Theoretics from Postcolonial Writers can be helpful tools for the current Occupy Movement in Western Nations. Edouard Glissant of Martinique has some significant strategies that could enhance the need for society’s necessary mental alterations. With a fresh expansion on the definition of history and self-reflection, we can expand our parameters that the corporate elite and mass acceptance hold us to.
Edouard Glissant emphasizes the ‘enmeshment’ of history. Through the opening between threads, we can re-write history from a multiple voice and not merely limit history to only be written via the winners of wars. “From the tracks left yesterday and today, mixed together,” we can begin to understand that the Cold War was not merely just those nations favoring Democracy versus those favoring Socialism. Our understanding of the world through post-World War II politics was never in actual reality Western Capitalism versus Soviet-ism. The Cold War was a limited definition of history, but in truth it was where colonialism attempted its best to suppress the rising needs of human beings in far off regions with alternative lifestyles, ideologies, and beliefs, but who had natural resources, profitable exploits and a labor force easily usable for the next century gains.
Why bring the Cold War into all this? In a recent interview between Tariq Ali and the film director Oliver Stone, Tariq Ali reminds us that, “History never goes away. History is always present. You may not know it, but almost everything that happens is related to something in the past. You cannot understand the present otherwise” (Ali). While most of us have been brainwashed to think the Cold War was merely stopping the spread of communism worldwide, it was not. It was a struggle of – Occupying – and the forces of the corporate elite pushed market value interests into every corner of the globe for oil, tin, rubber, water, minerals, cheap labor, and more.
Glissant states in his Caribbean Discourses, “The struggle against a single History for the cross-fertilization of histories means repossessing both a true sense of one’s time and identity: proposing in an unprecedented way a revaluation of power.”
History is always present. However, limiting ourselves to a single definition of history, whether reflections on World War II or the Cold War, ignores the majority of the human race and their genuine ambitions for human dignity and respect after the colonial era, which did not end during World War II nor during the Cold War. Waves of independent movements have been shattered in the last seventy years.
Along with the need to enmesh history with that of the larger diverse voices of the globe, Edouard Glissant empowers the need for Opacity. This quality of making the body and mind impervious to rays of false light obstructs the negative elements that attempt to limit definitions to refined one-dimensional textbook answers. He supports the need to keep perspectives, insights and accepted norms hard to understand. A blurry spot, like Helene Cixous’ use of incomprehensible reflections, maintains a semblance against false definitions. Opacity, like Enmeshment, assists in the re-evaluation of power.
Glissant states: “There is a contradiction between lived experience through which the community instinctively rejects the intrusive exclusiveness of a single History and an official way of thinking through which it passively consents to the ideology ‘represented’ by its elite.” This lack of comprehension is strength, not flaw, “Ambiguity is not always a sign of some short-coming” (Glissant). Mainstream media has for the longest time in the United States assisted in the passive manufactured consent.
The Opacity of the Occupied Movements allows the definition to continually be open to change and growth. When media and foreign policy experts limited the civil unrest in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya to the terminology ‘Arab Spring’ they anticipated that the movements had a clear historic beginning and a clear historic ending. In a wider understanding of History, these events in such nations are far from over.
Just this week, protests in Cairo have gotten more and more intense. After getting rid of Mubarak but keeping the military in power was only an inevitable delay to the continuation of the outcome needed to break from the power structure that limits democracy. Libya’s challenges have only just re-started after the end of Gaddafi. Now the blurriness of the road ahead will be just as challenging as capitalists seek to gain dominance over a larger public domain.
Democracy’s bottom line is people. Socialism’s bottom line is people. But Capitalism’s bottom line, whether it be in the hands of the government or private interests, the bottom line is profit and segregation of the haves, the have-less, and the have-nots.
Glissant proposes: “The question we need to ask will not be ‘Who am I?’ but rather ‘Who are we,’” and the important thing is not the reply but the question. It is a question that will require no active reply. It is not the negation of history when one assumes an answer. The answer is always changing and never universal.
Another great Postcolonial writer, Ngugi wa Thiongo from Kenya, suggests the notion of ‘decolonizing the mind’. What the Occupy Movements need to express especially in western nations is our own ‘decolonizing of the mind’. In Thiongo’s novel Wizard of the Crow, he emphasizes “breaking the Totality where man and women must fit within the Western ideal” of consumer capitalism. Numerous times throughout the novel, characters are faced with a mirror where they have to come to terms with the perceptions they have of themselves and then in order to transcend, they must go beyond the individual’s self and the world that he knows of. Some characters sought illusionary solitude, and others sought political protest.
Unconnected to Thiongo, but still applying to his novel, Glissant states, “The relationship between history and literature is concealed today in what I call ‘the longing for the ideal of history’ … this obsession with finding the primordial source toward which one struggles through revelations that have the peculiarity of obscuring as well as disclosing” (Glissant).
We are not single beings in a single enigma; those who are caught up in the closest proximity to the capitalist ideology have the hardest time looking in the mirror. Occupiers need to ‘decolonize the minds’ and going beyond the park matures our protest to a new nonviolent organizational level beyond romanticizing history (as with the original tea-party in the Boston Harbor). Many of us are doing just that in the opacity of the moment and in the movement. Next we need to send that message outwards to the passive masses to begin understanding a great enmeshed history beyond the borders and within the borders of the US, and beyond the notion that ‘we are what we are’ is unacceptable if limited to how the elite define us since their gains from World War II do not encompass the depths of a larger occupying notion: beyond economics, beyond borders, and beyond accepted perceptions.
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