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 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.