Mending Postcolonial Wounds
On collective healing in the South Asian diaspora
Lately, I’ve been spending my evenings mending old socks, blouses, and sweatshirts. First, it started as a need to fix up a 5-year-old pair of shorts with the seams torn apart. Then before I knew it, I was searching for something to mend, something to fix. I was sewing up socks before a hole formed.
I’ve long had this insatiable desire to fix. Growing up, almost everything around me felt broken into little fragments of what once was. I was familiar with heartbreak, but not the crying-to-Taylor Swift-in-your-childhood-bedroom type of heartbreak. I felt heartbreak in the heavy air, in the ways my family talked to and about each other. We’re stuck in this imaginary border between here and there, in a diasporic purgatory of sorts.
When the British left the Indian subcontinent, they fragmented the land into sacrosanct nation-states. In true colonial fashion, they drew an imaginary line in the sand … and then militarised it. Overgrown religious tension was caught ablaze under colonial fire as generations of friendships and Earthly kinship went up in smoke. In waves of mass migration, warfare, kidnapping, and gendered violence, unprocessed colonial violence was turned inwards.
Colonialism is abuse under the thinly-veiled guise of progress. We move forward, faster, frantic, never stopping to heal. In the words of the cliche but true dictum, “hurt people hurt people” – but what happens when people are victimized en masse? What we know to be true is that hurt nations hurt each other, and their people. In the past 75 years, since the legal independence of the Indian subcontinent, there has never been an intentional space to collectively grieve. When do we mourn the generations of continued violence, especially when so many of us cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel?
I believe that we must contextualize “history repeats itself” into a larger dialogue about the accessibility of healing and grieving supports. Two things can be true at once: humans cause harm because we are messy and complex and human beings are not innately evil or selfish. In cultures of capitalistic patriarchal shame, we pathologize emotional sensibilities and therefore stigmatize rest and healing. This is a clear barrier to mending our collective traumas. We often process trauma, and create space for accountability, when we are in safer spaces and relationships. However, under systems of oppression, fear-ridden trauma responses are spun into Hobbsian philosophies about human nature. We cannot neutralize calcified colonial wounds into abstract geopolitics – this is deeply personal work.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan, a Dalit-American transmedia artist and futurist, speaks to the ways that caste-privileged South Asians often willfully ignore their complicity and/or perpetuation of caste apartheid. She argues that this deflection of accountability and fear of the Other can be traced back to living in an activated trauma-body. Rooted in pre-colonial Brahmanism, caste violence was the first form of division facing South Asia. Soundararajan argues that in order to truly decolonize, we must first debrahmanize; she points to co-regulation as a first step in rehumanizing and repatriating caste-oppressed peoples.
Ignoring trauma and violence doesn’t make it go away. For the ancestors and aunties who never had a wide Window of Tolerance, nuance and criticism may feel like their world is about to come crashing down. For fellow diasporic South Asians now settled in colonial “Canada”, unravelling spoon-fed fantasies about the West can breed fragility and discomfort. Ending cycles of interpersonal, intergenerational, and international abuse and violence is always uncomfortable; it requires introspection and accountability.
I now realize that, in many ways, my desire to fix harps on centuries of Western saviorism and control – I cannot wash away the discomfort of grief. I believe that the academic abstraction of oppressed peoples’ lived experiences into theory is often another attempt at fixing or saving. Political theory is important, but it can only get us so far. When dissociation becomes second nature – or its symptoms embedded into our lineages – embodiment becomes a necessary praxis. In Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lorde writes, “The white fathers told us, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: ‘I feel, therefore I can be free.’”
Mending is a slow process. In a world fueled by speed – fast fashion, lightspeed internet, and same-day delivery – slowness feels out of reach. How can we sit with ourselves and each other, in slowness and sensitivity? When we look to the natural world, we see that nothing in nature is constantly in motion. For hours, days, or seasons at a time our ecological kin rest in stillness. Can we learn rest and slowness from the snails, grizzly bears, and trees? We cannot mend lifetimes of pent-up grief in a day, but healing is still within reach. As we continue to unearth colonial pain, let us feel our way to freedom.