GTDF decolonial work

Decolonial Work: Pruning Bonsai vs. Metabolizing Decay

Many approaches to decolonial work focus on the visible structures of knowledge, power, and legitimacy—pruning, shaping, or grafting elements onto an already existing system. This is akin to pruning a bonsai: carefully selecting which parts of a tree to keep or discard, controlling its form, forcing it into a predetermined aesthetic. While this approach may create a more pleasing or acceptable version of the tree, it does not change the conditions in which it grows. The soil remains untouched. The metabolic processes beneath the surface—the slow work of decay, decomposition, and regeneration—are ignored or suppressed in favor of managing appearances.

A meta-critical, metabolic approach, by contrast, recognizes that decolonial work is not about perfecting the visible structure of the tree, but about tending to the soil, the fungi, and the unseen networks of relationality that sustain life. Instead of controlling or engineering an ideal form, it asks:

• What needs to decompose for new possibilities to emerge?
• What happens when we tend to decay rather than fight it?
• How do we cultivate conditions that allow onto-genesis, rather than simply enforcing correction?

The Limits of Pruning: The Illusion of Control

The pruning approach to decoloniality often manifests through institutional reforms, language policing, and compliance-driven inclusion efforts. It focuses on:

• Epistemic competition—battles over who defines knowledge and which voices are recognized as authoritative.
• Moral purification—dividing people into villains, victims, and virtuous actors based on their proximity to historical harm.
• Performative correction—demanding linguistic, ideological, or cultural conformity as evidence of “progress.”

But like pruning a bonsai, this approach is fundamentally about control. It assumes that by managing surface-level appearances—by enforcing compliance, changing terminology, or regulating discourse—we can reshape deeper realities. However, control-based approaches to decoloniality often fail to address the underlying metabolism of coloniality itself: the extractive, competitive, and scarcity-driven logics that continue to shape relationality, even in spaces recognized as progressive.

Decoloniality as Metabolizing Decay

A metabolic approach, by contrast, does not seek to preserve or perfect a tree that was planted in toxic soil. It does not assume that pruning, grafting, or reshaping surface-level structures will be enough to sustain life. Instead, it asks:

• What if the soil carries both exhaustion and memory—holding possibilities for renewal as well as depletion?
• How do we recognize when tangled roots are still sustaining life, and when they are restricting it?
• What if the tree is both dying and seeding something new at the same time? How do we discern what to tend, what to release, and what to compost?

This requires engaging with decay and decomposition as necessary elements of change rather than failures to be avoided. It means working with collapse rather than against it, recognizing that modernity, like an overextended root system, is entangled in its own unsustainability.

Language as a Case Study: From Policing to Composting

One way to see the contrast between these approaches is through language politics.

A pruning approach to language assumes that if we correct words, we can correct reality. It focuses on enforcing the “right” terminology, ensuring compliance with evolving linguistic standards, and sanctioning those who fail to adapt. This is based on the belief that language creates reality—and therefore, controlling language can control meaning and power. 

A metabolic approach sees language not as a tool to be policed, but as a living, breathing ecosystem—one that shifts, decomposes, and transforms over time. Instead of asking, “Is this the correct word to use?” it asks:

• “What relational movements does this language create?”
• “What layers of stories, histories and emotional frequencies does it carry?”
• “What possibilities does it open or foreclose in each moment and context?”

From this perspective, decolonial language work is not about trimming speech into perfect, pre-approved forms. It is about tending to the metabolic processes that shape meaning—allowing for shifts, mutations, and composting rather than rigid enforcement.

Table of Differences: Pruning Bonsai vs. Metabolizing Decay

Aspect	Pruning Bonsai (Control-Based Decoloniality)	Metabolizing Decay (Meta-Critical Decoloniality)
Approach to Knowledge	Epistemic competition; fighting for dominance in defining truth.	Tending to the soil of meaning; acknowledging complexity and contradiction.
Relationship to Power	Securing moral authority through compliance, exclusion, or correction.	Recognizing recursive implication; metabolizing power rather than hoarding it.
View of Justice	Justice as redistribution of entitlements and recognition.	Justice as transformation of relational conditions.
Methodology	Compliance-driven enforcement; institutional correction.	Composting and metabolizing harm through ongoing relational work.
Political Focus	Expanding access within existing structures.	Questioning whether existing structures should be sustained at all.
Role of Language	Language as a tool to control meaning and enforce ideological alignment.	Language as a living ecosystem that shifts, decomposes, and transforms over time.
Ethical Orientation	Purification: sorting people into “good” and “bad” actors.	Complexity: holding contradiction, entanglement, and ongoing negotiation.
Temporal Orientation	Linear progress toward a more just society.	Cyclical and metabolic change, with decay as part of the process.

Beyond Pruning: Learning to Tend the Compost

A metabolic approach does not seek to perfect decoloniality. It recognizes that much of what we hold onto must be allowed to decompose. This includes not just colonial structures, but also the modernist aspirations of progress, purity, certainty and control that shape many decolonial efforts.

If we take seriously the idea that decolonization is not metaphor, then we must also take seriously that it is not a process of pruning the existing world into a more palatable shape. It is about composting what no longer serves, creating space for something beyond what we can currently recognize.

Rather than securing a place in modernity’s failing institutions, rather than competing for epistemic authority, rather than seeking to “win” the battle for representation within systems that are already collapsing, a metabolic approach asks:

• What are we feeding?
• What are we willing to let rot?
• How do we prepare for what comes next—not by controlling it, but by learning how to hold space for the unknowable?

Some will continue to prune, graft, and shape their bonsai as their decolonial practice. And that is their choice.

GTDF’s choice is to work at the compost pile, hands in the dirt, tending to the slow work of decay. Not because we wish to destroy, but because we know that life depends on death, that meaning is not fixed but metabolized, and that the deepest work of decoloniality is not about perfecting what exists—it is about clearing space for what is yet to come.