There is a stranger in my home: The colonial identity through the lens of a West African.

Tw: rape and discrimination

I like to view Africa and especially my home of Sierra Leone as an entity with limbs, eyes and a skull. It’s become a way for me to think beyond the scope of politics and into the realm of the person and all our tentacles. I’m not too sure what her name would be, but I know that she would be old, riddled with wrinkles but nonetheless beautiful. There would be cuts and bruises as big as potholes, sporadically placed on the creases of her knees and elbows. Jagged cuts, scrapes and love bites, centuries old intertwining with fresh ones. Her hair would be thick and coarse, with twigs laced in the strands, caressing each other like lovers. She is worn. Blood, diamonds, cobalt. She is both man and God. Redemption and vengeance. She is all and yet nothing at all. She is both stagnant and ever changing, morphing into whatever faceless creature enters her. Years of torment are engraved in the lines of her feet, inscribing beautifully tragic tales of torture and revolutions; there is a story that lies here. There is a constant rhyme emitting from her centre, a concoction of wails and sighs creating a symphony; there is beauty in the terror and noise. She is never alone. A disfigured creature is latched onto her right breast, sucking vehemently at what should be milk but resembles that of tar; it’s a strange thing, with maimed legs and huge hands, crazed eyes flittering constantly side to side.

The seeping liquid has stained the once pristine uniform that adorns the things body, creating a mirage of red, black and gold. It’s scratching and prodding and pulling at her, drawing out more of this black liquid. There is a scent that lingers in the air, and it is pungent. She is naked and shivering despite the warmth of the sun beating down on her, but still gathers the strength to hit and beg and plead with the thing to release her. It does not.

Who am I? Who am I beyond the lenses of the west? Who we are and where we belong is a tapestry of complex boarders and lexicons. We are born faceless and rub the paint of our environments to create a person that resembles that of so many before us. Who am I without my opposing reflections glaring onto me? Identity and its abruptly dynamic nature have provided the soil for just about everything and integrates itself in conversations that stem far beyond the individual. Identity in its rawest form goes beyond who we present ourselves as or the communities we resonate with; it’s the reason your grandma has her living room painted orange and why you refuse to purchase a white fridge. It’s the wind that moves the flags and the ink on the US constitution. How we decide to identify ourselves are confounded and entrenched by reasons we don’t even think about but comes as an innate response to the glaringly quiet societal questions that ring in our ears when we decide that living is inevitable. But what I find truly puzzling is not the power of identity, but its capacity to transform and transcend what we understand; it seems as though our identities are ubiquitous things that have a life force that we don’t control, this is especially true when exploring the person who has known nothing beyond western domination. I don’t want to talk about the African economy without talking about the African who lives and lived under it. I don’t want to talk about Kente cloth without examining the woman whose hands have bled to create it. Let’s look at the ordinary human for a change.

The colonial identity is a complicated, undefined retelling and reopening of a cultural brutality that stems decades. It’s the systemic pilgrimage of a person, a ripping and a tearing of parts of a people that had once soaked the soils of the land but now lay dead in white closets. The cyclical subjugation of the African is so deeply ingrained in culture, it has metamorphosized the victim itself and torn at the deeply planted beliefs the person holds. A holy ritual occurs, birthing a person that although lives on the land, doesn’t belong there; a hybrid of new and old, fake and real plant itself in place of the indigenous. There is an intangible separation of the African body and the African mind, the two disjointed parts weaving into each other, always adjacent but never unifying. I like to address this phenomenon as a dissociation of the mass identity that shrouds the carcass of the African continent because what you see is not what is always true. A sad part of this story is that the suffering occurs in places we cannot see and therefore tend to ignore, such as the mind. The post-colonial mind is one that is always at odds with itself as it cannot recognise a reality and system that is being forced upon them but is also disconnected from the habitual customs crafted at the hands of their ancestors. We shall further examine the specific catalysts of this disconnect without focusing too much on the west but not leaving them completely abdicated from fault because this dissolvement lays in their hands also.

