Let's Talk Colonizers and Colonized
Conversations of Various Kinds
The color of the water was beyond words my mind knew. I want to say it was aqua, but it also could have been turquoise, and there were full-spectrum rainbows shimmering on the white sand beneath me, dancing as my arms stroked, propelling me away from shore into indigo.
Still, I recognized it, this color beyond the words for blue I knew—indigo, cerulean, lapis, ultramarine, azure, cobalt, aqua—a blues mantra, seven revelations to my teeth and tongue forming sounds that echo far beyond the limits of my flesh and bones. With each utterance, I return each shade as a blessing that is a prayer to all that forms water, in all its forms.
The color of the water was beyond words my mind knew. It propelled me beyond the spectrum into what I lazily call the invisible. I became invisible, suspended in the seven blues, swimming toward the point to slip out of the bay, out of sight of any shore-bound humans. I was moving through a three-dimensional window so clear it joined worlds. Nothing to pass through.
Calling the water “it” makes me laugh. How can water, formless and always taking form, be constricted to two syllables that signify a non-gendered entity without any flow?
Not that I think water has a gender, or is feminine or masculine in any way, even on an inner level, though in many traditions it’s associated with the feminine principle. To me, water is without polarity, beyond contrast, though we know it by how it interacts with solid objects like rocky shores, as well as the invisible winds that sweep our planet, becoming visible themselves when they encounter water. What I’m trying to say before I get lost in reverie, is that “it” is a failure of a word. Nothing is an it, when you really get to know it, which in this paradoxical world, requires contrast.
We know others in contrast to ourselves. This doesn’t make others any less than themselves than we are. It’s important to remember that. Contrast is our friend, though so many of us have experienced it as an enemy, othered by those in power, or who at some point our lives have power over us—the media, our families, the dictates of society, public opinion. I have found accepting contrast as a natural law to be very healing. I’ve stopped worrying so much about what others are, or worrying what others think I am, and become not only more accepting of myself, but more myself.
I love my native tongue the English language, even though it is the language of colonizers. It is also the language of the colonized, and there are traumatic wounds in our psyche because of that, gaps in the way we relate to nature and each other because our words did not come directly from all the ways rivers can touch rocks, or the ways wind move through trees versus shrubs, or the differing cries of the sparrow and the eagle.
English did not rise out of Earth, or enter our ancestors’ ears like bird song. It began as an amalgam of languages as invaders conquered the island of Albion over a few centuries, around 2,000 years ago. As the invaders colonized the island, doing their best to erase the Celtic tribes whose languages were still connected in an indigenous way to the sounds, cycles, and patterns of nature, the English language formed in the mouths of both colonized and colonizers over a few centuries as the descendants of Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Scandinavian Vikings, and Norman French settled the island. It also contains elements of Greek and Latin. The Romans had conquered Britain before the Viking and Germanic raids, but the tribes of Britain still spoke their languages throughout the Roman occupation, which lasted for 370 years. Latin didn’t colonize their minds to the extent their connection to the land was wiped out, and people today still speak the indigenous languages of Britain: Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, and Breton, maintaining a link to a different possibility of being in relationship with the land through daily communication that is holding a crucial space for those of us, myself included, whose thoughts, and thus relationships to Earth, were colonized by English the moments we heard our first word. Those of us who inherited this tongue, whose minds were shaped by it, became colonizers with the first word we spoke. Like I said, this is a paradoxical world.
As infants, hearing our parents speak to us, we are innocent. We didn’t choose to be born to colonizers. As toddlers learning to speak we are innocent. We just want to learn to communicate our feelings. As older children, we want to share our thoughts, investigate, share our discoveries and wonder. Eventually opinions form. Then, language becomes a weapon, even if we don’t realize it. Sometimes we become aware of how language is weaponized against us through millennia of colonization, and sometimes, if we are brave and honest with ourselves, we become aware of how we weaponize language to other those not like ourselves we perceive as threatening in some way to our survival. This can be subtle and doesn’t have to mean our physical survival. Identity politics is an example of this.
If you become aware of this tendency in yourself, there are options. There always are, despite what our language tells us. Time is running out. It’s hopeless. We’re doomed. Nothing ever changes…yadda, yadda yadda, which is a phrase English speakers use to signify boring talk. The dictionary says it’s of unknown origin, but it sounds an awful like the Hebrew word yada, which means, in one sense, to know, but in another, defines the relationship between man and God, specifically, the longing for a Father to experience deep intimacy with his children. Who knew? Every time we’re ironically eye-rolling and dismissing something as boring, we’re also expressing the longing for the patriarch, which could be our very culture itself, to be intimate with his children. No man is an island, said John Donne a few centuries back. It’s still true. Onto those options I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph before I got distracted by yet another paradox…
One is to never speak again. I remember reading a book about an incredible man, John Francis, the Planetwalker, who for seventeen years, walked the North American continent without speaking in order to raise environmental awareness. He did eventually write a book, in English, sharing his experiences, and I’m grateful he did. We need people to speak these deep truths beyond societal conditioning of how to see and act. He is still alive today and speaks—in English.
Where I’m heading with this, it’s not about switching to a different language—it’s too late for that—though I do suggest learning other languages, especially ones that don’t share the patterns that form the ways of perceiving the self, others, and nature we have inherited from English. What we need to do, in my heartfelt opinion that I am not pushing on you, but I am acknowledging is an opinion, something I think would make a better world, is create beauty with the English language.
