Decolonizing Decolonization - part 2
IDENTITY
Meanwhile, here in Europe, it seems that identity is no longer a place of “sameness” or of conjunction or convergence of thoughts and practices, of ideas and ideologies, of dreams and aspirations, of communion and community, but of focus on the meaning of identical: often reduced to skin color. Discourse has constantly turned to the issue of race, dividing the world into two blocs: White and “Bipoc,” a term that can be found everywhere these days, popping up like a weed.
The first time I was asked if I was BIPOC, I replied: “I don’t know, I think I’m straight.” People of Color, they used to say, POC. Suddenly BIPOC popped up on the radio, and I thought: POC, BI POC, two times POC, it must be really dark, maybe that’s what we’d call the Bijagós in Guinea-Bissau. BIPOC is an American acronym, I don’t even mean English, for Black, Indigenous, People Of Color, as if all these people shared the same issues and the same problems, as if they were all allies and, basically, opposing the White man as the common enemy.
The big issue is that there are 50 shades of White. In 2020, The New York Times made a table where the Portuguese and the Spanish appeared as non-White, therefore BIPOC, and here in Portugal all hell broke lose. Even some blacks reacted, because if the White Portuguese weren’t White, then what have we been arguing about for so long here? And who do the American clowns think they are to define, or think they define, who’s White and who isn’t? Some of us blacks defended the whiteness of our fellow countrymen as it should be. However, we use BIPOC loosely, without noticing that it’s a term defined by Americans, which may make sense in their context, but not globally.
People of Color is a term that slips around in contexts, that doesn’t stick. In Guinea, people of color are usually Mulattoes, but the more color you have, the whiter you are. I’m considered a person of color in any context.
Identities are usually constructed from a convergence of various elements, such as values, social practices, symbolic references, cultural heritage and all the other points of affinity that can be conjured up. Identity is very dynamic and plural, I suppose. It should be a space where individuals and groups establish points of connection, therefore a space that can be transformed. I want to believe that. However, lately there’s been a tendency to treat identity in a more essentialist way, as if it were a static and immutable attribute, often defined by a visible and tangible characteristic: skin color… or sexuality, which is not always visible.
Why do we insist on establishing fixed points in a constantly changing world?
The question of skin color, the opposition to White, leads to defining everything Black as African, ignoring the fact that there are White Africans, Black Europeans, Indian Americans and Chinese Asians. And this relationship between Black and Africa also leads to all of Africa’s cultural multiplicity, all of the millions of African and Black identities that coexist or conflict inside and outside of Africa, being considered simply as a monolithic block: African culture, African identity, Africanism.
It is well understood that in Europe, the Americas, Brazil and other White worlds, fixation on skin color or a specific characteristic can be a consequence of resistance to historical and systemic forms of oppression. Racial identity is a way of strengthening oneself, of creating a movement that defends and positions the Black person as a human being and a dreamer trapped in spaces of oppression. The problem arises with self-boycotts that place Black people in an essentialist reduction of being: the Black body.
Faces, Toy Boy
BLACK BODIES
In various decolonialist discourses, which are often confused with anti-racist discourses, you can hear the term Black bodies often and repeatedly. Let me point out that I understand decolonialism and anti-racism as spaces that can converge, but are fundamentally quite different. For example, decoloniality is a theory that emerged in the South Americas, at a time when power was Latin American, but still White, and aimed more at the de-Westernization or de-Europeanization of power than at its de-Whitening.
In historical and practical terms, for example, when the United States gained its independence, it decolonized itself from England, established its own non-monarchical structures and created its own colonization. Brazil did the same when the son of the Portuguese king, D. Pedro, decided to be the first king of Brazil. He “decolonized” himself from Portugal and led his own colonization of that territory. That’s why it’s always annoying to hear White Brazilians crying and saying that Portugal colonized them, without remembering that they are the direct heirs of those colonizers, and that this crying and lamenting should be left to the indigenous and Black people who were taken there by force and still dominated today by the White Brazilians themselves (dear Brazilian friends). Brazil is a Portuguese colonial continuity and the Cry of Ipiranga was nothing more than a cough. Brazilians complaining about Portuguese colonization is like listening to Americans complaining about English colonization… and by the way, Americans don’t do that. Neither do the Native Americans, the indigenous people, who are still colonized, even though they have the nationality of the colonizing country.
Anyway, back to basics, anti-racism is centered on the idea of taking Black people out of the domain of White dehumanization (whiteness appears here as a concept, not necessarily a concrete White person, but Black people as people). In this text I’ve focused on Black people in the West, or in Europe, because there are racialized Black people in China, India, Israel, Pakistan, and in Africa itself. And I’m not talking about South Africa, but Guinea-Bissau itself. Some people call this colorism, and I say that colorism is racism without pedigree. The structure of colorism is racial, based simply on skin color, so it’s racism. But anyway… we can discuss this another time by bringing up the issue of power.
