Reconceiving Time as a Way Through Hate and Despair

On my way to drop off my dog, Zuki, to boarding yesterday, I saw a “Trump 2025” sign and I felt my blood begin to boil.

Against the backdrop of residents being snatched from DC’s streets, of innocent people being profiled and arrested, of the unnecessary and deeply disturbing presence of the National Guard, I cannot understand how anyone is still—even if they voted for Trump—endorsing these policies. Above all, what confounds me the most is how anyone can be capable of quite so much hate, and to hate with such conviction. And then, there is the other side as I remember how I felt during the 2024 election: the deep disappointment from Democrats to speak to people’s needs, the sense of general despair that their campaign was run on, which I wrote about in a previous Substack.

It strikes me that the two largest political parties in the US today are a choice between hate and despair. And both of these stem from fear. Hate: the fear of the other i.e. the other who are perceived to steal jobs, to commit crime, who threaten to take power away from those who may have never earned it but found themselves able to fall back on it, unquestionably. Despair: the fear of what the future will look like if we do not vote a certain way, of what this country will be reduced to, of what we are seeing play out now. Despair without offering hope; “vote for us to avoid a worse outcome”, the campaign seemed to read.

At the end of the day, the impact that both hate and despair have on our body amounts to the same: it takes from us till we have nearly nothing left over for ourselves. It contorts our bodies so that we walk with slumped shoulders; it transforms our beings so that we grow cold and depleted. What’s key is that it does this whether or not you voted for Trump, whether or not you are on the ‘winning’ side, whether or not you are cheering on what’s happening in our country now. Because hate, too, has a cost. As Nelson Mandela so wisely says in his autobiography, Long Walk To Freedom:

In the end, we are all losers. We have all given up a part of our soul to arrive here, at this giant wedge in society that feels impossible to overcome.

The other day, a friend and fellow writer posted an Instagram video about the conception of time in various African societies as one that doesn’t move forward, but backwards. According to John Mbiti, a Kenyan philosopher, in his book African Religions and Philosophy, Bantu languages don’t have a word for a distant future; instead, there are two words to describe time. Taking Swahili as an example, there is sasa, which refers to now or the immediate future, and zamani, which refers to the past. The distant future cannot exist because time is tied to events, and so we events create time. In other words, the future cannot exist if it is not felt.

This is, of course, in stark contrast to Western notions of time, which is treated as a commodity, something we can save or spend. And it has implications for all kinds of things: because of time as a commodity, we can promise all kinds of things about what society will look like, things that no one knows will play out for real because they haven’t been experienced. Like that the future needs ‘fixing’ because if we don’t, we should be fearful of what will come to pass. In the US political system, the future is one that is derived from fear.

I wonder what would happen if we reimagined time. If we learned from how Bantu-speaking societies conceived of time as a past that always exists. Could we turn to this past, to our history that is filled with hope nestling amidst the despair; that is filled with love nestling amidst the hate? Could we create a better future through being part of something bigger, something better, something that will soon become our past? Isn’t that what community movements—in the campaigns of candidates like Zohran Mamdani, for example—are doing: giving us reasons to hope again, to love again, making these events part of our shared history?

And so, I want to try out something new in how I approach the despondency of politics these days. To not just read the news headlines and get bogged down by it, but rather to seek out the slivers of hope, of community, that often get drowned out. Because, if we don’t look for these, if we don’t turn to our past, or to the spaces in which we are creating joyful events today that will soon become the past, how else do we survive in this world? How else do we get past the hate and despair and emerge into something resembling love?