Once a Colonial Subject

Europe 2001: Letters Home

Originally Titled:  England Motherland??

Or maybe should be titled: "This is what it feels like to once be a Colonial Subject in this Post-Colonial World."

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LONDON: The mother city to my little island home; full of sky scrappers, British banks, Opium dealers turned to land mongers.

London is a funny place. It’s like an older Hong Kong. It has a 100 something year old tube with wooden escalators, station names I recognize but have no meaning. Buses that look the same except for the color.

People speak the language of my schooling. That strange place up on the hill where I learnt about the world through books, read history of the roses, and drew pictures of queens with big collar.

I didn’t learn about the fishing villages of the city I was born in. I learnt about the towers and tortures,  about kings who chopped the heads of wives they no longer wanted.

SO THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE ANN BOLIN LOST HER HEAD.

This is the place where the Vikings landed.

I see.

They were not stories. This is whence they came.

Strange. At once so familiar and so distant. I feel like I should belong, but I don’t. Is that what they call the shadows of colonialism? The mimicry of man? But isn’t it what happens in India? What happens in Africa? It isn’t what is supposed to happen to me.

I thought I transcended that a long time ago, when I went to the New World, to America.

But you don’t know what the new world is, until you visit the old world. This is where it all came from. This is where it all began at its root.

This is that distant homeland. This is where I got my street names, my shops, my city, my words. This is where I was told was my motherland or perhaps better said: where owner/ruler reside.

That was until 1997. My owner changed. But it’s not a date. It’s a paradigm. A way of thought. Someone told me I no longer belong to Britain. I am no longer a colonial subject. No one asked me but some people signed some papers and I change to being a post-colonial subject. 

My being defined by those who used to rule. Can I not define myself on my own? Isn’t that what America told me?

I do not belong, am not indentured, nor should be to anyone but myself.

But their words are still just learning from the new world what the old world taught them.

I hate that people I meet in England tell me "HOW BRITISH YOU ARE!"

I hate that people in Ireland ask, "How come you speak with a British accent?"

"Long story" I tell them.

Long story -started somewhere when the Boats left the sea shore of this country.