Book enthusiast.

[philosophybits]

“It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that is understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above. But if you speak the language of everyday, if you are not obsessed by the perverse desire to spread confusion and to rid yourself of the people, then you will realize that the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning and to learn all the tricks of the trade.”

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism."

- Hannah Arendt.

[slowtheflow-deactivated20250325]

Perhaps about a year and a half ago I read Death and the King's Horseman, by Wole Soyinka, and got to thinking about it again because I'd been thinking a lot about forced religious conversion. I also read Homegoing, and there is a moment in which a white missionary confesses to murdering a young African woman who was brought into the church as an orphan.

She had met a man and wanted to marry him and return to his village, and a way of life that would have represented a rejection of the version of god the missionaries were attempting to impose.

A few years ago, Wole Soyinka did an interview about a novel he'd written and talked specifically about a character who was also missionary, but a Nigerian who had been converted, and how the character, on some level, was aware that he was a charlatan. Soyinka's novel and play are set in Nigeria. Homegoing is set in Ghana.

Given the relationship between colonialism and religion - how it is weaponized as a tool for oppression in a larger agenda that has little to nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with exploitation, I understand the resistance, and often, frankly skepticism about organized religion.

Awhile ago, I got curious about philosophy, and specifically how a lot of the philosophy and psychoanalysis that relates to human development, (and is readily available and taught in institutions of higher learning), is a part of a western canon, which means that the minds it analyzes, and the assumptions it makes about humanity, come from a very specific perspective.

I read a bit about Jacques Lacan, and the idea of mirror theory, and, started to think about why someone like Fanon is so important. Things like colonialism and forced religious conversion, to me, seem like the equivalent of someone standing in front of a mirror that you were once looking into and seeing your true self.

So not only is someone imposing themselves between you and your actual reflection, they are then telling you that they are your reflection.

So it becomes easy to gaslight people who are subjected to this into believing that everything about who they are is wrong, and the reason they don't look, think, or act like their "reflection" is because they are hopelessly flawed.

I think what makes it even more violent where a religion that poses the death of a divine being as atonement for the natural state of sinfulness that is humanity, is that the reflection that is imposed is intentionally made unattainable.

So, you will, in fact, never measure up. And, perhaps, that would feel like less of an issue if in certain circumstances this were not leveraged in a racialized way to justify the subjugation of certain groups of people.

Anyway, it made me feel quite a bit of empathy for this unknown character in Soyinka's novel, even without having read it yet.

The most interesting part is that when you really think about it, the character himself is actually not the fraud, but it is in fact the psychological implication of trying to mimic a reflection that was never his authentic form that may very well be the root of his discomfort.

It is the false consciousness being projected upon him that is fraudulent, not the actual person.

It did also make me think about the function of satire. And how it should not be used to punch down on those struggling to detangle themselves from the impact of this sort of psychological trauma.

I think it is better used as a critique of the circumstances that create such characters, and of course, of the people who benefit from perpetuating this sort of violence.

[gael-garcia]

“People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack””

— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham

[sivavakkiyar]

Frantz Fanon, Black Skins White Masks

[dontbestingybaby]

"One of the striking aspects of the new American social-science attention to the Orient is its singular avoidance of literature. You can read through reams of expert writing on the modern Near East and never encounter a single reference to literature. What seem to matter far more to the regional expert are 'facts,' of which a literary text is perhaps a disturber. The net effect of this remarkable omission in modern American awareness of the Arab or Islamic Orient is to keep the region and its people conceptually emasculated, reduced to 'attitudes,' 'trends,' statistics: in short, dehumanized. Since an Arab poet or novelist—and there are many—writes of his experiences, of his values, of his humanity (however strange that may be), he effectively disrupts the various patterns (images, clichés, abstractions) by which the Orient is represented. A literary text speaks more or less directly of a living reality. Its force is not that it is Arab, or French, or English; its force is in the power and vitality of words that, to mix in Flaubert’s metaphor from La Tentation de Saint Antoine, tip the idols out of the Orientalists’ anus and make them drop those great paralytic children—which are their ideas of the Orient—that attempt to pass for the Orient."

— from Orientalism by Edward Said (25th Anniversary Edition)

[probablykhalid]

"It is inadequate only to affirm that a people was dispossessed, oppressed or slaughtered, denied its rights and its political existence, without at the same time doing what Fanon did during the Algerian war, affiliating those horrors with the similar afflictions of other people. This does not at all mean a loss in historical specificity, but rather it guards against the possibility that a lesson learned about oppression in one place will be forgotten or violated in another place or time. And just because you represent the sufferings that your people lived through which you yourself might have lived through also, you are not relieved of the duty of revealing that your own people now may be visiting related crimes on their victims."

Representations of the Intellectual _ Edward William Said.

[damnesdelamer]

DECOLONIAL ACTION READING

I recently compiled these to add to a comrade’s post about Land Back, but actually I think they deserve their own post as well.

Amílcar Cabral - Return To The Source

Frantz Fanon - The Wretched Of The Earth

Hô Chí Minh - archive via Marxists.org

Thomas King - The Inconvenient Indian

Abdullah Öcalan - Women’s Revolution & Democratic Confederalism

Edward Said - The Question Of Palestine

Thomas Sankara - archive via Marxists.org

Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang - Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor

Other key names in postcolonial theory and its practical application include:

Sara Ahmed

Homi K. Bhabha

Aimé Césaire

Albert Memmi

Jean-Paul Sartre

Léopold Séder Senghor

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

All of these will help you interpret and confront the realities of colonisation, and ideally help us understand and extend solidarity to comrades around the globe. Decolonise your mind, and don’t stop there!