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.
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