Whither Freedom

The rise of a post-colonial dawn is sometimes perceived to be synonymous with the ascendance of freedom. After all, decolonial struggle entails in its essence the quest of freedom, a radical break away from the shackles of domination which pin down the people. Yet, we must ask the very simple question, ‘what does freedom means, and who really is free after this episode of decoloniality’.  This blog seeks to explore this question of freedom, especially in its discursive and epistemic dimension, as pointed out by Chandra Mohanty. As we will find out, there is hardly an answer to this question. The best we can do then is to try to understand the frameworks which go into defining freedom for us, and discuss which ones could lead us to a better and more appreciative understanding of the phenomenon.

The very basic problem one faces when approaching the topic is to make sense of the terms which conceptualize freedom in this discussion. When interrogating the gender dimension of post-colonial freedom, Mohanty points us towards the problematization of the term ‘third world women’. The problem arises when such term is used to represent a monolith. In this case it is used to bind together millions of women from the third world which are from diverse ‘classes, religions, cultures, races and castes’. What binds them together then is a sense of imagined oppression which is not only universal to them, but also create in themselves a binary of oppressor / oppressed, in which everyone is pinned down to a certain deduction of their position in this binary because of their position in the generalized discourse. Hence, a third world man is bound to be understood as an oppressor and the third world woman as oppressed, the former harboring power and the latter a passive recipient. Such narratives not only homogenize the diverse realities of people, but also make them vulnerable to being generalized in their experiences. Hence, women wearing veil anywhere in the world would be deemed to be oppressed and lacking agency, because a certain deduction about veiling being oppressive has been registered in the discourse. Who then is free and who is not? One answer, stemming from what Mohanty frames as western feminist discourse, could be that only the men have achieved freedom in the decolonial process, while the women are now under the domination and oppression of the third world men. Another answer, that of which traces can be found in Kenyatta too, can be that women of the culture are free in their own cultural sphere (with supposed cultural purity and rigidness) and it is the colonial governance, and it solely, which is actually oppressing them. Yet there can be a third answer, shy from both extremes, which can be approached to give a more wholesome understanding.

The question of freedom must be applied, argues Mohanty, not through generalized narratives about third world women, but through a careful understanding of the context from which the subject in question is being approached. Whether this can be done or not is a difficult question, given the possible justifications from either sides of the equation. Freedom could be framed as something being derived from the nature of its opposition to the colonial imposition, or it could be framed as something being derived from a framework of oppression and oppressed, and how things like the veil are being used to control female bodies in such and such context. The only definitive takeaway we can take from this is the idea that freedom must not be understood through meta narratives, but through an appreciation of impacts on the bodies of the discussed. It is only when the individual experiences and realities are not homogenized that one can come closer to answer the question. Till then, the bodies and minds who feel that decolonization has been a daagh daagh ujala ask themselves in despair, “Whither freedom?!”