Earth implicitly justified the powerful political position of the Catholic Church. Therefore, in supporting the Copernican theory, Galilei struck at the very foundations of seventeenth-century Western European society.
In response, high-ranking Cardinals fretted about the societal implications of Galilei’s writing. He was sentenced to house arrest and put on trial for beliefs that were revolutionary in the most basic sense of the world.
As a child within a Western tradition of education, I learned about Galilei in grade school. It was so easy to hear his story as an important and mostly inoffensive historical tale. Today when I reflect on the events, it strikes me that Galilei must have felt afraid.
Perhaps I think this because of the fear that I feel. There is danger threaded through the act of searching for even a way of sensing the unknowable. Who would have thought that the question of whether the sun or the earth move could be a political one? Structures have churning logics of their own. Like a snake that hisses and strikes when stepped on, these logics become dangerous once transgressed. The unknowable is always destabilizing, and there are consequences for even the smallest attempt to find it.
For this reason, it feels easier to search for the unknowable from outside of an order. Distance protects. Just as every language reveals its gaps in the concepts it cannot translate from another (saudade, pura vida, ji sike), holding multiple structures alongside each other makes the unknowable in each easier to see. This was the approach called for in many of the African, Asian, and Caribbean nations that achieved independence in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. They were able to pinpoint the gaps in the worldviews of their former colonizers because of the ways these worldviews had been crudely stamped atop their own. Édouard Glissant famously called for opacity, an insistence on multiplicity that would not devolve into hierarchy.7 Today, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí argues from a similar positioning for the use of the term “worldsense” rather than “worldview”. The former is a nod to specificity and the decreased primacy of the visual in Yoruba West African culture.8
The truth, though, is that for all of its hard-won wins and clarity, the postcolonial approach didn’t entirely work. As a member of one of those nations, I know well how many of us are still in the afterlife of colonization, the full impact of which remains unknowable, at least to some extent. And in a time where hyper-globalized markets and the internet have jumbled much of the world together, I doubt that there really is an outside from which to sense the unknowable. It reminds me of the 1956 Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists in Paris, organized around the question of how African nations could re-build indigenous cultures within and despite the degradation of colonization. Of the participants, James Baldwin would later write that “they were all, now, whether they liked it or not, related to Europe, stained by European visions and standards, and their relation to themselves, and to each other, and to their past had changed.”9
If there is no outside, then we are all left with no option but to determine the unknowable from a compromised position within. I think of it like playing a game of tag in the dark: hands outstretched, reaching for a surface that still prompts a jolt of surprise once felt. Risky, wary, and exhilarating. But as N. Katherine Hayles writes, “Although there may be no outside that we can know, there is a boundary.”10
The boundary I’m searching for exists in a place where a structure meets the reality it cannot hold. Thomas Kuhn, in writing about how new paradigms of thought emerge in scientific research, says that a deep awareness of the existing structure of understanding makes it possible to detect when something is off. “Novelty ordinarily emerges only for the [person] who, knowing with precision what [they] should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong.”11
Put differently: it’s the combination of being in the structure and possessing a willingness to entertain difference that makes it possible to detect the unknowable. Multiple fluencies—not in languages, but in understandings—are required.
And you’re never really alone in the act. There are always people whose lives are connected to unknowability, whether they would say so or not. There are people whose very presence complicates a nation’s idea of itself, or the narrative it is keen on projecting. They exist, and in doing so, they carry histories that threaten to undo hegemonic narratives.12
There are organizers and researchers whose commitment to their work pushes them to challenge narrow precedents. Their devotion to investigating at all costs sees them pushing past conventions and, in doing so, they begin the process of inviting in the unknowable.
In my hometown, there was an activist and historian named Reginald Moore who regularly went to county meetings to tell officials about the presence of our mass grave. He was summarily dismissed every time. Today, Rice University has acquired his archives of research in a collection that bears his name and celebrates his labor.
It is the willingness of so many to exist in that shadowy in-between place that gives me strength. They are like a lighthouse in the water when others choose to stay on land. They stand tall, trusting that one day the great many will climb into the boat.13
If it is the greater “we” of society that creates the structure that depends on denying the unknowable, the much smaller “we’s” are the ones who can rearrange it. And when we do, we risk a more precious reward: rearranging ourselves as well.
James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 7.
Department of Defense, “DoD News Briefing: Secretary Rumsfield and Gen. Myers,” February 12, 2002. See ➝.
The full phrase, from then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Nandita Sharma, “Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Decolonizing Decolonization” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 165.
“The Brazos” refers to the Brazos River, which is the longest river in Texas and flows through my hometown.
Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins (White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2023), 5.
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 68.
Cited in Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 42, italics in the original.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 65, italics in the original.
Edward W. Said and Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
I think of poet-theorist Christina Sharpe’s description of “the wake,” the place of fundamental contradiction where one “occup{ies} and {is} occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding.” Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, (Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke University Press, 2016), 13–14.
Spatial Computing is a collaboration with the M.S. in Computational Design Practices Program (MSCDP) at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University.