There is a broad understanding that identity is a malleable ecosystem that is bonded and twisted within the practices of life and the act of existing. To see identity is to not only see the person but to witness the chaotic transformations of individuals that don’t exist beyond the psyche. Identity is fantasy and premonitory, a fixture of a sick mind. To look at the colonial identity you need to witness the systemic ruining of character and the proliferation of violent greed as vehicles of subjugation and instruments of domination. Colonial identity and its formation are heavily birthed from the creation of language and begins alongside the identity of the coloniser himself. I don’t like to use the word creation because it doesn’t accurately represent the very specific nature of colonial identity and the way in which it manifests itself alongside the identity of the coloniser. Colonial identity is a wholly communal and impersonal throwing of cultural acid and seeks a purpose to create intergenerational scars that form beasts of cyclical torture; it’s a strange byproduct of our western lust for economic and psychological power. When western colonialists stepped foot on west African soil and saw the opportunity to monopolise both person and product, the entity of economic conquering became formless. There was an almost instant recognition of money and person being a vessel for psychotic evil to coincide complacent benevolence; to create a society that reflects not of God but of machine, there needs to be a down to the molecular level of destruction within a collective body. Identity in colonial lands, is painting limbs on equipment and denying the thing under it a face and a biological individualism. The colonised wasn’t a functioning being, but a mirror, both everchanging and still. Identity exists but isn’t there because the person it belongs to isn’t viewed as a human but a monetary catalyst. This mass objectification of the African is an intentional method used to create a society that can reflect delusion and promise but not hold the capacity to see the horizon that glares over the white man’s shoulder. The colonialists were looking for a never drying fountain of prosperity and humans are fallible and O so mortal; the marring of the person is a necessary fixture of a fruitful land.

There is something so intrinsically evil about the dehumanisation of the colonised African besides the actual taking away of their humanity; the colonisers had found a way to take something that is so beautifully human and complicated and reconstruct it into something that lives alongside a creature. The African was nothing more than a commodity or a resource that exists very finely within the financial systems of distant economies and any part of them that resembled that of a human was tied as a liability or a consequence of a deficient culture. There is no individual when looking at colonial identity but a mass grave, bellowing the cries of a discordant requiem. When you destroy the individual, you can put forth characteristics and possibilities that extend beyond the body’s capacity for readaptation; these brown corpses are reborn as shadows and wander the land with no recollection of birth but with the knowledge that their death has begun. You smite the face, steal the soul of the people and the ones that want to blossom from the soil have no sense of self; their remains have already burnt and are languishing at the hands of a stranger. The distancing of self and mind caused by colonialism has resulted in the ‘things’ that lay waste at the machines, living in limbo; confused at who they really are and clinging to ideals thrown on them. The colonisers themselves have no idea what these people truly are and see them as just a means to an end if that. These brown bodies are simply just bodies, and they were formed to serve. When looking at the formation of racial stereotypes and the introduction and reintroduction of systemic racism, it ties back to a need to rationalise the irrational. Propagating these stereotypes has led to contradiction in message and therefore a contradiction in victim; the African is lazy but unruly, a sexual deviant and a prude, illiterate and a manipulator. All these cogs come together to forge a system that cannot work but doesn’t understand why this is the case. When these ideals are already sparring one another, the small yet innate parts of the colonised that remain from their past self also look on in confusion at the inner workings of a person they cannot recognise; so, they latch on. They begin to become and accept parts of themselves that are unfamiliar but beat drums that resemble rhymes from what was and who they once were. A man that misses a day of work is immediately lazy because he is told so by both the coloniser and his own desire to form a person that can be recognised. To be known is to be seen and to be seen is to have face. The African and the coloniser share a brutally intimate exchange of a person to finally form something that is unrecognisable to both and lives beyond the perception of normality. They both are confused at what lays before them but are so desperate for a semblance of identity that they try anyway to say it is gospel; however, it is constantly rejected and instead blurs with the fantasies of capitalism.

