Decolonizing The Self

 

Colonising the self, the over-self or psyche (soul), can be a phenomenon where an individual allows their inner thoughts to be morphed into any form popularised by the masses, yielding their rational faculties to be directed vicariously by group-based notions that have been proselytised as universal truths.

It is an extensive cultural agenda that requires the individual to valuate their worth within the collective and its conceptual dialogues that redefine discussions on de-coloniality and the persistently radicalised dynamics in the symbolic spheres of social interactions.

Personal memories built alongside illusions created through media bombardments, are essential components that require to be annexed. And the fraught notion of a body at war with itself; its mind, becomes symptomatic of the condition of “colonising the self”, making one into a colony of usurped ideologies and plagiarised reality definitions.

This phenomenon occurs importantly to those discrete parts of the soul, “psyche”, whose identity and biological coherence are called into question by mainstream trends of self-observation and awareness.

These repressive processes and social systems worshipped today, specifically those that attack “forms of self-affirmation”, yield therefore such forms of inner paralyses and stoppage when the self dares retrieve its essence.

A colonised reality and memory exist in constant interplay, they merge and replace each other, memory played like an echo, constantly reassembled. When a mother neglects and is repulsed by her own offspring, yet is satiated by tending to another puritanical “messianic child; this sentiment exemplifies the colonial empathy crippling most people of colour.

Decolonising the usurped self means uncovering a history of merciless bodily control that entails disentangling oneself from all association with colonial imprints, disgusting only the anti-colonial in order to decolonise the self. 

Thoughts as imagery, sketches, and blueprints of a colonised inner self seen through a colonial lens, must be purged through rigorous interaction with all that is extra-legal in terms of western moralistic norms, carving a million voiced interpretations of pure intention.

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Existing without any political bearing on reality is near impossible, and obscuration and reclusivity have often been misconstrued for living a marginal existence that has no impact on a social dimension. Yet, the colonised self morphs and exists in liminal spaces, a chameleon who wear a kaleidoscopic personage which is reflected and projected on self-organized practices.

For an artist, should there be a vocabulary of seeing the self and extricating the self from the milieu, as a shadow membrane; an aesthetic-political freedom reaffirming much more lucid ways of how the real world appears to an abstracted self.

Does decolonising the self counter the colonial project enraging many woke people? Or is it a way of (dis)membering oneself in order to (re)member the self, not as a suspension of lucidity, but a way of reclaiming the shattered psyche that judges the shadows we occupy?

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Bravely staring into the gulfs of the psyche is daunting, especially when escapist methods have been employed to construct an illusory self, that purports to exist beyond the confines of coloniality. Rupturing the membranes of memory is traumatic in itself, but it is the essential route to truer self-rediscovery after absentia.

Emerging from this distortion and disfluency, the self translates its freedom on the premise of destruction of the colonial norm as a retirement for a self-centred d-colonial project. This deliberate effort to reassert  poetry to the discordance of the psyche allows for a wealth of generative forces. 

The forces in turn mould the soul into potentialities for transformation that can be transmitted to others as a form of intermediation. This new self, a hybrid of tensions in the silent emptiness discovered after shedding the illusory and colonised self is a gateway to a new silence beyond the boundaries of dogma, an echo of metaphors that emerged from the darkness of subservience.

The flood of time stirring awake after being displaced from the truer self, thus reaffirms life surging through cracks in walls built around the colonised self, trembling with each astonishing experience that reconfigures all reality around. 

