Prior to expanding further on Kennedy's understanding of arrivance and sense of belonging, it is necessary to detail how "arrivant" has been recently articulated within the work of Jodi Byrd.
Within a re-examination of the original definition of arrivance, one can consider what Lisa Lowe has described as the intimacies of four continents.
In the epigraph to The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, Imogene Kennedy describes the arrivance of her ancestors to Jamaica:
Kennedy's spiritual and ancestral relation to the silk cotton tree and her explanation of the "arrivance" in the epigraph more broadly reflect her profoundly anti-colonial practice of making home.
Again, in the context of discussing new technologies of cloning and machines, Derrida says: an event worthy of the name can and ought to be, an
arrivance that would surprise me absolutely and to whom or for whom, to which, or for which I could not, and may no longer, not respond--in a way that is as responsible as possible: what happens, what arrives and comes down upon me, that to which I am exposed, beyond all mastery.
As Henri Maldiney emphasizes, an event has to be understood as evenement-avenement, articulating in the unpredictability or transpossibility2 of its "there," its presencing or "advent": "un evenement-avenement toujours en
arrivance et jamais arrive" (Penser l'homme et la folie 306).3 A work of art is equally an advent; its miraculum is what constitutes its "rhythmical-genetical" dimension.