After the End of Colonialism

As to what postcolonial culture might be like, postcolonial art, postcolonial music, postcolonial politics (if such a term makes sense) or postcolonial literature; these are notions which may one day have meaning; but only when people have forgotten that their ancestors ever farmed each other.

In the Koran, it is said that to kill a person is to destroy an entire Universe. This is quite literally true; the Universe in my mind is not anywhere else, and when it is ended by my death, that Universe dies with me. It is in this sense that I say that to be an abused child is not something that ends when the child leaves the abusive home; nor does it end when the abusive father dies, or when the abusive mother apologizes, or even when the child grows into a father, a mother, a grandfather, a grandmother, and fulfils a life’s mission by passing on love and trust to the children, the grandchildren, by teaching them and showing them what love is, that love is not abuse and abuse is not love, teaching them to love, not to abuse, seeing that they love, that they are loved, that they are not abused and that they do not abuse. Even after that – a valid life’s work, my life’s work, the only work I can conceive of, is done; even then, I am still a person who was abused as a child; the abuse still defines me, and cannot fail to define me, even as I reject it. My mind, though a many-flowered tree of miracles and home to a thousand flocks of roosting birds of paradise, is still rooted in the filthy stinking pit of abuse, and the abuse is still there. The echoes are not silent. The new implications continue to arise; the abuse has still not finished, can not finish, until the final perfect bliss that comes from the death of the Universe itself.

And so it is with the colonies – with the farms, the factories, the systems of slavery and abuse which mean that an innocent girl must work eight-hour days of hard labour for 200 baht a day while her cynical, corrupt boss sleeps in his bed for 200,000 baht a day. These abusive systems can be ended, and must be ended. It is even possible that we, you and I, might one day summon the courage to end them.

But to really finish with colonies, to end colonialism as a mindset, as a cultural determinant? As long as there is a cultural record of the history of the last ten thousand years – as long as there is a memory of a story about the Pyramids, built over countless generations by hundreds of thousands of slaves to serve the lunacy of Pharaohs who wanted their insane wealth to continue into the afterlife, and didn't mind destroying countless real lives for the remotest possibility of achieving that grotesque objective - as long as we remember the madness of the British markets that made a tasty profit by keeping food prices at a level where millions of Indians and Irish starved; as long as we remember the genocidal farm Pol Pot built; as long as there are people who tell their children, with the same tears in their eyes that I have as I write this, of the holocaust that Hitler ordered; as long as we remember these and a thousand stories all too like them, colonialism will not be entirely dead, its implications and echoes will continue to arise anew, in different forms, and the best we will be able to do, the best any of us will be able to do, is to stand and squat together, holding hands on hearts, looking with honesty and kindness and love deep into each others' gentle eyes, and laugh as we piss on the meaningful and contested symbols that will long continue to mark colonialism's unquiet grave.