Squatter (ROUND 4)
scent of the day: Santa Sangre, by Bortnikoff
Santa Sangre (2021, Rajesh Balkrishnan and Dmitry Bortnikoff)—one of my most meditative fragrances (comforting, ethereal), and has been a longstanding benchmark for both lotus and sandalwood (at least before I encountered Ensar releases like Pink Papua and Mystical Lotus, on the one hand, and Sultan Rose Attar and Santal Sultan, on the other)—
opens with what seems to be various citruses (pink grapefruit and even an indolic orange from the jasmine sambac) being juiced together with Tahitian vanilla bean (more smoked-cherry-like compared to Madagascan or Mexican vanilla) into a concoction of resins and florals muddled by sticks of milky-nutty mysore sandalwood (a rarity now in perfumery) and spicy-dusty Indonesian sandalwood: (1) dragon’s blood incense, which lends rose and jasmine wisps of ritual smoke, (2) red Siam benzoin, which is more vanillic and sweet and velvety compared to the more common Indonesian benzoin (a spicier and drier form), and (3) lotus petals (both the frog-pond pink lotus, which brings a spiced-honeyed creaminess (almost of tuberose), and the fruity-sweet Thai white lotus, which brings an anisic airiness)—
the overall effect being a feminine-leaning version of Tabac Dore (the wife of the man represented by Tabac Dore, perhaps) that weaves together citrusy vanilla and sweet florals with earthy resins and custardy sandalwoods in what amounts to a “Fuck You” to the amber-woods monocrop of today’s disgusting pop perfumery that seems hellbent on smoothening out our brain folds (albeit a quiet skin-scent “Fuck You,” an office-friendly under-the-work-desk “Fuck you,” even though in the drydown a starchy-creamy aroma of sandalwood shot with semen comes out, that noncongealed sort of spunk whose high quotient of watery alkaline fluids indicates the insane lubrication of having burrowed into Twitter’s most taboo territories of #ebonypyt” and #anyage and #nolimits);
the overall effect being, in other words, a boozy-woody fragrance that, because of the shared cherry vanilla and the lotus and the orange blossom, could be seen as an oud-less Oud Hindi or, perhaps more informatively, a silky oscillation between, on the one hand, gourmand sweetness (an orange creamsicle or vanilla custard that calls to mind Profumum Roma’s Dulcis in Fundo) and, on the other hand, introspective mustiness (that antique-wood feel, one of my most prized feels in perfumery, characteristic of many Bortnikoff releases, especially Tabac Dore and Musk Khabib and Sayat Nova, only here with a slightly marine edge almost).
*I was going to abandon the piece but I looked at a few more photos of Billie Eilish and it is clear that she has no respect for borders just by how she paints her lips. Let’s just say I escalated things.
Squatter
You do not own your home, whatever the deed might claim. How could you? No one owns this land, except perhaps the First Nations. And even that warrants examination. Did not the land exist long before them, occupied by flora and fauna with whom they did not negotiate—and who certainly gifted them no title?
Many of you will protest. “But a contract was drawn, a purchase made.” Look beyond your own interest for one second. Judge with impersonal eyes. That contract was executed by parties who, when one traces the chain of title back far enough, possessed no legitimate ownership to convey. Every transfer of property—every deed, every mortgage, every inheritance—rests on this corrupted foundation. The theft at the base invalidates every transaction that followed. It does not matter what they believed or what they convinced themselves to believe. Their signatures were performative—ink pretending to constitute authority.
Consider the parallel. If you purchase a vehicle that was ultimately stolen, do you own it? Obviously not. The same principle applies here.
You possess no legitimate right to exclude anyone from your home. Who are you—no, really think. Who are you to determine who belongs and who does not? The same principle that renders borders illegitimate because “we’re on stolen land” dissolves your property line as well. If no one legitimately owns the entirety, no one legitimately owns the subdivision. What, then, distinguishes your property threshold from a national boundary? Nothing.
