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yesterday i stumbled upon this post that shares Palestinian-American writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s thoughts on writing “from the imperial core in the house of genocide.” it’s much more precisely written than this, but conveys the sentiment of “fuck your lecture on craft; my people are dying” (title of a Noor Hindi poem). the craft of writing in the western world has always, always been gatekept by institutions of power, which is something i considered deeply when deciding whether or not to get an mfa (which, may come in the future when i’m old and rich and have time to get degrees for fun). but i thought, “why would i want to learn from the very institutions i am trying to get liberated from? why would i want to learn how to write like a dead white man? why would i want to subject myself to the critique of people who don’t have the depth and range to understand the worlds i am building with my language?” people in the “majority” (or more accurately, people in the global minority) have rarely been able to understand what i’m doing with my work—and my writing, a core part of that.
Tbakhi’s writing made me think of what my language would look like if it were decolonized. i am starting this exploration today. i don’t feel like writing in sentence case (where the first word of each sentence in capitalized). what is the point of capitalization in this use-case other than making the sentence appear as “proper,” a colonial concept? in pre-colonial philippines, filipinos used babayin, an ancient script with characters that supersede capitalization. babayin was wiped away by the spaniards, though present-day artists & scholars are actively bringing it back to life. a struggle of decolonization is that colonizers erase indigenous culture, bloodlines, history, wisdom, and language—how can we return to what we cannot even remember?
it is a kind of relief, a kind of wellness, to unmask my language in this way. a decolonialized wellness that does not support capitalism, but rather encourages a return to roots and a way of being that is in alignment & reverence with all forms of life. it is all so deeply connected.
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