“All Words Remain Unresolved”: Ephemera, Crip Solidarities, and the Poetics of Alakesh Kalita

Abstract

This article intervenes in Indian disability justice through a case study of Assamese poet Alakesh Kalita, who lived with schizophrenia. Shifting focus from public activism to private, relational solidarity, it examines spaces shaped by care, intimacy, and affective labour. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of ephemera as evidence, the study analyses Kalita’s writings as a crip archive of endurance. These ephemera resist neoliberal demands for productivity and coherence, recording modes of living with psychiatric disability without seeking narrative resolution. Foregrounding uneven mental healthcare infrastructures, the article highlights the centrality of informal care networks in India, where support often relies on family and community rather than institutional systems. Kalita’s life and work were sustained through such kinships and literary solidarities. Crucially, Kalita’s poetry exceeds diagnostic registers. Rooted in Assamese cultural memory, his poems utilize metaphor and spiritual imagery to render psychic pain without reducing it to pathology. Ultimately, the article proposes a disability justice grounded in care and attentiveness rather than recovery or moral resolution. By treating his poetic traces as vital evidence, the study argues for a relational model of justice that honours Kalita within the enduring social scaffold of the domestic and literary realm.