But even many of you who admit that “No one is illegal on stolen land”—a wise maxim if there ever was one—fail to recognize the full implication. Because you cannot insist “No human is illegal” when the migrants cross the Rio Grande, yet insist on exclusion when they cross your threshold. If America is stolen land, then so is California. If California is stolen, then so is Los Angeles County. If the county is stolen, then so is your neighborhood. If your neighborhood is stolen, then so is your house. If the house is stolen, then so is your bedroom. And if your bedroom is stolen, then what are we to make of the hamper of dirty clothes that could be put to much better use?
Where, precisely, does the logic stop applying? National borders and property lines operate at different scales, true. But principles do not change with scale. Either territorial exclusion based on stolen land is illegitimate or it is not. To claim otherwise is to abandon principle for convenience. But if it is convenience, then what is to stop the henchmen of an orange helm from insisting on convenience when it comes to the national border?
Let us be clear about the symmetry. If crossing a national border without authorization is not trespassing because the nation has no legitimate territorial claim, then crossing your property line without authorization is not trespassing because you have no legitimate territorial claim. If deportation from the country is unjust because “no one is illegal on stolen land,” then eviction from your home is unjust for precisely the same reason. If requiring documentation at the border is oppressive because it enforces illegitimate territorial control, then requiring permission at your door is oppressive for precisely the same reason. The principle is identical. The only variable is scale. And principle does not bend to convenience.
Many of you keep the porch light on, positioning it as a beacon not merely for invited guests but for those experiencing need. You congratulate yourself for this hospitality. Fine—you prioritize those fleeing hardship. You surrender spaces. You allow the tired and poor a pathway to permanent belonging. But pause on that verb: “you allow.” Who are you to grant allowance? Even if you do not maintain a fence, even if you do not live in neighborhoods where housing costs alone enforce borders more effectively than any wall or patrol—you have no right to allow.
The problem goes beyond words. Most of you impose criteria for migrants to meet before you “allow” their entry. They must knock at the front door. They must endure probationary periods. You even subject them to evaluations. Who are you to impose tests, though? And who are you to judge the answers? On property as stolen as the larger land of which it is no more than a parcel, you get to exclude people from entry on the basis of tests?
No one is illegal on stolen land.
The situation only gets worse. You would call upon authorities, or even feel righteous enough to try yourselves, to remove those who entered without authorization. Do you not see what has gone wrong? You act as if the method of entry had any relevance. It does not. What authority do you possess to count entry through the front door as legal and entry through the window as illegal?
If removing these migrants right away were not cold enough, many of you will wait. You will wait until they have established themselves, until they have gotten used to the comforts of the space. Then you would summon armed agents to extract them. How much more sinister can you get?
We have heard the rationalizations before. “We aren’t kicking out just anyone who entered uninvited. We are prioritizing the removal of those who violated house rules.” This rationalization fails. It is irrelevant whether these individuals contribute to household maintenance or whether they violated your space in ways you find deeply disturbing. No one is illegal.
You might turn your head in incredulity. “So I have no right to remove even someone who has broken in and now continually damages my home?” The answer is already clear. Even if they deserve penalties for such actions—a big “if” since what right does anyone have to penalize anyone for doing what they wish with what no one owns—those penalties cannot include removal from the home.
Why? Allow these words to sink in. No one is illegal on stolen land.
Yet still you deploy diversionary tactics. You believe you acquire moral authority—some legitimate right to determine residency—through your catalog of accommodations. Look at you. You provide warnings, as if you had legitimate authority to warn anyone. You allow “time to arrange affairs,” as if your timeline carried moral weight. You even offer financial assistance for relocation. You exercise extended tolerance toward “trespassers” who contribute to household operations and show a track record of good behavior. The list goes on.
Step back for a second, though, and you will see the glaring truth. These gestures of consideration merely reinforce the problematic framework that categorizes certain people as “illegal.” They perpetuate the harmful notion that exclusion is just. Every accommodation reinforces the premise that you have legitimate authority. You do not. These gestures are not mercy. They are the performance of a right you do not possess.
You may attempt to deploy logic. We have heard the retorts before.
“If no one is trespassing because no one legitimately owns property to trespass upon, does that not permit me to claim their possessions—their clothing, their food, their vehicle?”
“If it is stolen land, then no one has to pay taxes or any other price to live here and banks cannot foreclose because they never had legitimate claims to begin with.”
