Week 6

“What’s your inner white man called?” quipped Dr. Zaman to a member of the audience. Her discussion on Friday, about discovering affinities and disparities in Mexico, was thoroughly personal. In sharing intimate details about her life, how the same bougainvillaea grew in her family home in Karachi and blooms in Mexican streets, she talks about history by meeting, confronting, and then developing a cordial relation with her inner white man. A historian that doesn’t objectively present history by standing from a privileged vantage point and it’s privileged because she can project her narrative onto the lives of the dead, Dr. Zaman nudges introspection when unearthing the past, understanding it, and making it visible to the present.   

As Dr. Zaman waded through Mexico’s history, she claimed to have felt stupid and incompetent; in her talk on Friday, she described the academic engagement as one of turbulence where her sympathies oscillated between the colonizer and colonized. When reading about human sacrifices, Dr. Zaman admits to recoiling and considering that, perhaps, colonization wasn’t that bad of a historical development after all. When I read about sati as part of the Indian subcontinent’s culture, I, too, recoiled and considered that perhaps colonial laws aren’t that bad if they save lives of women whose lives are forcefully temporally intertwined with their husband’s. Then, I read about the massacres, exploitation, and psychological violence of colonialism and think we could’ve dealt with sati in ways other than a white man stopping it. Yet, sati is a part of my people’s history and I can navigate it in complex ways. When I read about foreign cultures’ history and what I perceive to be their savagery, I recoil and think, like the white man did when he stumbled on those lands. These people are primitive and haven’t evolved sufficiently, I think. As Dr. Zaman pointed out, we’d have been happier if it were the light of Islam guiding these people to what we think is the straight path but if the missionaries got there first, it’s still better than the state they had doomed themselves to. We are, in more ways than we care to admit, similar to our colonizer.

When I read historical texts and heedlessly map my own biases on it, I lack nuance. When Fanon talks about how integral the veil is to Algerian culture and hence, how crucial it is for the colonizer to shed it off the Algerian, he leaves out the Algerian woman when writing about her. When Mohanty talks about western feminism painting the Third World woman, she points out that the narratives leave out the subject they’re talking about. We speak to the dead and construe from their histories what our prejudices filter. When studying decolonization, similarly, I leave out the decolonized, those that are not my own. I tend to think that decolonization is this monolith of experience, not in its process so much so as its aftermath. It’s factually grounded that each people had distinct experiences with the colonizers and attained their freedom differently as well. What’s normative is how are they/we still decolonizing ourselves, cleansing ourselves from the historical remnants, legacies, and dependencies courtesy of colonization. Who is right: us when we think a language is a tool of power and access so we must talk in our indigenous languages or they when they say that it’s not that big of a deal to talk in Spanish? One thing is for sure: we cannot one-dimensionally peruse a history that’s not ours and that we all when we feel incompetent and stupid as we engage with history, must learn to meet, confront, and deal with our inner white man.