ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses coping strategies that the people of Cateme, following a brutal crushing of a communal protest in the resettlement site, employ in their attempts to make their lives liveable, as well as potentialities of politics and resistance articulated through this coping, living with, and ultimately surviving their precarity. Focusing on temporary and permanent migration, the chapter shows how, in spite of these practices of coping, the dispossessed people’s lives continue to be marked by suffering. As the hardships created by the multifarious violence of spatial capitalist abstractions are not overcome but, instead, are reconstituted by Cateme’s population itself, these practices of coping articulate the non-politics of abandonment: in the face of the direct, body-injuring violence evoked to suppress the social contestation that emerged in Cateme, the dispossessed population no longer challenges, nor openly contests the precarity of their lives, but merely survives it by abandoning the resettlement site. This abandonment – that is both a form of coping and precarity – forecloses possibilities of different imaginaries of life and space, thereby sustaining the current socio-material formation of capitalist abstractions in Tete and beyond.