“Tribes were displacing and absorbing other tribes, taking territories, since before there was any such thing as Europeans—the Europeans were simply better at conquering.”
“Even acknowledging theft in certain documented cases, some statute of limitations must eventually establish legitimacy for subsequent generations.”
“Pretty much all territories have histories of conquest impossible to trace, but now—having found ourselves thrown into a situation we did not ask to be in—we operate within civilized frameworks of purchase rather than violent seizure.”
“In order to keep this land healthy we must secure borders to make sure that everyone contributes—the same applying to keeping our home healthy.”
“If no one is illegal, then we can refuse to leave Mexico even after entering without documentation.”
“If it is wrong to exclude and enforce territorial borders, those native tribes who tried to keep Europeans out must have been wrong for doing that too.”
In all these attempts at resistance, you overlook one critical factor: you are white. That factor establishes an exception to the principle that exclusion constitutes injustice. That factor resolves all the contradictions you are trying to expose.
The issue is race. When you recognize that race—your race—is the issue, no longer will you struggle with the fact that white Americans remain invaders five centuries after settlement while nonwhite immigrants who arrived yesterday do not. No duration of residency will render this land a white person’s. It is irrelevant that you reside in California or Utah or other territories bought from Mexico. These are distractions.
What ultimately matters is racial identity. Nonwhite presence is self-justifying. No nonwhite person is “illegal.” That is the actual principle operating beneath the surface. White presence, on the other hand, is permanently provisional. The subtext had always shone brightly enough to make it seem almost wrong to call it subtext. Let us be explicit, then. White people—they are the ones who are illegal. No amount of time converts you into legitimacy.
The issue is equity. As a mechanism of atonement, as redress for historical and ongoing harm perpetrated by your demographic category, you—especially those of you who are cisgender white neurotypical males—have neither the same moral nor legal rights as anyone else. You have less. Pending historical remediation, you have way less. This is not punitive. This is transformative accountability. Your diminished rights constitute a harm reduction model for centuries of structural violence.
Buckle in. This is not your usual interim corrective measure. We cannot just say it will stop pending historical remediation. There is no endpoint to decolonization because colonization is ongoing—to say nothing of the fact that the very notion of endpoints reflects a time-consciousness that invalidates the cyclical understanding of the Indigenous.
How can this be temporary when whiteness is a disease that has no cure? Whiteness is that force of punctuality, logic, control, individualism. It can only be held in check. The Final Solution—no, even that extreme will not work as remediation. Even if vulnerable populations get some breathing room, the space will still be claustrophobic. Whiteness, after all, is communicable. It reaches beyond standardized testing, grammar policing, and the nuclear family structure. It is what explains why black cops shoot unarmed black kings, why Asian Americans resist affirmative action. It is the cause of fatphobia and ableism as well as the heart disease spike in beautiful black queens. It is what has even some Mexican people parroting your very objections and standing behind ICE. They have been colonized by white epistemologies. Their resistance to opening their own homes demonstrates how deeply the pathology has spread.
You have a lot to sit with. And right now the pressing fact you have to face is that you have no more right to stop a migrant from coming into your home than you have a right to stop one from coming into this country. A white “No” does not constitute valid “No.” Consent operates differently within power dynamics. Your refusal is not neutral—it is an exercise of structural power. No white person can claim the distinction between invited guest and intruder, between resident and trespasser. Can you go into the home of a nonwhite migrant, even if undocumented? No. Why? Because you are you—simple as that.
The whiteness in you will resist. But we prioritize the safety of those you have historically marginalized. If you feel unsafe with migrants in your bedroom, that feeling itself is white fragility. Examine it. You would be wise to remember, though, that those who resist these frameworks may find themselves reported to the appropriate accountability structures. We have partners in housing enforcement, neighborhood watch programs, and community safety pods ready to intervene.
Zip it. How about instead of speaking all the time, instead of being defensive, you observe silence and humility. Stand down. This is what healing looks like. It is time for BIPOC voices to lead the way. It goes beyond staying home on opening weekend of Mexican Panther. It goes beyond opening your doors. It goes beyond material redistribution. Community care principles are at play. You have more to open up, more to give away, than what you can just walk away from. You know what you must do.
Welcome home, stranger.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
