The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships. ~ Audre Lorde.
The neocolonial blindfold
It has been over two hundred and fifty days since what is left of Palestine has turned into a legitimate concentration camp. Far from wanting to take any type of pain lightly, when I saw the world’s first reaction my first thought was how sad it always is to see most people’s emotional state synchronise with whatever mainstream media decides to give attention to, with whatever they decide to say about it, and with no interlink nor relation to what and those who are behind what is actually happening all over the world. Although it is not justified in this Information Age, this is how formal education and popular culture has been purposefully designed after all. In such a way that you don’t know what hurts the most, whether it is the reality, or the sickness behind, around, through, and beyond that twists it. Something that those at the far end of any oppression know from experience very well. The ongoing reality bursts into temporary moments of global evidence getting a sudden reaction which fades until the next visible event, as if they were, when known, disconnected. And we are the type of creatures who feel and empathise with what we can see, which is well-known by those who control the public news stream.
In this so-called Age of Information where we can, even if for a high price, curate our own feed, there is also a type of unprecedented agency where education and information have left the neocolonial/politically biased official curriculums and national broadcast channels.
As events keep unfolding, in the most progressive circles we have seen the narrative change from genocide to globally silent genocides, from Zionism to The Suez Canal, and ultimately from Gaza’s gas to Sudan’s gold, Congo’s cobalt, Haiti’s limestone, Afghanistan’s copper, West Papua’s crude oil, and every other territory suffering from some form of genocide or intense suffering under the Western imperial machine of capitalism … On a global underground-made-mainstream level, we have also seen almost the entire world reaching the biggest protests of their history demanding a stop to the violence in Palestine, including the occupation in the best cases. The first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time hoping that the world might do something about it. We have seen Westerners astonished to find out that their taxes are funding the world’s weapons and the complicity, not to say the origin of it all, in the Western elites while reaching out to ‘their representatives’ begging for a ceasefire. We have seen most people mocking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We have watched the director of the United Nations in New York resigning from what he himself calls a failing lie. We have seen South Africa be the only country to bring a genocide case against Israel to the ‘International Court of Justice’, for which support has been led by ‘Global South’ countries (a list that would be longer were these countries not still overdependent on ‘former’ colonies), at least successfully killing the myth of the White saviour. Now a visibly fish eating its own tail. You could say that the world’s neocolonial blindfold is, at least in the ‘Global North’, starting to fall down.
While Israeli embassies abroad are closing their doors, Palestinians are sending goodbye letters to institutions on behalf of their entire ethnicity. While freedom of speech is openly forbidden and punished at the heart of Western ‘democracies’, people are having diverse trauma responses in the West known as fight or freeze. While some corporations are closing franchises due to a partial popular boycott, Congolese keep silently dying in astronomical numbers in comparison to furnish the world with technology on an ongoing basis. And while the number of bombs dropped in Palestine is greater than the entirety used in World War 2 to date … I can’t help but wondering, well against my wishes, when all of this will be collectively left behind as a surrealist blurred memory as it has already happened in the past, meanwhile Sundays in the West are spent back in malls under the illusion of freedom that four, or eight, if lucky, days a month concede. Even the so-called leftists will continue to vote the populist left of a bipartisan paradigm under the same capitalism just to avoid something worse if they don’t, while Palestine could quickly become a well-edited remnant of a history book, not to say one more social scapegoat, via a one more sponsored holocaust which has successfully increased anti-semitism and islamophobia by 1000%. Because for what it concerns the rest, it will not even get attention.
They are somewhat funny these reactionary moments of collective effervescence within a structure that only seems to get stronger until it collapses naturally, versus what could collectively be constant conscious responses. We seem to be so vocal about far-away occupations as if we were not letting our lives be occupied by the exact same power behind them all. As if there was a genuine interest in being invested in freeing the occupation of our minds despite the challenges of having to navigate that beyond what we are being offered, including the realm not only of education, but also the one of health. Including somewhat understandable reactions in emergency situations, yet still not responses, such as demanding to defund the police in the context of Black Lives Matter for example. As if all these were things alien to the rest, to be begged to a not complicit and sane elite, or a well-rounded system just in need of reform.