American poet Mary Oliver is loved by so many because she does this. In poem after poem, she creates beauty with the tool she inherited from her parents and culture, the English language. I would even say that the depth and quality of her body of work redeems the English language, although that both implies it needs to saved, as well as letting it off the hook. (How many paradoxes can I get in one essay?) We English speakers still have work to do. Here’s Oliver herself on how she uses language to give back to the world:
“Foolishness? No, it’s not.
Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree. To do this I have to climb branch by branch and write down the numbers in a little book. So I suppose, from their point of view, it’s reasonable that my friends say: what foolishness! She’s got her head in the clouds again.
But it’s not. Of course I have to give up, but by then I’m half crazy with the wonder of it — the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.”—A Thousand Mornings: Poems, Mary Oliver
Yes, the Greeks and Romans moved out from Athens and Rome over a period of a few hundred years, a couple of thousand years ago to create the first empires of Western Civilization as we still know it, a culture of destruction that believes its own lies about the possibilities of endless expansion on a finite Earth.
Yes, they bequeathed to us a legacy of words like “it” that sounds like a cat about to cough up a fur ball, a word that creates no echoes off canyon walls, instead falling with a thud that flattens minds and entire cultures.
Yes, their is grieving to be done about what what we’ve lost and what we’ve been bequeathed, but don’t grieve too long. You’ll risk being consumed by guilt, and honestly, we don’t have time for that. We need your tears, but we need your beauty more. The best kind of offering you can make will contain both. Tears and beauty.
Tears, like water, have so many forms. Think of all the ways we can weep and ask yourself how many have you experienced. Have you wept like a storm? Have you cried in gratitude? Have you sobbed in empathy for the suffering of another? Have you cried because you laughed so hard? I have a feeling too many of us in Western culture only cry when the tears are forced out of us by feelings too painful we can’t contain them. We need more every day tears. Don’t wait till there’s a crisis to cry.
English is still colonizing, which in a positive way means it’s a living language. It is till picking up new words as it spreads around the world. Is it a plague—something that will wipe us out— or a rainbow, a potential vessel that could contain multitudes?
I am a person that looks for solutions. I may be considered naive by some, but I believe in the goodness of life—all of it—including humans. And while distortions occur, some which create horrific suffering, I hold a vision beyond the circumstances of our world. In that vision, we are all safe because we can’t be touched by what happens in this world. We can be moved, and our tears are sign that this world has moved us. We have grown and evolved. Let’s find the words to express that as beautifully as possible in whatever language we find ourselves. If you are the keeper of an indigenous language, thank you. The fact that you have survived centuries of continual colonization is a miracle. May you speak your language into our current time without fear or dire consequence, and may you be received by ears that are willing to finally hear and learn from you.
I am not an expert on cultural traditions like de-colonization, but I do think this political work is very important. I encourage everyone who reads this essay to investigate how you’ve been colonized through language, and to honestly look at how you’ve perpetuated that on others, no matter what part of the socio-economic spectrum you are on, for colonization goes far beyond the political. Whatever you discover, make beauty with it. Your guilt, your shame, your regrets, your greed—all can be transformed through the humility of exposing yourself with a heartfelt intent to heal the divisions between us, and by that I mean between humans, and everything else on our planet, visible and invisible, and beyond that to the cosmos. Find the words. Shape them into something that will move others. I promise you, the spaces you prepare this way, will be filled with things that surprise you. Set a place for the beloved guest at your table, like the Sufis advise.
Things, of course, is another word like it, that fails us. Well enough of that. It’s time for us to stop failing the things by naming them, like the the seven-petaled white orchid bobbing in the wind moving my hair as my hands type out these letters that are formed, no matter what language they belong to, by the primal sounds of birds, whirling water, and an infant mouthing ma as it latches on to the round breast of its mother.
Listen here: A Conversation Between Norman Minnick and Jennifer Lighty
Thank you for reading this edition of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles. Before you go, give a listen to a conversation between me and Norman Minnick about the creation of my mythopoetic memoir, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming.
Norman is a poet, author, publisher, teacher, editor, and book designer. He designed the cover and interior of Piko, and was my editor. He’s been teaching a course in an Indiana womens’ prison on mythology, and I was honored to included on his syllabus, which included luminaires like Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Angela Carter, and Martin Shaw. When he told me how much his students were relating to the book, I offered to beam in on Zoom, only that’s not allowed in prison, so Norm had them write down questions for me that he asked me on this Zoom, which he will hopefully be able to show them.
To find more about Norman’s books go here: Norman Minnick, author and publisher.
Big Island readers are invited to a very special collaboration between me and Elle Luna on December 13, at a private location in Kealakekua. I will be telling Psyche and Eros. Elle will lead us in mandala making, and after we’ll share a delicious vegetarian curry that Elle will concoct, supported by me chopping a lot of vegetables!
Please register for this event on my website as space is limited. If you don’t want to pay with a card online, you can Venmo me the ticket price by responding to this email and I will send you my Venmo link. After registering, you’ll receive the address and suggestions of things you might want to bring to make yourself cozy on the beautiful farm that will be hosting us.
Register for Myth & Mandala at this Link
Thank you for being here! It means so much to have an audience of appreciative readers. Feel free to reach out any time and stay tuned for my upcoming online writers’ circle, Enchanters at the End of the World (As We Know It), that will soon be launching for paid subscribers of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles.
Don’t forget to take a look at new website jenniferlighty.com!
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
Hi Jen!... Loved the meandering feel of this piece...like wandering along a frieidly, winding, wooded path dappled with shade and sunlight.
All that without leaving my bed on the semi depressed Sunday afternoon!
This took me back to the line in A. Rich's "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children": "knowledge of the oppressor/this is the oppressor's language/yet I need it to talk to you