I am a Colonial Subject
I am a colonial subject.
My body, my eyes, my name, my hair; none of them are my own - they have no will, they have no agency - My body is a field of contestation - Its a demarcation of symbolic meaning, of representation regarding objects I cannot chose to represent myself.
My body is constructed for me - Exoticised, fetishised. The concurrent ‘where are you from’ is my societal gatekeeper of identity. Either I pass or I don’t. My body is not my own
When the following question materialises; ‘no where are you really from’ I know within myself that my passing onto real danishness has failed; I have been called out as a traitor, a trickster, a deceiver - Stripped naked of my ‘disguise’ My body is not my own.
I have been pitted against national romanticism. How could a ‘Mexican fuckboy’; the dangerous ‘other’ to the provincialised uniform project of european identity ever think he could become a ‘real’ part of society? my body is not my own.
I once thought that studying at university would change all that - I thought that the embodiment of critical thinking would at least provide me some legitimacy of autonomous representation. However, to my horror, I realised that the obsession over my being, my colonial language, my body is equally alive here; I am positioned as an outsider, a commodity for ‘your’ pleasure. The academic knowledge we learn here is relegated to the abstract - The ‘critical’ language we attain in these institutions rarely transforms into everyday talk and no one ever questions why - Instead the waging of guerilla warefare continues against me; ‘where are you really from?’ My body is not my own
My dream of self-representation is dead. ‘You’ have killed it, exactly the same way Nietzsche killed god. My life, my identity, my body has become a fallacy; subject to the greatest heist ever; hope. My body is not my own.
I’m often met with the argument that ‘race’ is not a structuring feature of society; not a process of symbolic stratification. That this is all a figment of my imagination, a racist ‘wet dream’ of which I am the producer. But failing to see this structuration for whatever the reasons might be does not mean that the process doesn’t exist. I wished I lived in a society where ‘race’ and ‘skin colour’ didn’t matter - I wish the historical features of colonial symbolism my body unchosenly represents could be just that; arbitrary. I wished we could move beyond such irrational reductionist readings of ourselves and each other. But this is reality, this is how myself and the rest of us ‘others’ - the archetype bastardisations of ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ - experience life - these are our shoes. our bodies are not our own.
