Free-Write: Internalized Colonial Ideals

For a french literature class I took this quarter at my university, I had to watch this movie entitled "Faat Kiné" which follows the life of an unwed mother of two, and her successful life as a business woman in Sénégal.  I preferred the other movie "Madame Brouette" that we watched, but that really isn't the point.

filmfestamiens.org

In one scene of the movie, the women wore these traditional Senegalese dresses, beautiful, vibrant dresses and they danced at a party Kiné was holding to celebrate her children's academic achievements.

And I found myself smiling, thinking.. how quaint, timeless, and archaic their manner of dress was.
And that shit stopped me in my tracks.

Now I have had a lot of classes on post-colonialism, both in my french literature, french grammar, and many of my political science classes, so I know what internalization of the colonial ideology looks like.  I know what it looks like when someone has accepted that binary that the Papal Bulls began which related barbarism, backwardness, misogyny and hyper-sexuality (among other things) to people of color, to their countries, and to their culture.  The binary that equates the West with moral, biological, cultural and intellectual superiority.

And I saw myself looking at the garb of these women and seeing something reminiscent of another 'simpler' time, but I realized that this inherently meant that I saw their culture as not fitting the 'modern', more 'advanced' world - you know, the way a business suit might.  The way that I dress might - or my Western friends.

This disgusted me, and I was surprised and annoyed with myself to have found the very same mindset which subjugated not only the peoples of the "Orient" (a term often used by colonial powers in order to define Eastern civilizations on their own terms) deeply ingrained inside my own head.  But what about their dress, about their culture, is 'quaint' exactly.  Moreover, how could I judge my own manner of dress and my culture to be superior or more advanced?

The only, true differences I see between the West and East are these:

West - East
Colonizers - Colonized
(Often) Richer - (Often) Poorer

...Sure there are numerous other differences.  Of course there are.  And within the "west" and the "east" there are also differences, an infinite number of cultures, ideologies, social structures, educational systems, cuisines, gender roles, etc. exist all over the world, mixed up in ways that this binary - whose sole purpose was to recreate the identities of the colonized - could never possibly seek to understand with its extremely limited binary.

I am not quite sure what I'm saying anymore.

But I know this, that I am a product of this binary ideology, which asserts that those colonized were colonized in order to save them - you know, the whole "kill the 'savage', save the child" mentality?  And it makes me wonder how much fuller I could be as a human being if I could only get rid of this silly infatuation we have with being more advanced, with surpassing our fellow human beings, with being "better" -- and with our futile and dangerous attempts to prove that the "other" identity that we create to scare ourselves and to ideologically imprison others who are different than us in a cycle of dehumanization and violence.

How much more peaceful and beautiful and whole I would feel if I could see past the curtain of bigotry, the distance put in between myself and the culture of my own ancestors.  How much more beautiful the world would be?

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P.S. I have a theory.  I have a theory that all of this colonization and the resulting Western superiority complex actually stemmed from the childish, but nonetheless demoralizing realization experienced by Western civilizations before the start of Western Imperialism..

They 'discovered' the beautiful and strong Eastern civilizations, the lush and bountiful lands of Africa and the proud civilizations that lived there... and realized they were inferior themselves.  In attempting to begin trading, they realized that they had nothing to offer these advanced civilizations which they wanted.  Collective trauma - left unresolved, misunderstood by the traumatized party - only breeds more trauma in the end...

Maybe that's the reason why the non-Advanced Placement 'world history' curriculum at my high school only began with the French Revolution, well after the advent of Western Colonialism?

(>^_^)>#