The bitter aftertaste of colonialism

Two Sundays ago, I came across a personal essay written by a 30-year-old Dominican-American man, published at the New York Times. Christopher Rivas remembers as a child how his father took great care of his appearance, so much so that he spent more time getting ready to go out than his mother or his sisters did.

His father explained, Rivas wrote, “that as a young man in the Dominican Republic, you had to work so hard, perfecting yourself, preparing your mask, so that when a young European or American woman came through, she might choose you, might take you home with her, like that was your only way out.”

It was a belief, Rivas says, perpetrated by the movies and TV, that a black or brown man gets made better by being with a white woman. It was, he adds, a whole system coded within him.

The Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain for over three hundred years.

This story strongly reminded me of the Philippines, another country which had been under the Spanish rule for three hundred years. Before the Spaniards came, the nation we now call Philippines was actually a group of 7,100 disparate islands, every island had its own ruler, language, religion and culture. They were fighters too. The first explorer Spain sent to the Philippines, Ferdinand Magellan, was killed by a ‘Filipino’ warrior as soon as he stepped on the beach.

In response, Spain sent religious missionaries instead. They conquered the people through religion, planted in their hearts the fear of God, and made them feel guilty, unworthy and inferior. Cultures disappeared, religions died, identities got blurred, and languages evolved. Those who resisted were thrown into prison, killed or deported. At some point in those days, they declared those islands one country under Spain and called it Philippines in honour of their king at the time. Afterwards, when the Filipinos decided they preferred freedom, the Americans came to supposedly help deliver us from that nightmare, only to replace Spain’s with their own hidden agenda. This is my simplified version of my country’s history. 

But more than anything else, all colonizers left a toxic cultural spoor that the colonized then absorbed and accepted as their own. In the Philippines, how often has one heard an innocent remark about someone else who could be prettier, if only they had a fairer skin, or a more western nose? Or how proud or how superior someone feels for carrying a colonizer’s genes? As if being brown, short and flat-nosed is being second rate? Or how a lot of people think we can only get our act together when run by another country? Those are conditioned attitude, formed through centuries of colonization.

Dependency, feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and resentment are common by-products of being under another country’s power for decades. Filipinos are not alone. All over the world, I have no doubt that thousands of peoples feel this way. England was in India for two hundred years. In fact, a recent research shows that historically, only 22 countries have never been colonized or attacked by England at some point in the past.

Spain, also known as the Catholic Monarchy, was considered one of the largest empires in history. Spain controlled vast overseas territories that included places in the Americas, in Europe, Africa and Asia for over four hundred years.

Not to mention other countries like Portugal, France and the Netherlands, which left their own colonial mark upon countless places in the world.

More recent, however, more palpable and currently, still being felt in real time are the after-effects of colonization on the First Nations peoples of North America. In Canada, before the Europeans came, First Nations communities were self-sufficient, healthy, and confident of their special place in the world. They have their own form of government, languages and cultures. Their only fault was that they were too hospitable.

Colonizers took their lands away, forced them to live in reservations, destroyed their cultures, and sent their children to residential schools, where they were then converted to Christianity, and many of them sexually or physically abused. This is common knowledge. News media has detailed these abuses and the resulting court cases in the recent years.

I’ve been wondering about what benefits, if any, have the colonized gotten out of all these? I don’t know. Let me do some more research and I will get back to you.

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, April 15th, 2019 issue)