Summer Reading #4 — Paracoloniality
By Robert Wood
Poet Robert Wood is the Liminal Summer Reading columnist for 2021.
Join us over the summer for six columns, on Decolonisation, translation, resistance and more.
A very basic paradox matters. On the one hand, we know we were never colonised. Malayalis have always and will always be Malayalis. We never were and never will be British subjects. Something similar might be said for many other types of peoples, including First Nations people here, which is why we read ‘always was, always will be’. On the other hand, we need to recognise that we decolonised, in the case of Malayali people, especially in 1947 with Indian Independence; or that we are still resisting the ongoing and contemporary attempts at genocide that stem from colonialism’s long shadow. How are we to hold two such seemingly contradictory thoughts in our mind? By accepting paradox writ large, not only this one. The first part recognises the internal, autonomous strength of our own communities, while the second sees the truth of the British Crown. One obviously chooses sides as well, and, if readers had not cottoned on to where my sympathies lie they have not been paying attention in the previous columns. However, I am less needy to explain my own people, given it is simply a basic working assumption that I have and contain, and, I am also less interested in the direct weapons of empire. Call this first part, my own reality as a Malayali, which is conscious and fully formed; call this second part, a subtle reworking of what counts as power in need of resistance to and liberation from. And so, for all the ink spilled on decolonisation, in the first instance, and colonialism, in the second; what about paracoloniality?
Paracoloniality might be said to run alongside, and occasionally cross into, the colonial and maybe even the decolonial themselves. We are told, over and over, that ‘Australia’ is a settler colony. And the decolonial project here is often glossed as an ‘unsettling’ even as it lacks a basic utopian impulse and often provides white settlers with a backdoor in which to critique their own complicity in the colonial project without giving anything up. Why not propose a return to where you come from? If only white settlers would read WEB Du Bois or Marcus Garvey and take heed of those lessons most of all; or, sensing they are outcast from London, is there a fear of never been accepted at ‘home’? So often, unsettling seems disingenuous most of all precisely because it ends up being an easygoing apolitical localism resigned to a place that is peripheral.
The reality here for non-white, non-Indigenous people is a paracolonial one. Neither colonised like white settlers nor deeply grounded like First Nations people, we exist in a way that runs alongside the colonial and yet remains distinct. Coming, in my case, from a people that fought off the British seventy five years ago (and other invaders before that), I also have no affinity for the practices of settlement (there are no farmers in my family but there are fishermen). Born on Noongar country and with a short twenty year engagement with Ngarluma people, I am making my home as a guest here in the city of Boorloo. I do not know if I am doing it right, but over time I have felt less guilt and become more open to the possibility of learning to play my role however it is assigned. I think if one is open to that and persistent then one can learn how to be a good guest aware of the traditions that are shared. And yet, I have not been through Law and have very few connections to Whadjuk traditional owners.
Taken together, my life in paracoloniality is a process of nesting, not a settling nor an alienation. A nesting, hopefully gently and as a welcome way in the world, which is itself founded on non-violence. If I were given the legal framework in which to return, I would gladly go back to Kerala and be welcomed by my people, where I still publish and connect with an intellectual, artistic and family network. I am still waiting for that to happen and to see it as a lateral movement back to a motherland not as a periphery to metropole route as some wild colonial boy. And yet, where I am nesting, there is work to do as a fellow traveller, and that goes to seeing paracolonial interventions as a handmaiden to Indigenisation, the latter which is best left up to the people who know. The conventions to follow then are not the white settler ones that come with the nation state political system. The conventions to follow are not conventions at all, but good people versed in culture as a whole.
How should we regard paracolonial nesting in general terms? Why nesting? I have chosen nesting as a phrase and metaphor in which to think through a relationship of self-care partly because it is organic, partly because it is aspirational, partly because it is welcoming. In mapping out and reflecting on the ways we actually live, I realise the extent to which we have always been paracolonial. I do not see symbols of empire in my daily life, not crests, not coins, not flags. There are vestiges of that found everywhere here, but in drawing distinctions between eras, we can perform our own set of power relations by choosing what to see, what to herald, and what to change. One strategy for this might be acknowledgement of colonialism here. One might be humour. But another, and one I am attached to, is also the theorising of the evidence before us in a way that accumulates into new narrative frameworks that allow us to more truthfully reconceptualise what is happening. In that way, I have sympathy for Queen Elizabeth, if only because she is the most colonised of all, if only because she is so far from true consciousness that the work she must do is beyond most of us, if any of us at all. That sympathy does not, of course, change my political need to see a republic, or a cultural need to repatriate material to this continent, or even a religious need to express my soul in any way that is fitting. I love England, but I love Australia more and Noongar country even more. I love the British Museum, but I love the National Museum of Australia more and Boola Bardip even more. That we can extend that love to the colonial is fundamental in changing the violence that is at the heart of it. We run alongside it as paracolonial subjects then, offering the possibility of teaching subjects how to be freer than they thought they could be.
And this is where nesting matters. Nesting is warm and welcoming, but it is also temporary. It is not a house that empire built. It is not the biggest estate on earth. It is not here forever, and, to some extent it is both fragile and resilient. It is a place to bring babies up in and can be carried in the hands. It is found in Asian countries as a type of soup, a delicacy to be cherished and had during celebrations, festivities, and a complicated trope of layered meaning and ritual. Crocodiles also make nests, so one should be wary.
And so, we return to the paradox—how is it that we have never been colonised and are working for decolonisation? The answer to that does not lie in charting a middle path, of saying we are somewhat colonised, and somewhat successful in working towards decolonisation. Both of them have longer shelf lives and sometimes we enshrine the very thing we are working to overturn by simply negating it. The answer is to hold onto the paradox, and, not simply as a way to synthesise it, into a higher dialectical position. That would simply see teleology installed and misplace our hope onto the future. In living for the present, we need to realise our contemporary selves in discursive ways that de-centre the colonial project as a whole. That is why we need to be Malayalis or what we are as peoples, and to see our path as one of enlightenment, which can happen in the nest we grow up in and when we take flight to return with worms for the new hatchlings. That might be the basic optimism that underpins a desire for freedom, but it makes sense to me regardless of whether we become a republic, get our bones back, or pray in a whole new way.
Robert Wood is a poet. He is interested in dream, enlightenment, nature, suburbs and philosophy. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean. He lives on Noongar country in Australia.