Taylor Post 1: Epistemological Violence & “Going Home”

Colonialism is

         (not)

     satisfied

                   merely

 with holding people in its

 grip and emptying the

native brain of all form and content.

By a kind of perverted

logic,

it turns

to the past

of the oppressed people, and

dis           torts,

   d i s

      f i g u r e

   s,

and destroys it.

This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.

I tried to organize the poem on the page to reflect the way my body read the words. The way I annotated the page, I thought first that the following paragraph was to be about ‘What Colonialism Is’. It was, instead, a paragraph on what colonialism is (not). It opened up questions in me around what would ’satisfy colonialism’ and by extension, what would satisfy larger iterations of capitalist settler colonial logics in the country we live in here. I couldn’t stop thinking about how voracious a system this is, how gluttonous and ridiculous and alienating it becomes. How often it distorts the ways I am able to understand the world and the way I want to move through it.

    The passage I chose is talking—to me— about the many forms of epistemological violence constituted through colonial logics. Epistemological violence, to me, constitutes forms of violence which attack, undermine, and erase the ways people understand the world and peoples ways of knowing. When our ways of understanding and translating the world are distorted, it makes it harder to think reflexively, to (as Cherrié Moraga reminded us last week in her BCRW interview) “go home” to one’s origin stories and work out what must be worked out. Perhaps that is the point of this specific system of oppression.

    Thinking critically about forms of epistemological violence, my mind was certainly drawn to the prompt quote of this assignment. Ntozake Shange writes in Language and Sound of the ways in which she often wants to attack and deform that language which attempts to attack her—that language being English. It is a language which “perpetuates the notions that cause pain to every black child as he/she learns to speak of the world & the “self” (19). In many ways, the english language over and over again through series of, what Foucault might call, ‘small punishments’, teaches us that the ways we want to express the world has limits that must be respected if we ourselves want to be respected. For example, in many ways, the manner in which the english language has historically been implicated in the lives of my ancestors has been as a tool to devalue their stories. And I feel that pull, that friction. I know that the very language I use to articulate and read maps of liberation in essays, and novels, and poems, has also constituted great violence upon my ghosts.

    In this place, if things cannot be articulated in this language, they are invalidated and distorted. When I mean that I don’t have words but I have a movement or a sound in my chest that can tell you everything, it is with the hope that you (can read beyond this place)/ understand. Audre Lorde tells us “that poetry is not a luxury” and I have to constantly remind myself that that poetry can exist outside of this colonizer tongue. That poetry is bigger than my tongue, mouth and body—that it prompts an overflowing in me.