Generational Trauma in OFMD
Entirely boggled to learn there’s a subset of #OurFlagMeansDeath fandom who think that Ed isn’t canonically a BIPOC character? Because they don’t say aloud that he is? My beige dudes, the actor is Māori. They cast a Māori actress to play his mother. This was not an accident.
Taika has always been proudly vocal about his mixed heritage and the fact they canonically gave Ed a white father and a Māori mother is so important in the context of Ed’s character. The show is set at Peak Empire, when England (and Europe) colonised everything.
There’s a powerful thread of subtext of this history within her characterisation and this show doesn’t do anything accidentally: she is a house servant, trapped in poverty, abused and controlled by her white partner, and conditioned to believe that “it’s not up to us, it’s up to God”.
For anyone unfamiliar with European colonialism, the role the church played in it is toxic. The stolen generations and the people descended from the kids put through the Christian school systems are a legacy of it: children of indigenous people abducted and forcibly cut off from their culture to be ‘civilised’ through Christianity and assimilated into a white-centric culture. The entire system was a genocidal horror story perpetuated in the name of God for centuries in almost every single colony. The children were abused and conditioned to believe they were lesser, better than their heritage but still never good - ‘white’ - enough. “We’re not that kind and never will be”.
So when Ed’s mother says “it’s not up to us, it’s up to God”, that is the voice of a child of colonial violence repeating what she was taught by abuse and by rote to make sure she knows her humble place in the world order created by the Christian Empires. The fact she’s a servant is also so integral to this. The Christian schools trained the children to be workers but most specifically in low-level manual/domestic work. The people running the show didn’t want them getting ideas above their station, after all.
Not a word of this show is incidental. The history is there if you listen to it and it makes the red silk scene devastating because we are seeing a woman from a colonised culture literally and metaphorically pass that trauma on to her son.
Think of the first time we see the silk: it is immediately in the aftermath of Ed’s encounter with the French Captain. This is the moment when Ed is faced with the same level of racial abuse as Frenchie and Olu get from the white Navy officers in episode 1 - “made by savages”, “silence, slave!” “your master may tolerate uppity behaviour”.
The Captain refers to Ed as “your kind”, immediately designating him as something Other and Uncivilised by comparison to himself. Ed reels as if slapped at that alone, asking tersely “what’s that supposed to mean?”. The man derisively says “a rich donkey is still a donkey”.
But no, sure, tell me there’s nothing inherently racist about a posh white man describing a brown man in terms of a beast of burden, something meant for manual work, carrying things for its owner and known for being beaten into submission. /end sarcasm. In many documents from that era, this was a common way for white (especially English) Europeans to write about anyone not white, regardless of rank, culture or history: comparisons with animals, beasts, lower creatures are all over the place. (eta: it has also been confirmed that donkey itself was commonly used as a slur against Polynesian and Pasifika people, which makes this a deliberately targeted racist insult)
Ed, unsurprisingly, does not react well. The fact that this is the thing to make him lose his temper for the first time underscores how distressing it is for him, especially when it segues into the flashback to his mother, repeating that same lesson to him.
The way these two scenes overlapped is so important because not only does it define Ed’s history but also demonstrates that - even decades after the fact - the legacy of generational trauma has not and will not go away.
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