Through this assemblage of psychic infractions and immersive mirages, a ghost in the mirror of the mind observing the alienated self through smoky eyes emerges, granting wishes from the grave not blinded by clarity. This reassembled self guides a new evolution of the soul, illuminating with an intensity that unsettles the resilient potential for transforming the preconceived notions of self in a constructed reality.

music inside

vibrating and haptic, 

visual and immaterial, 

embodied and disembodied,

with ceaseless grace 

like aural sculptures in vapours of time

the music inside swells.

with hums in a capsule

lured to their demise in collective joy 

not as denial or enchanted parenthesis, 

but as a conscious and active resistance 

to the depressive order of the lower world,

the music inside, a remedy as much as a tool. 

a room

a room that lives 

in indispensable shadows

and parallel snapshots of half dreams

amid a cascade of fragmented allegories of vision

gestures of lived thoughts

iterations of mythical undoings

crafting a recursive choreography 

witnessed through tears

in this room 

a grotesque comedy of forced oblivion

and fluid contemplations of synthetic fetishes

scrambles for lost reminders

about forgotten sounds of wonder

in this room 

filled with poly-vocal re-imaginings 

revealed through tinted glass

art the fragility of awkward objects

secured like wooden hearts in ragged ribcages

akin fragments of utopias distorted by blindness

fibres of destiny unreel with each gaze

translucent materiality draped in past disquiet

pressed against panes of a wasteland

and as this room eats its way 

through forests of dreamtime images

in muted violence stuck on wooden floors

slinking in and out to mimic the mischief of clocks

awaits yet, another room 

Drowsy Gods And Spoilt Demons

when the land becomes a mother,

folded by the sky timidly

in an age of loneliness,

her anxious gaze prompts us 

to experience unembellished self-forgetfulness

like faultless men at the mercy of the sea

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and when rises a disregarded room above the waters,

an adrift matter like a memory playing live

stalled in dormant conversations that look like forests

prophetic and reclined, tenderly trivial

yet an exemplar against amnesia,

it beckons us to sink our teeth into our skins to bleed patterns of wit into illumined soils

***

and in an art of a drowning man,

his mother - her girdle bound his neck;

in his eyes is observed a placid sea

thrusting back by a million deposited souls,

soaking to receive immortal honours

among drowsy gods and spoilt demons 

Black Mind.

Against Colonial Psychology - A View

Stories are remembered, revealed, feared, and not always recounted in a way that is desirable, and in them there are lingering echoes of past conflicts and trauma.

And just as territorial and post-colonial spaces are perceptible and tangible while revealing all historical complexity in order to address historical silences, they can also obscure portions of historical memory which continue to haunt many victims of colonial brutality. 

This obscuration and concealment ultimately reshapes the conditions of visibility for these victims while fostering new modes of appearing and surviving from the self-same obscurity and loss of identity.

In South Africa, narratives that exposes how grand colonial fantasies of segregating people of colour along their usefulness in regards to colonial demands, there coexisted narratives of the fetishization of homelands among the colonised which seem to be overlooked in academia. 

Investigating how these homelands, which symbolised blatant dispossession of land, became havens for black identity formation along tribal lines; is another aspect of the collective healing project that require scholarly attention; to uncover how the oppressed would accept such an unequal and exploitative social arrangement.

And as these narratives analysing various forms of sedimented colonial violence that deformed collective minds of black communities begin to come to the fore, due credit can be given to the efforts of dissident scholars such as Professor Kopano Ratele, among many.

In a time of monumental debates, inadequate ways of coping with the past and current manifestation of colonial traumas are further exacerbating senses of dislocation and social despondency in many who are concerned with finding tools for collective healing beyond western methodologies and analysis.

It therefore becomes essential that they find spaces for the examination and re-imagining of African cultural traumas in our autocratically ordered and increasingly post-factual world beyond the confines of academia and glass-walled lecture-halls made for voyeuristic observations.

Their work seems to repeatedly deal with questions of dislocation and the collective imagination of home and its interrupted relation to identity whilst suggesting its instability and plurality.

It is commendable that there are researchers, scholars, psychologists and writers who develop works that translate inner landscapes of traumatised people; observing, dissecting, reassembling their distraught identities and narratives of survival in adversity.

And although the notion of place as a locale informed by sedimented social and ecological histories is eroded by globalisation, their continued search and analysis of black minds, developed through a community-based approach, pushes a variety of boundaries, inserting subtle shifts and offering new readings destabilizing expectations and norms of western socio-psychological analysis.

Transforming past experiences into indelible social marks often neglects and turns away from accuracy, but rather moves towards convening, sensing, and misbehaving with histories, and stories enshrouding particular sites of memory.