When we talk about the liberation of Black people, we’re talking about Black bodies, yes, because decolonization is about liberating and sovereigning territories and the body is also a territory, vast and full of mysteries. Black people have even been commodities and added value. However, the uncritical and exaggerated use of the term Black body and the definition of Black people as Black bodies, as if Black people were devoid of ideas, dreams, ambitions, expectations, frustrations and souls, empties the discourse. The Black person, as a body, becomes just a machine, an instrument with a voice, as Cicero would have said. In fact, the limitation of the Black person to a body is in line with the definition of scientific and religious racism, which characterized the Black person as a being without thought and without a soul, therefore only an animated body, comparable to a walking corpse. Thus, the Black body is a pre-corpse. Defining oneself as a body simply reinforces these racist stereotypes, and it doesn’t even innovate, because racists have never had any doubts that the Black person is just a body, so we’re lagging behind in the “discovery.”
The cow is also a body, and that’s what annoys vegans, because the cow is only understood as a body that easily becomes a steak.
From the workshop “migro ergo sum, 2022”
From racist enlightenment, which considered the mind and thought to be the most enlightened part of the human being (which Black people didn’t have, so they couldn’t even have history), to decolonialism and blackness, which consider the body to be just as important as the mind, we arrive at an essentialism of the Black body, as if the Black person were just a body and nothing but a body. I’m repeating myself.
I can’t talk about Africa, because I only know Guinea-Bissau, and even then, only badly and poorly… ahhh, I prefer to say “badly and grossly.” In Guinea, we don’t call ourselves Black bodies and, apart from a few enlightened people who studied in Western academies and were acculturated to European activism, who learned these concepts here or in Brazil and who repeat them almost uncritically, Black Guineans don’t define themselves as Black bodies. However, the philosophy of Kriol defines the human being as a body. Black, White, Chinese, Indian, Javanese, we are all bodies. To ask “how are you?” in Kriol we ask “kuma di kurpu?”, literally “how is your body?”, but the person, the human being, the reflexive self is also defined as the head. For example, to say “I’m talking to myself,” I say “I’m talking to my head;” to commit suicide is to “kill your head.” For Kriol, the person is made up of body and head, flesh and mind, the material and the immaterial. The person is a “pekadur,” a name with a Catholic bias, a sinner (pecador), but one who understands the human being as a flawed being. In Guinea, I think we know that we’re not just bodies; the many toka-tchur (festive funerals) prove this. In fact, I don’t think we’re even theorizing about it, our main concern is whether they’ll pay the six arrears this month. Or whether we’ll finally get an appointment at the Embassy to get the damn visa. Or whether we’ll get the visa and show the country our shoe numbers… the expression means rushing out. I’m going to stretch it, and I hope I’m right, and generalize that in Africa we don’t discuss Black bodies, just as in Europe, and beyond, we don’t discuss “White bodies.” Race is discussed, yes, in various ways.
Representing the “Black person” by their body makes them a real being, a tangible, visible and material being, but when the “Black body” is contrasted with the “White man,” I believe that we move from the tangible reality to a more abstract, symbolic one, because the “White man” is not a body, but an idea, a concept, a symbol, in such a way that it’s possible to say: “kill the ‘White man’ in us,” without it being an appeal to genocide.
Power is White, so White is invisible, it is the center, it is the norm, the constant that defines all the variables. Although White can be identified by the skin it wears, it’s a being that must be analyzed rationally and philosophically. It seems that the White man is not a body, but he is, par excellence, the human being who defines and stamps the seal of humanity and the right to life on existing things, basically, he is the being who can guarantee Black bodies their share of humanity. White is the one and Black is the other, the subordinate, White is the brain and Black is the muscle, White is the mind and Black is the body, White is the content and Black is the container. Are we going to keep feeding this?
In Guinea-Bissau, White is also a social status: when someone starts using a fork and knife at the table, they turn White, when they improve their social situation and acquire strange goods, habits and behaviors, only seen in soap operas or films or in White immigrants, or when they start having White friends, White lovers and other White things, they turn White. And there’s power in that, so much power that families are even proud and say: “nha fidju, uai, kila branku nan k i kasa!”, or “branku so k i ta ianda ku el!” In truth, I don’t know if Fanon shouldn’t have written “White beings, Black masks,” because the goal I see the people running towards in Guinea is to “become White.”
Given this, I even think that calling a Black man a Black body makes sense, since you can’t change the body, apart from Michael Jackson, but you can whiten the mind and soul. In fact, as I’ve already said, whiteness goes beyond skin color (I invite you to read the “letter to the racialized friend”).
The themes and terms that permeate the discussion on decolonization are created in Western academic spaces and transported to Western artistic spaces, embraced by social activists in the West, and exported to Africa from here, a show with too many similarities, but not purely coincidental, with the colonial process and movement.
The Black body is one of the boring, limiting terms that abound in decolonial discourse. The fact that it is an unknown or almost unknown term in Guinea-Bissau (I’ve no idea if I need statistics to say this), makes me wonder: how do you decolonize Africa without Africans being involved?