 Evil is an obvious bystander of colonialism but the way in which it is presented, leaves room for justification at the hands of the perpetuator. Kicking a human and kicking a pebble are, in the simplest of terms, the same thing. The action of kicking is recognised as something that is inherently violent but the thing it is done upon inspire different reactions. We accept that humans are deserving of fairness but that pebble without soul and the ability to function is simply a replaceable part of landscape.  This attitude towards pebble and human describes the basis for the justification of social violence done upon the colonised west African. The colonised isn’t human so therefore the violence bestowed upon them isn’t violence because the action is without victim and ultimately a casual norm. To take it one step further, the colonised needs saving from their own languishing that comes as an inevitable force of their own inability to properly exist (like a pebble on a footpath, they are a mere inconvenience); they need the white man to save them from themselves. The barbarity of colonialism is a part of the forced cleansing of Africanness from the world and paired with the frailty of western consciousness and morality. When you are told you do not exist, that you are nothing but a pebble, the human in you begins to rot and so does the want for emancipation. All that we recognise as a colonial identity lives alongside, not within, the colonised. Identity is without agent.

Identity, in the context of colonialism, is a broad and rambunctious steam engine, clacking away constantly. As the identity clings to the colonised, a forceful reckoning begins in the mind of the coloniser; something breaks within him, and he begins to separate himself with reality. Fantasy and truth conceive a beast both untameable and dormant, holding a spiked whip in its hands. Colonial identity is tethered to both colonised and coloniser, the two a consequence of one another but able to come to fruition without the presence of their opposite. Identity through the lens of the coloniser is just as complex as the identity adopted by the colonised because they both are in nature, false. When we become consciously human, we cement some unshakeable ‘truths’ about ourselves that have been forged by weapons that never grace our hands. Even if we are to become people that are completely different, these foundational truths lay at the foot of our persona and rear its head whenever we think of deviating from our rudimentary selves. Change is not without cost, and you cannot evade the swing from the hammer you cast. The identities that come to pass in colonial rule are somewhat symbiotic in nature and force themselves to fit into moulds that they are not meant to be held in. let us strip the whip from the hands of the coloniser and understand that without domination, their identities are unfulfilled; they are nothing, but brute force mangled with a deeply insecure and impotent being. Identity in the eyes of a coloniser is a curse that whispers the incantations of a morally inept man that lives alongside master. These colonisers, for a lack of a better word, were (I use the word were loosely) mediocre men that held no agency in their native lands; simply ordinary. Something malevolent comes to pass when man is given power and room to deploy the ailments that press on him; a second birth occurs except the foetus isn’t of this world and lays in the womb of man, out of sight but in mind. It is a biblical prophecy that needs the blood of the brown man to actualise but the prophecy is not without ramification. When you deny nature and transform yourself outside the realms that should be possible for you, the man you truly are becomes a man that troubles you. The master and the slave cannot be the same; the warrior you have become cannot succeed in battle if the battle that exists is one where the sword you wield to kill another, is the sword that strikes you first. The coloniser is the first and last victim of their own sword.

Identity is internalised persecution. When the coloniser becomes a coloniser, an immediate discomfort settles at the pit of his stomach and he recognises to sustain power over the African, he must place a leash on the man that existed before. This is not possible, and he is instead taunted by himself. The decay of the individual happens for both the colonised and the coloniser, but the stench is different and the way in which the decay presents itself are ideologically combative. We recognise that identity in the colonial system is blinding but the anger that it causes in the coloniser is something very interesting and evinces the duality of humanity. In all sense of the word, the coloniser is a messy matrimony, and this mess inspires more hatred for not only himself but of the colonised. There comes a point where the internal battle for self in the coloniser begins to spill on those who he subjugates and in turn releases a being that displays an almost diabolically nefarious system of targeted destruction. When who you are begins to prod at you instead of dissolving, the human embodiment of your confliction serve as a reminder of your own rot and your conviction of self is only maintained through chaos. Everything is tainted. Who you are can only sprout when the people you persecute are faceless. The price of greed is always yourself. This torture consumes the coloniser and they themselves become transmitters of not blood and bone but of commodity that operates beyond the empire. All that makes him human lay waste and the immortality that was supposed to come from invisible revolutions are stuck in the handle of blood drenched daggers.

