Unsummoned
In one of Franz Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes, he imagines different variations on the story of Abraham. His final re-imagining of the tale is also the most tragic:
“An Abraham who should come unsummoned! It is as if, at the end of the year, when the best student was solemnly about to receive a prize, the worst student rose in the expectant stillness and came forward from his dirty desk in the last row because he had made a mistake of hearing, and the whole class burst out laughing.”
What if, Kafka asks, the call that was meant for Abraham had reached the ears of other, unworthy Abrahams? Would these Abrahams who “should come unsummoned” be right to sacrifice their own children? After all, how are they to know the call was not meant for them? How do we decide who God does or doesn’t speak to?
Human sacrifice shows up in two of White Christianity’s foundation myths. The first, is the Christian version of the Binding, which does not tolerate ambiguity the way Jewish readings such as Kafka’s do, but rather identifies sacrifice with Christ and therefore sees in their White Isaac a prefiguration of the Word. The second is the foundational myth of colonialism, especially on the American continent. White Christianity was born from colonialism and has participated in it for as long as it has existed (that’s where the “White” bit comes in). Among colonialism’s multitude of justifications, depicting indigenous people as “savages” is nearly essential, and this depiction often emphasises violent practices such as human sacrifice.
From these two foundational myths, of the Word’s inarguable supremacy and of indigenous people’s unfettered savagery, the answer to our question, how do we decide who God speaks to, becomes clear. Today’s white Christians, when the Binding of Isaac is described as human sacrifice, are quick to offer context: it is only a parable, after all, and it is a shadow of a very distant time. No such context is afforded to indigenous people, who are still absurdly called upon to disavow their ancestors’ practices as if it were a pressing contemporary issue. The right to be contextualised is a function of being spoken to by God.
In his 2017 book, James R. Martel uses the word “misinterpellated” to describe Kafka’s unsummoned Abraham. Interpellation is the process by which we are called into existence as subjects. For White Christianity, indigenous people are subjects in the sense that they are the property of White Christian sovereignty, whereas White Christians (and Abraham is, in the White Christian imagination, himself a White Christian) are subjects in the sense that they are free, thinking and feeling agents. The sacrifices carried out by indigenous people are proof of their savage nature, while Abraham’s sacrifice is an example of his virtuous struggle with his faith as a White Christian subject.
Martel also sees Haitian revolutionaries as misinterpellated subjects: by turning the French Declaration of the Rights of Man against their colonists, and claiming the universal freedom and equality which was meant only for white Frenchmen for themselves, Haitian revolutionaries effectively chose that God (or in this case, the Declaration) spoke to them too, and acted upon this choice. Decolonisation is inseparable from this claim for active subjecthood.
Such a claim for active subjecthood naturally complements a different picture of sacrifice. One which is not carried out because it is asked of us by God, but because we ask it of ourselves. The sort of sacrifice which involves putting our own life and well-being on the line to defend the lives and well-being of those who are more vulnerable than us. The only place to begin such work is by recognising the right to context, to active subjecthood, to being summoned of those vulnerable people, the subjects of colonialism.