The indigenous Waorani activist, Nemonte Nenquimo, wrote in an unforgettable Guardian
Op-ed titled This is my message to the western world – your civilisation is killing life on Earth,
that,
Nemonte Nenquimo
You forced your civilisation upon us and now look where we are: global
pandemic, climate crisis, species extinction and, driving it all, widespread
spiritual poverty. In all these years of taking, taking, taking from our lands, you
have not had the courage, or the curiosity, or the respect to get to know us. To
understand how we see, and think, and feel, and what we know about life on
this Earth.
Her words summarise colonisation, the process of occupying land without regard for existing
inhabitants and their economic, socio-cultural and psychological realities.
Decolonisation is, consequently, approached as a process of “reversing” colonisation.
The prefix “de” typically implies to undo or reverse an action: to decaffeinate, defrost,
deindustrialise, dethrone, demythologize, detoxify and so on, all connote a reversal, a
backpedalling.
Yet when it comes to colonisation, the innocuous-seeming prefix “de” cannot be taken
literally to mean undo or reverse, as neither is possible when it comes to colonisation.
What is possible is to reimagine and reconceptualise a way of being in the world. Nenquimo
ends her Op-ed by saying, “It is the early morning in the Amazon, just before first light: a time
that is meant for us to share our dreams, our most potent thoughts.”
In that spirit I share below some dreams and potent thoughts which involve reconceptualisation. Language that needs reclaiming. Things that we should recolonise.
A colony does not, after all, only connote a place occupied by violent and destructive forces.
A colony is also a place to grow vegetables, and flowers and fruit, as well as community and
ideas. These one hundred prompts are not intended as a procedural guideline but rather as a
reimagining.
100 Things to recolonise
- Gaze
- TLC
- The possibilities of language
- Sexual freedom
- Ageing ungracefully, or however the fuck one wants to age
- One’s own life
- Sensuousness
- Multitudes
- The Centre
- Your body
- New ways of thinking
- Movement
- Utopias
- Sustainability
- Islands of possibility
- Play
- Wildness
- Landscapes
- Frolicking
- The dissolution of patriarchy
- Landscapes of love
- Critical interventions
- Rage
- Leisure
- The space between illusion and deception
- Authenticity
- Honesty
- Non-heteronormative complementarity
- Poetry
- Rationality and reason
- An ethics of caring (thank you, Patricia Hill Collins)
- Circles
- Gratitude
- The expansion of science
- The beauty of eternity
- Honest relationships
- Deserved goodbyes
- Passionate conversation
- The enchantment of reading stories
- Humaneness
- Nature’s comradeship
- Nonconforming beauty
- Pausing
- Tabula rasas
- Breathing deeply
- Awareness of the cosmos
- Attentiveness
- Learning from children
- Learning from elders
- Conscientious objection
- Meaning-making
- Subjectivity
- Being present where you find yourself
- Expanding the mind
- Lovemaking
- Consciousness raising
- Political solidarity
- Uncommercialised feminism
- Uncertainty
- Cuddles
- Sexual stimuli that isn’t sexist
- Deep time
- Lost chronicles of women chroniclers
- Flowing with nature’s rhythms
- Shadows
- The difference between gluttony and appreciation
- The power of kindness
- Tolerance
- A tenderness toward one’s own eccentricities
- Discernment of public opinion
- Lightness
- Unwritten pages
- Open-mindedness
- A mind and body that resists becoming a machine
- Stepping out of the familiar
- Self-awareness
- Fearlessness
- The lessons of grief
- A playful attitude
- The realisation of the stark reality of the climate emergency
- Inventing new gods
- Dancing from the soul
- Intellectual agility
- Creating hope
- Ending denialism
- Entertainment that isn’t oppressive or capitalist
- Dialogue
- New archetypes
- Banter
- Non-dogmatic prayer
- Existential lust
- Acts of generosity
- Borderlessness
- Unhierarchical relationships
- Nonpatriarchal kinship
- Informed inventiveness
- Stillness
- Opening doors of opportunity
- Disturbing claims of inherent objectivity
- Making a place for imagination.
This piece was originally published in We Should All Be Dreaming: Words Make Worlds by Sonya Lindfors and Maryan Abdulkarim commissioned in the frame of A I S T I T / coming to our senses contemporary art program
Image is by Armando Drechsler
Thank you Minna for another insightful piece to start the year. It is always invigorating to think afresh and expand our possibilities and reconfigure our thought patterns. I am however stuck at the location of our being ‘defenseless’. After all, the history of European colonization of the world has been the history of armed men forcefully taking over territories by virtue of superior technology, germ warfare and a complacent and colluding “patriarchy” in the native territories. This is followed up by an indoctrination regime of religion and secular education to truly cultivate a dominating hegemony.
Why has patriarchy existed? Well partly to serve as “protection” to the communities that were invaded. (And to be the invaders of other communities in a quest for resources and well being, for one’s progeny). What were they protecting? Livestock, Ancestral worship zones, their women and children, etc. (Obviously this is in general; there were women protectors in some societies).
I hope you are aware, We are still unable to do this. By we I mean the formerly colonized. Now a few have advanced to the point where they can say, if you attack me I will hurt you or wound you, but almost none who have recovered to the point where they can assure the former colonizer they will vanquish them if they attack. However this is approaching for some cultures, it is within the horizon.
So if we begin to “recolonize” anew along the lines you have outlined, what is there to prevent the bully from tearing down the sand castles erected? I wonder if feminists have a really difficult time coming to terms with the fundamental brutality of natural law and man’s quest for dominion on earth. If women figure out how to tame this brutality (especially sans men – who have been traditionally sacrificed for the comfort of women in every culture and era) then maybe true “equality” will be ushered in. The idea of creating soft, declawed/neutered males, to “detoxify” their masculinity has not worked. It has created even more miserable women. So how will you go about eradicating the need to defend?
Who is an African, and what is it to be an African? These are the questions that strike me whenever I seriously think about my identity as an African. I look at myself, and other Africans around me, and I think, indeed we’re Africans — it is in our skin, our languages, and in the vestiges of our culture and heritage that hold for dear life despite the unending assault from an increasingly globalized world. But then I take a closer look and realize, we’re also European, and an American, and Indian, and perhaps Chinese too. Our identity has and continues to be sculpted by outside cultures far more significantly than we’re able to reclaim, reinvigorate and reintegrate our forgotten, sidelined cultures, that are indeed, more in tune with our natures both as individuals and the lands we inhabit. That’s the tragedy of “African-ness” — that no matter how we try to reclaim this essential part of our nature, our immediate situation doesn’t offer much incentive to give our full attention to this task. Instead, the more pressing needs of our necessity, our survival and immediate dignity, have conspired to ensure that much of the recolonisation you rightly detail here, is always sitting on the back burner, and thus, consigned to playing catch up while each passing day the world grows ever smaller. I suppose in this sense, recolonisation is a calling first and foremost for the individual soul, and not the multitude.
Wow . I had to relearn