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.

  • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    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.