I've posted this blog entry in a few different places. It was difficult for me to write. So, i can only understand that it may be difficult for others to read, Posting...

Settler Colonial Realizations, take II

This piece has grown...
It's still really raw and messy...
It's still morphing as I develop my ideas further. I'm struggling with language I'm not accustomed to utilizing. I'm struggling with analysis I'm not accustomed to aiming at me. So, if you're reading now. Keep going right to the end. Afterwards, you might want to start again or return in a few hours, or days or weeks, because this is a set of ideas and explorations in tha makin. So, my ideas and words are changing and expanding as you read. This piece is growing as I do.

A set of cascading realizations
In tha gut...
roiling, gurgling.
Do you listen to your stomach?
I do.
This is difficult...
hee, hee, hee...
exciting, a new set of realizations and interrelationships to process and explore and gnash my teeth about.

I've got to document an email exchange I had with a Native woman who lives here in Toronto. She had been trying to make contact with me about talking, processing emotions using a radical anti-oppression framework.

Life, as indicated from the various postings here on this blog, has been chaotic, crazed, unintelligible, horrific too much of the time for me to be able to see or think clearly enough to support someone else's self-uncovering.

So, I didn't return calls, emails, or when I did I was non-committal.

Intentional community woes behind me, blogland skirmishes where I sustained way too much idiot friendly fire, my own counsellor getting a solid, thick earfull every week, baby labour behind me and recuperation well on the way...

I engaged, connected fully present and ready to offer life support.

Still, when we finally began communicating I realized I was annoyed and felt as if she wasn't getting me and how I was located as a Black, caribbean born, woman.
I had flashbacks to other conversations, terse engagements with Native women I'd met over the years. I remembered feeling as if they lumped me in with white colonizers and immigrants from other parts of the world...as if to say: none of you should be here, so get tha fuck off our land.

Thinking about immigration as a misnomer from where I, caribbean born into the western hemisphere via the horrors of the middle passage, stand, I regrounded comfortably in a refusal to understand myself as "landed" or as "immigrant" since, to my mind my people's had been forced to occupy space in the west for hundreds of years. Coming to kkkanada was just a shift of neighbourhood from the islands off the coast to the mainland.

Thinking about shade, lightness, white-skinnednes and darkness, I grounded in a consciouness which allowed me to see the ease of misdirected and/or projected rage originating from behind light skins readily smeared on those inhabiting dark skins, those understood because of their location as accessible, easy targets.

I really tried hard to stay with the familiar, the place I've been sitting all these years.

I talked/wrote about the Middle Passage and said that Black people didn't come to Turtle Island voluntarily that we were forced, dragged, stolen.
The relationship to the land, this land started there. Others who came later, whether they were enticed by faulty adverts or running from persecution only to be fuk'd over, head taxed and coolied by white people's racism came willingly.

Black people, I asserted and maintained, were different.

And fucking hell, we are. More than I had been willing to see.

Did I say this is difficult? I'm excited...and scared. Shivers.
I am human, able and willing to ignore certain hard harsh truths if they're not sitting right under my nose. Denial.
I am human. So, this woman's presence with spirit, truth, self-knowing and clear sight has galvanized me, drawn me, invited me, forced me off the edge of yet another flat earth. Her stating of a very simple truth: It's not possible to cry out against the Israeli occupation of Palestine or against the US invasion of iraq without reckoning with the invasion and occupation of this place. These thoughts send me bungee jumping again...I don't know where or when I'll be able to land...

Shifting...shifting...my mouth feels dry and my heart's skipping beats.

Feeling uncomfortable I'm hearing this woman's pain, heeding her truths, listening to an invitation direct from my spirit to feel my way through, deeper, deeper. I hear a word she uses, so foreign to my tongue. I use "colonizer" meaning a white person not me. She uses "settler" which I understand encompasses the white people, people of colour on this land and...me?

I couldn't stay with that thought for very long at first.
But my ethics, a sense of what makes sense so defined by the writings I've had the privilege of reading and understanding not just as academic, theoretical, political frameworks, intellectual exercises divorced from reality, but filters through which to see and templates from which to craft tools which can be used to build consciousness of my own location and privilege, guided me true and brought me back.

Privilege and oppression, a new blend, tha, tha, tha remix.
Here I go again.

I remember going there little by little at first...
Writing her that Black peoples living in the Americas had made some really bad choices, to say the least. We hadn't allied with First Nations peoples across the board, but only in pockets here and there. And yes, I know there are pockets of Black folks all over the place with Native dna and Native people with African dna. That still doesn't quite get to the root of what's happening for me.

This is what I know:
Malcolm travelled across the Atlantic to Mecca and connected with Pan Africanists. He didn't stay at "home" to seek counsel from Native elders and join his struggles by any means necessary to theirs.

Martin read from the "good" book, he didn't ground his pacifist dream for a brighter Black settler future on the struggles bloodied, captive land so rocked by genocide...maybe he would have realized he needed to fight not not die.

To call these historical moments of epic misguidedness or major mistakes sounds really weak, somehow. These moments have diverted the path of Black people's histories and herstories, forever linking us to the land theft agendas of the colonizer here in the Americas.