Identity is war on battlefields that hold no soldier but blood blooms like roses, rattling on about the fictious men that fell at their own hand. There are no victors in this war, both winner and loser lay either dead or destroyed, telling tales of sadism but their whispers go unheard. The juxtaposition of war and identity is a concept that very specifically targets the colonised and births itself continuously, well after the declaration of independence for these countries. The maintenance of self for the coloniser is the maintenance of domination because as inferred, they are illegitimate masters of both body and people. However, the synthetic power they’ve accumulated is too hard to let go of so instead of reverting to their person, they become more erratic in their fight for more, their paradoxical identities shape into codified constitutions and iron clad institutions. The cerement that he wove is heavy on his back but serves him, interthread with the nerves within him. The coloniser is shackled to death like they are destined lovers, coming to meet but time standing between the two could ever come to pass. Their live beyond their person and cannot wield to something as fickle as death. Their suffering continues far beyond the moulder of the grave.  Identity in the colonised world is that of mysticism and legend forging a reality that refuses to capitulate to the norm. it is without definition but an omnipotent force that I feel today as I write this in the comfort of my bedroom. This is what identity is; power and presence are the children of this dirty copulation and live beyond the person. The identity of the colonised man and his coloniser continue to breathe today, infecting and punishing their offspring.

So far in this piece, I’ve looked at colonial identity as a manifestation of a blaring mania that convolutes its victims, or the people it captures. It breaks into rooms and destroys cultures, but identity is not without dichotomy and can become anything as it is everything. Hopefully you’ve noticed the very intentional placement of pronouns in this piece of work and the lack of the use of ‘she’ (this is completely intentional).  Women in both literature and life are a mystery undefined by event but human landscape for suffering; hysterically quiet victims that pose in the background, blood staining their funeral gowns. Does the woman exist? Do our identities stay forgotten in the pages of diaries never written? My voice is bellowing, sweet cries of pleasure and mournful weeps of pain but can you hear me man? Is my womb and the child that passes my only form?

 I want to explore identity as both a method for silencing and who’s own voice is banished to the vacuum of history, who is better to show this disjunction than that of the colonised woman. When exploring the colonised woman and the question of her identity, its imperative to look beyond colonialism and understand that patriarchy has claimed her well before the white man stepped foot on her shores. She is exposed to shatteringly violent double whacking of the hammer of brown and white man, bearing scars deployed from hands that mirror her own and of machine. At the most cardinal, the identity of the colonised African woman is dynamic, caught between the throws of worlds that exist in the fantasy of the foreign man and the native bareness. She is without larynx, but a voice lives inside of her telling tales of horror and fiction, like a bird she still sings; like a flag, she is in constant movement. When I looked at the identity of the colonial man, I alluded to shapeless shadows and bodies without distinction, but this objectification comes at a different angle when we begin to concern the woman. A large part of colonial ruining was the bastardisation of sex and forceful introduction of institutional rape of a woman’s body and soul; she is the battlefield these men lay on after the war in the mind becomes too heavy to bear alone. She is grass, regenerating whenever seed comes to regurgitate child and childless mother becomes one with the soil but is unable to be absorbed so just sits waiting for a death that will never arrive. The colonial woman wishes for relief, wishes to come back to her body but when she returns to the scene of the crime, she witnesses a second or a third man ripping at her. Man is both beast and human, wielding similar weapons but like the tide she returns home. Just like the night, she comes.

