What Freedom

Colonisation brings about the inevitable question of 'freedom' and in what ways this freedom is 'granted' to the colonised. One would think that freedom would be the last step in the process, and everything ahead of this will not be as terrible as that which preceded it, but this is rarely the case. It is interesting that freedom from the coloniser is not the end, but that there is much more agony waiting ahead. One of the ways in which this is embodied is the creation of the 'Third World', one that is still dependant on the coloniser and their functions because of the crippling state left in after a supposed 'freedom'. Delving into both the construction and treatment of the Third World, one questions if there was any freedom to begin with? This contested state of freedom applies to everyone in this 'Third World', especially women, also highlighted by Chandra Mohanty.

Mohanty works specifically with the framework of Western Feminism and the ways in which this applies to and "constructs" a "Third World woman", one that is characterised by oppression, uniformity of experience with all other Third World women, and their inability to "escape" their distressing situations. This is where we ask; what freedom?. Even after having gone through colonisation-a process which is enacted on the bodies of women, conveniently forgotten as such-these women must go through a process different in nature and severity, but nonetheless one of dehumanisation and entrapping. Even after a supposed freedom, these women are subject to notions of "sameness"and ones that paint them in one light, not even given the chance to speak up for themselves.

These women are seen as ones that must be protected from the men of the Third World, they are women that are neatly boxed into categories of experience all predicated on the notion that they are being subjugated. They are seen as a homogenous entity, without any regard for their complex and different realities. This is explained by Mohanty when she writes how "the homogeneity of women as a group is produced on the basis of biological essentials but rather on the basis of secondary sociological and and anthropological universals". By way of example, when speaking of a woman that practices purdah, Mohanty writes how the single most dominant conception of such a woman is that she is being oppressed, and there is a suggestion from the West that they that can save her from this oppression. Here, the freedom after colonisation is useless. These women are "constructed" a certain way, and all throughout the process of this construction, we are never able to hear from them even once.

Mohanty also wonderfully encapsulates the way in which these women are portrayed by Western discourse, and speaks of how the mistake made is when we see this discourse in a matter of binary where the Western woman is crucial to the identity of the Third World Woman. She says, however, that "it is not the center that determines the periphery, but the periphery that, in its boundedness, determines the center". Even with this however, one begs to question why there is even the need for a periphery. Why is there a compulsion upon us by which we must divide ourselves in this way, because whenever we do, the question of freedom becomes unanswerable.

All of this speaks to how the freedom supposedly 'granted' to us is never ours. It is not one we can own, because this freedom is conditional and it comes at a cost. It comes at the cost of moving from one worse to another, keeping at its center those that want nothing to do with any of this. When we ask the question of "what freedom" and what to do with freedom we are granted, we also ask the question of who wants freedom and how are they given it. For woman, this question can never hold up. She has craved freedom ever since she has been aware of it, and it is astonishing that in almost all her existence, she has never known it. How do we then ask her what to do with freedom when she has never known it of any kind?