Words are gestures, are images, are forms of witnessing in a social project shaped by collective experiences, and through their various incarnations, words can assist in reconstruction of shattered identities and healing.

Therefore the intention for this video poem stems from how private lives were impacted by historical catastrophes, dabbling with themes of self-reflection, offering vantages to rethink the current wretched souls of black folks while challenging hegemonic narratives of pain. 

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This video poem interrogates various interpretation of psychology in the African context, from how African centred research and practice converge to form hybrid form of psycho-analysis. 

It also questions how western psychology has been adapted and reassigned African metal illnesses, thus compounding the mounting questions about how a field of study fashioned by colonial minds liberated the particularities of the minds of the oppressed.

Rather than following a narrative structure, the video poem embodies a process with no clear beginning or end. It reflects the continuous interactions between the artist and scholars, capturing both moments of cacophony and moments of alignment. 

The emphasis is on the dynamics of collaboration, with individual authorship dissolving into new collective audio-visual shapes, reflecting on the historical, cultural, and psychological impacts of colonialism, as well as the process of revisiting the trauma it caused.

The video poem is consequently an effort to investigate the far-reaching emotional implications of western cultural hegemony and colonial systems of power for non-western subjectivities, focusing particularly on collective trauma and notions of repair.

Music In Times Of Strife - A Note To Musicians

Rather than viewing collapse as mere destruction,  embrace it as a generative force where brokenness is understood as a condition to embody and negotiate, rejecting the logic of repair.

This concept extends to the idea of dismantling the dominant systems that shapes our understanding of our existence, those oppressive structures that appear social, political, and environmental—developed out of Western thought.

This method of “re-worlding” therefore suggests an undoing of the existing world order of notes and melodies of melancholy, creating aural space for new possibilities that emerge from the collapse of these orchestrated systems.

From this state of improvised brokenness found in the chaotic aftermath will emerge a kinship found in wastelands of maternal wails. 

And through these new connections — both human and non-human as in robot sibilances that haunt dreams — in light and shadow, in forests and in depths of oceans. - our metaphors will embrace their demons.

Write notes in the translation of errors emotional exchanges between cultures, souls and wrapped in their losses and recurring methods of deprivation.

Rhythmatize freedom that arises from the disarticulation of simple images of poverty in a climate of impunity and make beauty seem like transition and upheaval waltzing hand in hand. 

***

Your melodies aught be not orchestrated by state and societal forces, but rather by reimagines of a new poetics of resistance and littered with narratives of mobility, impermanence and acts of resilience in adversities.

But can music be composed that juxtaposes multiple temporalities pertaining to Africa’s diverse history, mythology, and ecosystems related to biological evolution and eminent extinction?

As musics of each land are independent corpuses of knowledge about the envisioned future, from pasts that unfold horrible memories they linger as scores narrated through blistered lips.

Can Africa’s songs be generated through sequences of informal instigations and responses to destruction,  traumatised jubilations that become a metaphor for inherited gestures and wounds?

Are there sonic remnants and souvenirs after any destruction such as sounds of fighter jets and explosions of shells in homesteads that can be decoded and recoded into a collage of real and fantasized history?

Believing that music is not meant to atone or repent the broken and damaged, it still has the capacity to interrogate, trigger and root memories. So, can musicality induced in the cacophonies of horror become a soothing balm to scars in minds and souls of the dispossessed?

And can music made against a background of incomprehensible ruin and killing in warzones like Gaza and elsewhere be considered therapeutic of lived traumas?

***

What song can translate our leaders’ tyrannous genes, those who could watch hundred of young men perish trapped in cramping mineshaft, wantonly disregarding life for favour of profiteers?

Whispering to souls frightened by jubilation, could this music be mournful and painterly, rousing wounds to song and bleeding over again, in the midst of relief and momentary rescue?

In light of imposed silences that convey concealed voices of poets incarcerated by their demons, may your chorus be filled with uncomfortable hymns that triumph over bellicose slander of paddlers of power.