Sex and power are siblings that are always at odds with one another but never able to leave the others side; sex and colonial rule are a less crude way of describing the vicious hyper-sexualisation of the African woman. To call this process of degradation, sex, is inaccurate and completely conflates the evil dynamic between the two people, so in this work I’m going to call it rape. Rape is a tool, a weapon, a consequence and a fiscal policy that underwrites the primal behaviour of an entitled man. A man that holds a power that he himself cannot see, rips at his own underwear looking for an organ that remains in the vagina of an unnamed brown woman in an unnamed housed placed in an unnamed village; his memory serves no purpose but to be his vindicator. He without tail wipes his own tears and at night finds another brown centre to release. God and glory look upon him in a shame that he does not feel. Rape is a fiduciary conquest necessary to the proliferation of free market and the sacrifice of a sacred female child. The colonial woman is without body, but a fixture that when gone leaves a charred skeleton; what makes the woman doesn’t belong to her. A woman’s identity is the noise that plagues empty rooms and the out of tune violin in the basement of abandoned houses; she is a vessel and omnipresent. Rape in colonial terms is a production, scripted by men who they themselves believe can see and own ornaments that they fiddle with. When you are denied of not only life but of visibility, it becomes difficult to place yourself in a reality that finds different hands to brutalise you. You must understand that her identity has no fingers cling onto and what remains of the past is too bitter for her swallow; she lives in constant purgatory, her form a collage of memories that are not hers. Even the action of me describing the horror done upon the colonised African woman feels brutal and impersonal.

The coloniser is a disorientated man, that endlessly searches for morality and justification for his depravity; sometimes this can lead him to pathways that are not on land but on bodies. When his feet arrived at the door of the brown man and saw the mysterious shadow besides him, the fullness of her figure caused him to lose his mind; the seductress was nothing but a woman, but her cries resembled that of moans and the red stain on her soiled cloth glowed. He believes that he is without fault, her body both collateral and consequence of her own temptation. Rape and sexual exploitation are birthed first in the mind, conjured as a white man’s fantasy and unveiled on the stage of plantations. He sees what he wants to see and leaves no limb unsoiled in his perverted production of power. The identity of these women is stolen well before it can grow and ripped through her when her pleasure is buried alongside her pain. Is the woman nothing more than a broken reflection, does she exist beyond mind?

The physical world and fantasy are a principal part of the emptiness that is the colonised woman’s identity and the space in which it occupies. The African woman’s body is at the forefront of her identity, strangely, and proves to be the second site of ruin when we discuss a lack of recognisable sense of self. I like to think of this ruining as successive overthrows of everything that gives us any sense of person because her mind is already floating in the stereotypes placed on her by the brown man and now her body also seems to have joined it in this state. The two blows come both in the physical sense and the metaphorical, as violence transforms itself into parasites that destroy both. Woman is praxis without a frame to display herself; all opportunity to be is snatched away before we can witness the beauty of her lonesome. When you are without identity, even conflicting ones, you are just operating in abjection and rejection from both society and our own intrinsic need to identify. Death and life become one without ever meeting or inhabiting a body, and they infect each other indulging in an unfaltering dance. Just as her life is stolen, death is too. She is grotesque, a body that is both stained and untouched; she feels the rejection of both God and Satan. She cannot escape the coloniser as in his mind, her body never dies and can never leave him, his immortal pet bows at his feet for eternity. When the colonised woman tries to escape this prison, death finds her company, but her coroners hand explores her body too, stealing her organs and her clothes. There is no relief. Her captors refuse her freedom and the child she was now lay in her womb, another part of her body to steal. She is denied the simplest of formalities, entrenched as only a mythical creature not a person with dreams a

nd a body. When she peers into the mirror, she cannot see who she is, a stranger sneers back at her. The identity of the colonial woman is a denial and grief that is silent.

Colonial identity is a beast with countless faces and lives beyond the measurement of time. There is no right and wrong as it constantly transforms itself to whomever witnesses it. Life, death and expansion are unable to confine it. Identity is you. 

Thank you so much for reading my first post, I really hope that this has stirred some sort of discourse within you. Please email me if you want to share your own views and see you next time!