Editor's Note:
Promoted and post-dated by liza; who says this one is an instant classic and a serious must read.
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So, I had a conversation with Stinkapee. She wanted to know why the British had enslaved Black Africans, our ancestors and dragged them over here to work. I gave her a simple answer. I told her that they probably had Dursleys [1] for parents.
I was talking to my counsellor when I realized that I was more accurate than I realized. The "parents" of the British, the influential people that Western historians would probably say came before the British were the Romans who invaded that tiny island way back when it was just a collection of warring tribes.
Does this sound familiar?
So, the ancestors of the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, umm...there might be others, were just there minding their own business, painting themselves blue, having yearly rituals in the honour of the earth goddess, trying to jostle for better land, more food, fertile wimmin...of course this is a gross over simplification...
When along came the Romans sweeping across Europe, dominating, harming, "civilizing", everything in their wake as they stretched the boundaries of their state's reach.
These, warlike, patriarchal, dominating, authoritarian, violent people came with their values, spread not just their architecture, their styles of governance, their language (Romance languages), their official religion (eventually christianity was imposed by the Romans), but also spread extreme emotional dysfunction.
This is what I'm thinking...
So, you have these legions, men marching, emotionally deprived (what some would called disciplined) across the whole of Europe, away from families, no parenting time, murdering, plundering, dominating on a really large scale, knowingly spreading the Pax Romana, the Roman "Peace", more like the Pox Romana...a plague of maladjusted ideas about how to lead, how to rule, how to worship, how to marry, how to run a home, how to deal with those who have less power, how to define citizenship, how to define woman, how to parent children.
They believed that their approach to life was worth imposing at swordpoint and they did just that. They came with controlled rage under wraps, the willingness to harm while speaking of government and civility. Only people who were in severe denial about the harm they caused could spin their successful domination as a benefit to the peoples they damaged. Spin doctoring isn't a new concept, obviously.
Just so we can be clear, I know that some will want to include the various interrelationships between the actual countries of Europe saying that they also invaded and influenced each other. But, to my mind, these internal skirmishes, exchanges, intermarriages, double crossings, invasions all came after the fact, after the Romans had "infected" every single culture in their reach with a particular approach to imperialist expansion.
I'm not about trying to erase the spread of Islam through much of the ancient world or the North Africans moving up into Spain and occupying it, influencing it architecturally, culturally or linguistically or Genghis sweeping across the Steppes bearing culture and dna samples, too.
I'm not saying that the Romans invented imperialism. But I do think that they, like many of the world's other hugely "successful" ancient world powers had something in common, they imposed views, ideas, culture, religion, ways of governing through violence.
Funny thing is though...at this present moment, the world isn't dominated by just any old power. It's dominated by the US and through them by Canada and European states such as Britain and through these states by a vast majority of corporations who all trace their lineage back to the Romans and beyond and in so doing, I believe that they claim a heritage of merciless emotional harm and trauma that stretches back as far as has been documented.
I'm invested in tracing this. Why? Even though I can't hope to unmake what happened in/to the people in my family, I do understand that trauma and fuk'd ways of dealing are passed down and around. The evidence is in the ways we treat the planet, the ways we treat each other, in th ways we do our political work, in the ways our governments go about their business.
There's a link...well, many.
So, I've gotten as far as the Romans. A life of studying everything I could get my hands on about ancient world history should count for something more than just a knowledge of which language came from where, who migrated where and intermingled with who, where a particular culture originates, blah, blah, blah ...
I'm sitting with Papi talking about this post and...
I remember one Black dyke partner bringing home Toni Morrison [2]'s "Playing In The Dark" when I was in my twenties. My analysis was developing, but I was still very basic in regards to constructions of race in many ways. As a result, I was so enraged by the idea of examining the horrible effects of white people's own racism on themselves, an idea she explored in on of the essays that I immediately decided to look on her analysis with more of a jaundiced eye.Why would I be interested in the emotional trauma of white folks? They had nothing to do with me.
Fastforward to present day. Strike that. As the colonized, living in close proximity to the colonizer on the same stolen lands for so long, I've come to the realization that their trauma became our trauma, became my family's trauma, became my trauma as soon as the ancestors of present day white people set foot on African shores so many hundreds of years ago.
Later, I also remembered Memmi [3] and Fanon [4] who discussed and wrote about the psychology of the colonized. I think they, too understood that the colonizer had created and nurtured madness in those they colonized. I understand colonization as the act of imposing insanity through trauma and systemic abuse. My thing is that the ancestors of the white people we know today "came" to the "new" worlds they "discovered" already driven insane by their own experience as the dominated. As with many people who experience abuse, they just decided that the best way to scrub themselves clean, as it were, was to offer that experience to others, thereby revising the hierarchies they were offered by placing others beneath them.
As a result, all information about their ancient history of being dominated forms a picture that can only increase my understanding of who I am as a daughta of Black Africans brought by the colonizer to the West.
I'd like to read and understand more. More on this as I trek not forward right now, but instead waaaay....back.
Next stop? I figure Sparta and Athens. Or as I'd like to call it Ancient Patriarchal Relations 101 with a (hom0)sexy twist, no?
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