Colonialism and its surroundings

On the first pages of

, the novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah that I read these days with admiration and delay, one of the narrators meditates on the relationship that his African country had with the British colonizers.

He remembers his childhood education, received in the language of the colonizers, and he remembers the confused impression that education produced on him.

It was, he tells us, something akin to admiration for the colonizers, who had come so safely to these lands to do important things that the colonized were unaware of: curing diseases, for example, or flying planes.

But then he thinks that admiration is not the word.

What he felt—what children like him, brought up in that system, felt—was more like a compromise.

And what was it that the locals conceded to the colonizers?

Control, says the man: control over their material lives,

but also on their minds.

And then come these wonderful lines, which I'm going to allow myself to quote without cutting them, because every word matters:

“In their books [in the books of the colonizers, that is] I read unflattering accounts of my history, and because they were unflattering, they seemed truer than the stories we told ourselves.

I read about the diseases that plagued us, about the future that awaited us, about the world we lived in and our place in it.

It was as if we had been remade, and in a way that we now had no choice but to accept, so complete and accurate was the story they told about us.

I don't think they told it to us cynically, because it seems to me that they also believed it.

It was the way they understood us and themselves, and in the overwhelming reality we lived with there was little to allow us to contradict it, at least as long as the story was new and unchallenged."

Seaside

was published in 2001;

In the years since then, I don't think I have read a more lucid description of the invisible effects of colonialism.

The other effects, the visible ones, are well known to all, and tend to appear frequently in the newspapers, almost always taking the form of violent acts or, in any case, of human suffering;

but what Gurnah's character describes, the slow imposition on a society of a history that is not its own, is the sociopolitical equivalent of brainwashing, the conquest of territory that is, ultimately, much more valuable than the geographic territory of a country: the mental territory.

All the earthly powers that have been in the world have pursued that prize, and anyone who has read George Orwell knows well that, among many other things, that is political power:

the ability to impose a particular narrative on a society.

When society buys the story, when it makes it its own and begins to live in it and understands itself through it, the powerful can say that they have triumphed.

Colonialism is no different in that from any of the other isms that have tried to shape our lives in recent times.

This is what totalitarianisms have done: I think of the fascist and the communist, although someone will surely tell me that colonialism is, in itself, a totalitarian form (and they would not be wrong, although this is a more complex conversation).

In any case, this seems obvious to me: setting up a story

,

ourselves in a way that

, is what everyone who aspires to dominate a society seeks.

If I had to choose a reason why novelists and poets are persecuted, censored and sometimes assassinated by these powers, this seems to me the most obvious: literature is uncomfortable because it is always rebelling against the imposed narratives, introducing dissent, giving a version of common history that is discordant or unsubmissive, preventing with its mere existence the establishment of a single or monolithic history.

"What you are telling is false, or incomplete, or tendentious," says the literature.

"Things did not happen that way, or they also happened in another way, or could have happened in another way, and our story is incomplete if that way is not told."

This, of course, is terribly annoying, at least for the authoritarian on duty.

To use again the lucky words of Abdulrazak Gurnah, or of his narrator in his novel: what literature (or, at least, the literature that interests me) has always done, is to search, in the

, which allows us to contradict the history that something or someone tries to impose on us, the history that is imposed

.

But the issue does not have to be only political.

Theodor Adorno pointed out somewhere that one of the hallmarks of a fascist is a deep aversion to introspection, or to all who invite introspection: of course, group identification cannot work if group members are looking inward. inside, if they are not participating in the collective story or do not buy it or do not believe it, if they declare themselves agnostic or disinterested or merely skeptical.

By the very fact of inviting the citizen to become a private individual, to leave the gregariousness and lock himself in the worlds that he carries within, the literature of imagination becomes subversive.

Almost 50 years ago, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa had a conversation without waste in Lima.

(Actually there were two conversations in a row, and they have recently been published in book form under the title

There García Márquez comments that he does not know of any genuine literature that serves to exalt established values.

And, despite the fact that the example of the literature of Rudyard Kipling, who is at the same time a genuine writer and an outright colonialist, occurs to me, I understand well what he says;

and furthermore, I am certain that this is one of the debts that we Latin Americans owe to the two novelists sitting there, and to others ranging from Alejo Carpentier to Carlos Fuentes, from Guillermo Cabrera Infante to Ricardo Piglia: their novels blew up the very notion of unique history, and they left us behind a multiple and vast continent, with an ambiguous past and elusive present, whose overwhelming reality so many continue to try to appropriate.

And there we go novelists, trying to cover the continent with stories.

So Gurnah's novel, which talks above all about colonialism, can also be used to talk about other, very different things.

Well, all citizens of all societies live in tension with what we can call our storytellers: the forces that constantly compete to tell the story that wins, the story that prevails.

These narrators can be political institutions such as the State or historical phenomena such as isms, they can be organized religions (great and successful narrators) but also cultural trends, since nothing moves the stories of our contemporary world as much as the exaltation of identities.

Be that as it may, it is better for us citizens to be vigilant: contradict, question, disagree.

That there is always someone out there determined to colonize our heads.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

is a writer.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber