Whoever colonizes was colonized.
Destruction, cruelty, fury, and coercion, the violence of colonization was also used in us.
With all its destruction, cruelty, fury, and coercion, the violence of colonization was also used in us. Even more so in the past, it is very present as cultural trauma. Although much more previously, we were also colonized through roman imperialism, genocide, inquisition, wars, and conquests. For centuries, we lived as slaves and servants, with little or nothing, and always at the mercy of power fluctuations. This violence is very present in our bodies. However, we call it culture, and we have a really hard time imagining otherwise, for we’ve been led to believe that we are morally and intellectually superior.
Because we believe we have been expelled from paradise, we base ourselves on the brutal forgetfulness in which we are forced to mutilate the threads of contextual ancestral wisdom, myths, stories, and memories — dilacerating the intrinsic sovereignty that co-creates life.
So, we keep controlling and exploiting everything and everyone, calling it productivity and success.
I do not bring this as victimization or excuse for all the atrocities we, the Portuguese, perpetrate worldwide, especially in Brazil, and contributing to the violent African diaspora by transporting more than 5 million black bodies across the Atlantic along with all the violence and destruction of nature and cultures everywhere. Because there is no excuse for that.
Four thousand years later, we cannot afford to forget it again. We need to regenerate and co-create life in all its exuberance and diversity.
However, I am a privileged one. I didn’t ask for this skin tone privilege, but I have it, and it’s real. With all the limitations of being a woman in this war culture, the white mantle I am involved in gives me more freedom and dignity. And it’s frightening and demented that this is real, every day at every moment. Being a woman, I was sexually assaulted twice, ten years apart, both by authority figures, and the gate through which I touched the collective trauma was through my own trauma. It is sad and clear that it had its consequences on me.
But it’s not about me. It’s about the culture that allows, recreates, and sustains this. The enormous problem is to individualize the trauma when it is collective.
It’s just another form of control, keeping the victims, sustaining the perpetrators, threatening and intimidating. These are insidious cultural movements that mutilate us with every silence or scream.
To live regeneratively is to assume pain and feed life in all its forms. It is not an individual process -it has never been-, it is communitarian and cooperative. This, deep down, is what the colonial/economic system has always tried to break down because of individualism, to divide and rule. We must re-signify the cultural trauma, not as individuals because it has never been exclusive of any particular individual, but a normative part of a colonial structure. Lets re-member ourselves!