In everyday life, when planning how to build one within this paradigm, it almost seems instinctual for humans to opt for what feels like the safest option, considering it a matter of survival. However, for most people, this means focusing solely on the short term and their own immediate needs, even if it means adapting to the most unsafe option in both the present and long-term future. Even when having awareness of past struggles and what they have taught us, it ironically feels almost immoral to constantly do your best to live against capitalism not only socially, but especially when previous generations had little choice, and we are the first to actually have one. Even for our direct affections and their sacrifices, it is somehow considered a betrayal not to adhere to the capitalist notion of success. Yet that is what would really pay everyone, not to say life, homage. That is where the compromise goes through when willing to respect both yourself and everything else, not only in your past, present, and future lineage. This dilemma resembles the theory of instant versus delayed gratification on a larger scale that also reverts in the present. Despite the challenges, there is unparalleled peace in living and building in alignment with one’s values as much as possible, while creating a positive multidirectional impact. Encouragingly, if dismantling neocolonial structures is akin to lifting a veil, then we cannot say that it is not gradually happening, recognising that everything is a process. The question remains: how far are these social outbursts, both inwardly and outwardly, willing to go?
As the Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean anticolonial revolutionary Amilcar Cabral said conscious of the links that go unseen to the majority due to our neocolonial indoctrination like other revolutionaries, there are two alternatives: ‘We either admit that there really is a struggle against imperialism as the highest form of capitalism which interests everybody, or we deny it. If it exists and is trying simultaneously to dominate everything from the working class upwards in all the so-called ‘advanced’ countries, while smothering the national liberation movements of the countries that the West underdeveloped, then there is only one enemy against whom we are fighting. If we are fighting together, then the main aspect of our united solidarity is extremely simple: it is to fight.’ If we understand neocoloniality as literally anything alienating us from ourselves, then we can even bring it a level further.
Liberation psychology and radical politics
Crises keep overlapping, with the most recent one being the national far-right rise in the UK, and rarely seen as the eventual symptomatic tip of an iceberg that links them all. Among all the narratives since last October, I have failed yet to find a popular contemporary one approaching this event, or any other really, through the lens of trauma in a constructive way except for ‘Israel, Palestine, and the Doppelganger Effect’ in the book Doppelganger: A Trip Into The Mirror World by Naomi Klein, a Canadian author and activist of Jewish origin, which includes the chapters ‘The Nazi in the Mirror’ and ‘The Unshakable Ethnic Double’. I have still failed to find at least one narrative beyond the blame or intractable game, genuinely appealing to everybody, through and beyond history, let alone beyond Western medicine. This essay, revisiting the work of many liberation psychology and decolonial thinkers, aims to do so, analysing the relationship of the oppressor and the oppressed in a way that interlinks both the personal and the social with a decolonial and hence radical approach, that talks in past, present, and future tense to everyone. And after a historical global pandemic momentum relevant to decoloniality, these types of pieces written during another historical momentum, as sad as it sounds, will not expire any time soon. As Naomi Klein states, ‘Israel-Palestine has been described by many as the ‘open wound’ of the modern world: never healed, never bandaged, now ripped open in ways we cannot yet begin to comprehend. Yet convinced that we can break out of our partitioned narratives, that we can look at and listen to and learn from our doubles, even the ones we most reject, that may be our only hope’. In my eyes, the Israel-Palestine case is such a textbook example of how oppression works applicable to any other, that when thinking bigger in these terms, specificities are, at that level, irrelevant.
