Before Consent, There Was The Kitchen

What the Body Reveals about Power

BEFORE LANGUAGE

Before Christmas, I asked the community a simple question.

How was power taught to you, before it became obvious?

I waited.

Nothing came back.

The post sat. People read it. Some saved it. A few shared it.

But no one answered.

At first, it felt like a miss. Maybe the question was too vague. Maybe the timing was off.

Then I understood what I’d asked.

Power is rarely taught as power.

It is practiced.

Rehearsed.

Installed.

It doesn’t arrive with an explanation.

It arrives as don’t do that.

As this isn’t for you.

As laughter that lands a beat too late.

As being told to wait — and learning not to ask how long.

All of this happens at home,

under the language of care,

by people who love us

and never name what they’re passing on.

These aren’t lessons you remember being taught.

They’re movements the body absorbs.

Small corrections. Quiet repetitions.

When I asked people to explain how power was taught to them, I was asking them to translate something their bodies learned long before consent.

By the time we’re asked to name it, the body has already adjusted.

It knows where to stand.

What to touch.

What not to reach for.

The question wasn’t unanswered.

It was answered before language.

FROM TRAINING TO STRUCTURE

Before the state, power was already being practiced at home.

You learned where you were allowed to go.

Which rooms you could enter without asking.

Which ones required permission — or silence.

Work appeared early.

Not as labor, but as help.

As responsibility.

As something you were praised for doing well —

and expected to continue.

No one explained hierarchy.

It was felt.

In tone.

In timing.

In who ate first —

and who waited.

Before consent, there was the kitchen.

Power became ordinary through repetition and correction.

A hand moved.

A voice intervened.

No explanation followed.

Through silence:

What was never explained.

What could not be asked.

What the body learned to avoid.

Through reward:

Approval.

Relief.

Being left alone.

Movement was regulated here.

Labor was assigned here.

Hierarchy was enforced without language.

This is not how power announces itself.

This is how it installs itself.

SCALING THE TRAINING

The training does not stop at home.

Early rehearsal makes later programming by schools, media, and the state feel natural rather than coercive.

Some systems train the body to police proximity.

Caste produces purity reflexes.

Anti-Blackness produces fear and distance.

Different names, same rehearsal: separation without explanation.

Who can sit close.

Who can touch — and who is rendered untouchable.

Who must be avoided.

Distance becomes instinct before it becomes policy.

Other systems train endurance.

Capitalism teaches the body to tolerate harm when it is framed as necessary.

Suffering becomes procedural.

Lives are reduced to inputs.

Comfort is protected by abstraction.

Pain, elsewhere, is rendered acceptable so continuity is not interrupted.

By the time these systems appear as institutions or global orders, the body already knows how to comply.

What looks like indifference is trained capacity.

What looks like inevitability is rehearsal.

THE LENS

Lots of things shape us early.

Power is the one that teaches the body to live inside unequal relationships without questioning them.

That is a lens —

a way of noticing how what feels normal or inevitable was trained into the body long before we had language for it.

It doesn’t tell us what to think.

It changes what we can see.

This essay is part of an ongoing inquiry into how power is rehearsed, carried, and lived in motion. To see how these questions travel across geographies, sound, and everyday encounters, continue with Archives in Motion.

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Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist and cultural architect working across installation, film, writing, and education. His practice examines Black–South Asian entanglements, diasporic memory, and the afterlives of caste and colonialism, using ritual, gesture, and archival inquiry as material.

As founder of the BlindianProject, Batambuze develops long-form artistic and educational works that challenge systems of erasure while proposing new frameworks for cultural recognition and solidarity.

Batambuze speaks and facilitates internationally on Black–South Asian solidarities, caste and colonial legacies, diasporic identity, and cultural resistance.

For speaking engagements, workshops, or media inquiries:

jonah@blindian-project.com