Personal anecdote when rereading Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: There was one time in a seminar– I’m not taking the class, only visiting – and everyone was reading Fanon. We watched a documentary about his life, and the professor told me to chime in if I have any comments regarding the discussion on French colonialism. The comment was casual, but all of a sudden I am so aware of the fact that I am a colonial subject; at the time all I ever knew about French colonialism was through the k12 history books that mostly described the statistics of the war rather than explaining to me what colonialism means. I nervously nodded, almost felt bad about the fact that I didn’t have the knowledge nor the vocabulary to offer a heartfelt speech about how I carry the legacy of colonialism in my blood. (Now I do, because they would rip it out of me if I say I don’t.) Like Trinh Thi Minh Ha wrote in “Cotton and Iron”:
“Wherever she goes she is asked to show her identity papers. What side does she speak up for? Where does she belong (politically, economically)? Where does she place her loyalty (sexually, ethnically, professionally)? Should she be met at the center, where they invite her in with much display, it is often only to be reminded that she holds the permanent status of a "foreign worker," "a migrant," or "a temporary sojouner"-a status whose definable location is necessary to the maintenance of a central power. "How about a concrete example from your own culture?" Could you tell us what it is like in ... (your country)?"
Ah, some white men colonized my country two centuries ago. Some other white men now demand me to speak about that experience with the essentialist, Orientalist, anthropologist tone masked under the liberal notion of “she’s aware and angry about social injustice.” I don’t think the professor means ill; in fact I think not a whole lot of white people when making encouragement or reserving space for a third world/ woman of color (so I’m aware now I belong to that category) to speak out realize that they are actively practicing their colonial power of naming or that they are freely exercising their entitled, well-reserved rights to ask colonial subjects to perform tasks.
At the time, I didn’t think much – it was just ironic that we were watching a film about Fanon (“Look! A Negro…”) and here I was, being made aware of my colonized roots, with a few students turning around looking at me with curiosity (“is she knowledgeable about postcolonial theories or? The reflexes on their face when they see me were telling. “Oh.”) Then the person next to me (she too is a person of color, a black woman to be exact) whispered with almost excitement: “Are you Vietnamese? Vietnam was also colonized by France right? Do you speak French?” The three sentences were uttered in the same breath and it took me almost five minutes to explain to her that no, after French empire we dealt with Japan and then the U.S., no, French was never a national language even though a whole lot of elites were educated to speak it and no I don’t speak French. The look on her face was unsettling – she couldn’t imagine how a colonized country was not speaking its colonizers’ language. I blame all the postcolonial theories that stressed so much on the homogeneity of “the colonizers” and the role of colonial language, because damn if my country was under attack by a bunch of different imperial forces, from Asia, to Europe, to America.
(And then there was that white female professor who gave me a 10/10 on my paper on the book The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi even though at the time I was struggling with English in general and all those complicated theoretical discussions. I was reading that as a text, written in a language I’m not fluent in, but I guess she was reading me as a text, written in a language she knows so well. Talking about Orientalism.)
