Colonialism made us feel backward. It was always Europe that was advanced and enlightened, and it was always the East that was backward and wretched. Rather than honestly say that they had come to plunder, the colonial rulers said that they had come to school the East — it needed to be civilized. Every European colonizer used the phrase — the French called it mission civilisatrice, the Portuguese called it missão civilizadora and the English called it liberalism. [...]
Fanon considers the problem of backwardness as it re-emerges after independence. The masses’ victory does not come with the sensation of a new beginning. They have thrown out the colonizers, but they now find that “they have been robbed of all these things” that modernity had promised them — running water, surely, but also freedom of political action. Two or three years after independence, Fanon writes, the people begin to feel that “it wasn’t worth while” to fight the colonizers, and “that nothing could really change.” Fanon sees this resentment. It marks his text. “The enlightened observer takes note,” writes Fanon, “of the existence of a kind of burnt-down house after the fire has been put out, which still threatens to burst into flames again.” [...]
The colonial gaze descends upon women in burkhas or burkinis or in anything that resembles — as far as the colonizer is concerned — backwardness. Real backwardness — poverty, disease, illiteracy — is set aside. It is the false backwardness — backward religions — that must be condemned. This colonizer sees in the woman a threat to his civilization. He wants to tell her what to do. She cannot make up her own mind. Not long ago the colonial patriarch told white women not to wear bikinis. Now the colonial patriarch tells women to wear bikinis. It is always the colonial patriarch who must decide. He is the only voice of freedom. It is his mission civilisatrice.
No comments:
Post a Comment