Albert Memmi, a Tunisian sociologist and writer of Jewish origin, explored the interdependent relationship between oppressor and oppressed in his 1957 book The Colonizer and The Colonized. He analysed the psychology of the oppressed revealing how both groups experience a duality and dissociation. This manifests as a distorted self-perception and an internalised oppressor through a process of demystifying the ego and its illusions. An alienated ego experiencing a one-sided world through the emotional projections of its own shadow / unconscious, whose dilemma is to find itself authentically, which applies to any kind of oppression equally. Without addressing this internalised oppression, Memmi later explained in 1974, horizontal violence and projective identification occur, where in the impossibility of detecting our internal oppressor, we end up oppressing our direct and indirect fellows. And in that projection, attacking indirectly the oppressor that inhabits us and others, we become oppressors ourselves. It is a phenomenon that even explains how narcissists, including the Western ones ruling the world, come to be.
Beyond the Eurocentric conception of mental health, and through the lens of Indigenous cosmovisions around trauma with concepts such as soul wound, and blood memory, the approach is very different, but the consequence is the same. By this principle, not only Jews are just enacting and recreating their own generational trauma but -if not healed- Palestinian, Congolese, Sudanese, Ethiopian, Afghans, Haitians… alongside any survivors and any oppressed community/person in the oppression spectrum of what is just a chain effect, were, are, and will be, the next generation of oppressors-to-be. One of the things that makes the approach of decolonial healers and scholars such as Renee Linklater, Frantz Fanon, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Eduardo Duran, Orkideh Behrouzan, Malidoma Somé, Aurora Levins Morales or Jennifer Mullan among others completely different, is that within this paradigm, people are not -originally speaking- the ones to be fixed, but the environment that they were/are in. People are not sick but sickened. The social system is the one sick. Nobody feeling truly safe needs to be violent, which makes the all psychological cycle-breaking work, inevitably political. It is indeed the approach of liberation psychology, first conceived by the Spanish/Salvadoran psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró and developed extensively in Latin America, which aims to actively understand the psychology of the oppressed by conceptually and practically addressing the oppressive sociopolitical structure in which they exist. An interdisciplinary approach that draws on liberation philosophy, Marxist and decolonial thought, critical theory, and critical pedagogy. Unfortunately, when it comes to personal and social healing, since they are two sides of the same liberation coin, people often just cope and fight in the wrong direction as a trauma response, often supported by their own personal and social oppressors.
Regardless of who you are thinking about, we cannot shame ourselves/people at large into change, but only love ourselves and each other into evolution. Yet for that to happen we/people need to properly face the truth, not to mention the wound, to understand what we/people are dealing with, to be able to grow not only the vision but the compassion necessary to move us/ the world forward. That is to say that we need to understand the neocolonial/narcissistic disease for what it is in order for it not to have power over us personally, let alone to be able to dismantle it socially. And that is an ongoing process which requires a lot of consciousness, to witness the unconscious through everything we have been through and continue to be programmed to be and think like, if not paying attention. It is so insidious, that even when fighting it, if our consciousness falters, we risk becoming the very thing we are against. The identity, the choices, the activism, everything gets shaped by the same sickening pattern, as a mirroring reaction defined by the very cause it is against instead of a response, because it knows nothing else. Like Ayishat Akanbi once said, ‘when you dedicate more time to fighting your opponents instead of building your associates you cease to heal what societal structures erode from within’. It is indeed easier to promote what we hate punctually in between periods of illusionary escapism, instead of promoting what we love continually, but definitely not better.
That is the reason why genuine liberation has always been focused in one way or another on the realm of the imagination. The goal of oppressors is to limit the imagination about what is possible without them. The reason why envisioning more for yourself and the world you live in within a completely different logic frame, getting curious about what it actually takes to make it happen, and building it every day is the only thing that makes sense. If we can’t see beyond, nor work out that muscle, we can’t go anywhere different. We all lack genuinely practical formal education to navigate this present realm of life, let alone education showing us other paths and other ways towards personal and social health. However, the world has very much had iconic revolutionary teachers of many kinds, whose torches need to be handed over and refocused so that we can all become our own and others’ as our main responsibility if there is anything, past, present and future, we care about. As much as, deep down, this frightens us as beings mentally-wired towards what the brain understands as safety, which in neurological language is only the familiar however unsafe that is, that is how the imperialism shaping our lives, gets dismantled. Even if the ongoing process lasts over a lifetime, not underestimating the liberation work that others have done before leading us to this point, that means self-enquiring how ready we actually are to stop being complicit with capitalism through our most important vital choices, as challenging as being fully coherent is while living in it. Our global crisis is a crisis of relationship, and it is a decolonial exercise thinking beyond constructed binaries, able to gracefully link everything. In this instance, liberation psychology and radical politics are an imperative link to be able to compassionately humanise and understand as well as to envision a way forward, which is not the same as justifying any side including our own, even in the face of savage oppression. Generational trauma reenacts itself in different timelines and ways, but in a social context, it is knowing where it is rooted and embedded in -what is the real problem and not the people that needs to be resisted- the first step forward when thinking of the long-term solution to a constant problem, instead of how to cope with its eventual symptoms.
Conclusion
We will only decolonise the world when we unlearn how to be violent towards ourselves and others, very conscious of the relationship on both ends. Considering the past and present state of global affairs, something that has been taught to us all personally and socially, even if differently, through intergenerational trauma. Oppression, when ingrained and not healed, ends up based on the mythification of false beliefs that are only masking the pain within and released by recreating it, finding an external ‘enemy’ who can personify it. Something that is reinforced by the visible and invisible oppression we all live under even if at different levels of it. Liberation is consciously choosing to transcend the myths we are fed, by having the courage to face our wounds, to be able to holistically ground ourselves to see through and act with as much integrity as possible. In the middle of a genocide recreating a genocide that happened years earlier, while in the middle of an even sicker context responsible for the original and ongoing, the ones at the far end of incomparable terrorism obviously need emergency support. However, no effort is going to ever change genocidal violence if not addressing the wound of the ones enacting it. And most importantly, no effort is going to ever change any type of interconnected violence if we are all not addressing our own.
As the Brazilian critical pedagogue Paulo Freire, the Tunisian sociologist Albert Memmi, and the American writer and activist Audre Lorde, among other authors pointed out, in this complementary pair of opposites – oppressor and oppressed – one cannot exist without the other so the only possible liberation is to extinguish the oppression that would extinguish them both in a revolutionary way, but it is dehumanising, alienating, and self-destructive for both, which is why liberation is not a job to be carried out by one side alone.
Needless to say, the consciously oppressed have always been, are, and will be the ones leading the way as the first attaining that consciousness, making the unconsciously oppressed conscious of the fact that they were and are oppressed too so that liberation is actually possible.
Only the day when our efforts will gather some coherence. The day when triggering events perceived as external will be compassionately recognised as a ripple effect literally linked to our everyday life functioning, whether we like it or not, as a mirror of the violence we engage in in our cities, in our homes, in our relationships with ourselves and others, and when constantly addressed. The day when the depth of our understanding will know that although not all forms of oppression were invented in the West, the entire world is currently shaped by its neocoloniality -and most importantly how- the link of all the personal and social struggles existing under the same power will become undeniable. When we unlock that what is really behind any oppressed-turned-oppressor in whichever visible or hidden, punished or accepted, personal and/or social manner and degree, is no different from what is really behind the heaviness and effervescence of today, we will, at our core, be free. And only then, the rest will follow.
Author’s Bio:
Cristina Morales is a Spanish London-based cultural activist – an applied anthropologist and transdisciplinary cultural practitioner working internationally as a critical researcher, writer, pedagogue, and social practice curator-artist at the intersection of art and politics for self and community development. A singular trauma-informed cultural strategist linking decolonial theory and the full spectrum of human sciences with social practice art. Her work and interests involve but are not limited to, public engagement, critical and co-led practices, relational learning and alternative forms of knowledge production, radical imagination, alternative art circuits, social and avant-garde movements, African/diaspora arts & culture, and ultimately holistic health.
Author’s website: moralescristina.com