In the Depths

Decolonising Knowledge. The idea that knowledge is tainted in ways that legitimise the social structures of society was incomprehensible to me before.

The most compelling out of the recent texts we read from the Black Radical Tradition, to me, was Toni Morrison’s “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.” It may not have been the text itself as much as the theme of her reading that struck me. The fact that a language itself can be infested with “hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people” is truly bizarre. The illumination of the existence of such knowledge means, at least to me, that we as part of the colonised world need to further our command over the knowledge we are exposed to in order to understand how perception is created, so that, like Caliban, we may free ourselves of the image imposed on us. Another chord which struck from her writing was the conception of a ‘universal race’ or ‘race-free’ – that whiteness considers itself as the point of neutrality against which all other races exist. For me this was a dark but very logical discovery into the minds of the ‘superior’ race. Before coming across such texts, my understanding of the significance of literature was shallow.

What this allowed for was a dramatic shift in my paradigm. Following from the liberation of the image imposed on us, through a broader view of the Black Radical Tradition, I understood the significance of one’s culture as witnessed in the Black Power movements of the 20^th century. The white man attempted to destroy the ‘other’ through destroying her culture, through imposing his image on her. The Black Radical Tradition was a reaction to the historic domination of the white man. It was a celebration of everything about Black people that was non-white, allowing them to celebrate who they were, freeing themselves slowly from the chains of the white man.

Through such exposure I have understood the significance of our culture and how we must celebrate being ‘Us’. I believe understanding this knowledge is more important as a Pakistani today than it was fifty years ago. This is because of the advent of globalisation and how through globalisation, we are being imposed with a new kind of imperialism – economic and cultural. Due to this, I feel there needs to be an extra effort put into reviving our culture so that it does not wither away, impeded by global trends that originate from the White Men of the world. An enormous part of our culture and its history is available to us only through literature. Through Toni Morrison and the likes of Frantz Fanon, I have come to understand the power and gravity of such literature.