the destructive power of western culture and language suffusing everything in my life. the destruction of my own gaze into a western one.
i can't live without feeling constantly like we lost, we are conquered, and that this feeling will never go away. the frustration at the parts of myself forever lost to this even as i write in english on a primarily western website shaped by a very western internet, in full awareness that i do not know how to access such concepts and spaces indigenously.
i need to read some books and relearn my mother tongue. i need help.
I don't know if this would make you feel any better, but European-descended decolonial leftists feel like they lost hard, waaay long ago, and don't even have any sort of living connection back to their pre-colonized identities whatsoever; just generation after generation of being colonial monsters who re-colonize themselves as they colonize others. No chance at reclaiming, because it's just completely, 100% gone, for 1000's of years or more, 10 times over.
I know this can be a kind of crass thing to say in the context of present-day colonialism, so I'm really, really sorry if it comes across that way, but: it really doesn't feel like having won haha. Colonizers have no link back of their own to work with. Maybe that helps some way.
I'm trying to learn here, so do you mean like, historical nomadic steppe cultures or countries like scotland or do you just mean like present day France?
It's not as much as a sense of having a fuzzy link to the past that I'm frustrated by, but the way that the West is legible as upwardly mobile, is a signifier of class – if you've watched Parasite: 'Kevin' 'English classes'
I mean even countries like France have been internally colonized by a "French-ness." Most people didn't even speak French in France until after the Revolution, and French identity was a very conscious construct cultivated by the French state that did not exist prior to the 18th century. The homogenizing forces of sameness in the service of nationalism and capital are never ending. Obviously different than actual colonization and much lower on the awful scale, but similar mechanisms at work.
So well articulated. I truly struggle with what attitude to have wrt this – many preservation attempts are so very sterile wrt to how culture & language actually exist, any attempt at preservation also feels like a one way condemnation to a museum.
Simultaneously, I live in a country with close to a 100 languages that are actually practiced – understanding those traditions, cultures, living with everyone needs something common. Despite the ignominious way that has come about, I truly do love it.
Yeah I always feel the impulse to preserve, yet that path almost always seems to lead to reaction. I see it myself with Irish nationalists who harken back to tradition—often that “tradition” is a British construct meant to otherize and barbarize the Irish rather than something actually rooted in the past. If you were here for that god awful Native American struggle session the other day the tension was their as well. The need to preserve and demarcate one’s own colonized culture while at the same time moving forward is something that we’ll always be reckoning with, I feel. As Marx says, capital makes sure that “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” The conditions of our reality are that tradition has been blown up in the favour of capital, and to merely return to that tradition is to bury our heads in the sand. It’s up to us to chart that new path, embracing the destructive tendencies of modernity while still feeling moored to our own collective pasts.
Ya. I kinda mean all of it. The last time Europeans were Indigenous was before the Celtic invasion a few thousand years ago. Or, at least, before the Roman Empire did its thing around year 0, leaving us with the absolutely degenerate Medieval era for a thousand years before weaponizing that christianity against the rest of the world in the 'colonial era'. Celts colonized Europe, then the Romans, then the English colonized the Scottish, then the French colonized the English, then all the Europeans colonized a lot of the rest of the world, etc. etc. It's just been a dogpile of shit-heads colonizing one another, and themselves, for thousands of years.
Like, which part of that history is a European supposed to draw meaning from? It's all shit. Always has been, for practical purposes. All the healthy Indigenous knowledge/lifeways, language/culture have been stomped on, ten times over. They're gone. But it was so long ago, there is absolutely no hope at reclaiming it. This is why so many White people fall into the trap of fetishizing their 'Viking ancestors'. Vikings existed for, like, 100 years. And everything we know about them was written by a single christian historian 300 years after the fact. It's all garbage, and it's all gone.
So, like, what I mean is that Europeans don't have a not-colonized culture to learn from, or even reach back to. The pain of having been colonized is really dull-to-non-existant, because it was so long ago. But the emptiness, the search for meaning and connection to ancestors and all of that, is still very much there. People are people.
So even as people of European descent are at the 'top' of the colonial hierarchy, if you're a decolonialist/leftist, it definitely doesn't feel like winning.
I don't bring this up at all to minimize the pain you shared here. That is very real, and nothing like what a White person/European person would feel today. I just thought it might take the sting out of feeling like you 'lost' to share that the good-hearted White people definitely don't feel like we 'won'. Indigenous people I've talked with about this are all hurt, and angry. Obviously, and that's valid. But there's also a pride in that their cultures and languages are still alive, and that they have the opportunity to help revitalize them, if they want. I think that's a pretty cool thing, just from where I sit.
Anyway, these are a whoooole lot of, just, my personal thoughts haha. Mostly I'm just reading this thread and finding it super insightful, so thanks. Also hell ya, Parasite was fuckin' awesome hahaha
Ah, I've never understood how exactly Europeans would feel disconnected from their pasts – it sorta seems to be right there in all the aristotle and the cathedrals and palaces. But I definitely see the symptoms when it comes to the fetishisation of Viking Culture, which I misread. Thank you for writing this!
Ya, it's very true that a lot of the 'dominant' culture draws directly from European history, totally. And a lot of libs are proud of the Ancient Greek philosophers and Christian architects and all that. It's just... I'm not, cuz they were all so... bad. Hahaha. :af-heart: