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.