Sure, immediately following "emancipation" some left for Africa. But so many remained. And those who remained had choice and made decisions. They/we did not collectively ally with the custodians of the land and collectively attempt to link our political agendas with theirs. We did not request permission to be here any longer than necessary to collect our things and go. We didn't ask permission to take up permanent residence from the original and true custodians of the land.

Stockholm Syndrome in overdrive we internalized the settler colonial attitude that gave us a sense of entitlement a sense of ownership based on underpaid work for bible thumping white supremacist colonizers still hell bent on theft and murder.

In that historical watershed moment, brutally, psychologically, emotionally, physically abused, torn, raped, infantilized, dominated, ethical centers so far off kilter, our moralities and world views substituted with that of our abusers, our colonizers, we stretched trembling needy, covetous hands, reached for power and legitimacy and survival means all derived from the proceeds of stolen land.

And ever since then we've focussed on struggling self-centeredly against white folks for a better share of the land, for better treatment on the land while while working with them, alongside them, helping them to imprison the land and its peoples through the apartheid system of bondage South African whites learned from Canada.

We allied with our oppressors to further their colonial settlement project, supporting their plans to parcel out the land. Our only complaints were that we didn't get enough respect as fellow settlers, that we didn't get enough land, that we got land full of rock stones, never the "good" parts of the land. In the West Indies, the Haitians warred over the land and "won" the land. In Barbados where I was born, we were "civilized" (historically crushed, made an example of by the British who wanted a completely controlled island without the uprisings plaguing other colonies that they could point out as proof that the slavocracy worked). More British than the British (still taking pride in this) we waited peacefully until we were granted the right to govern the land, legitimized by our betters - the imperialist, colonizing white royal family.

Some of us actually define ourselves, understand ourselves as "indigenous", originally coming from the land. I spoke to my sister years ago about our elementary school education in Barbados. We both agreed that we'd been left with the distinct impression as children that Black people had always been on the island, that we were originally from the (is)land.

Part of the problem being an avoidance of the memory of enslavement and an avoidance of our Africanness. Black Africans who live in the caribbean are indigenous to somewhere, we did spring up from the soil of a land...just not in the Caribbean. Those islands are Native land, too.

There is rage about being left in limbo, I think, on the part of us descendants of those enslaved Africans. The continentals often make fun of us, understand us as cash cows seeking objects that will help us feel more like we belong. I've heard us described time and time again as the lost and fucked up descendants of slaves...not directly related to any continental...unless the link is of strategic importance.

Knowing that the shoddy records kept during slave times mean that many of us, most of us cannot supply such precise information, I've seen continentals snicker about us saying: You're from "Africa"?...Africa's a continent. Which part are you from? Which exact location on the continent?" The agenda? To show that we don't fully belong, no tribal linkage, no family to directly claim.

Given the petroleum wars, the cell phone mineral wars, the genocides perpetrated with arms purchased from all too willing euro-descended providers, the AIDS crisis the West created, the poverty, corruption, the neglect, the starvation all evidence of meddling by imperialist states (former or present colonial powers) and corporations, as Africa's wealth continues to be syphoned away so much of it to Settlers here in North America, with the help of us Colonized Settlers, to increase the quality of life for so many of us Colonized Settlers...there is no mass exodus of Black people wanting to vacate these settlements and go "home". Yeah, for a vacation maybe, to look for spouses/friends/allies/hazy tribal links, to attend conferences, to go to the festivities unfolding around Project Joseph.

But not many, myself included, want to actually give up perfectly useful Settler status here to really go "home". The life we've created here, functioning as buffers between Native resistance movements and White Settler Colonizers is lucrative and "comfortable".

Why do so many of us remain here? Why not choose to renew actual geographical ties to the continent, thereby doing the right thing by returning "home"? We tell ourselves we've set down roots here, struggled against white settlers, struggled against the odds to grow our gardens here. White Settlers forcibly transplanted us here and now we claim the rotted roots sucking sustenance from these lands as necessry to our continued survival.

And we've been fighting the White Settlers on that point ever since. They question our false land claims, never their own, by asking: But where are you really from? In response we cling even more tightly to the lie of our claim to this place and demand validation and recognition from those who originated the lies.

So, we're in this "new world" and if we don't understand ourselves as linked directly to the land by ancestry, by "rights", then we really are nothing, we really are the dispossessed. And none of us want to claim limbo as "home". We behave as if the fact that we don't want to wander as scatterlings anymore, justifies us supporting and perpetrating settlement projects in the Americas. We were forced to work, to suffer, to scream, to cry out. For that we have a right to rest, even if our resting place is in someone else's bed.

We want to finally belong somewhere.

Me? I'm linked tuh me. I belong to me. I come from my ancestors by blood right and no matter how I behave, how rude I get, how much I fuck up the tidy little stories my peoples tell to themselves, to each other and to me, no one can take away my roots. NO one can nay say who I am and from whence I come. That's what I've got to keep me warm as I continue to do this work. I understand that my genes are a jambalaya, a mix up, a stew. These cells hail from a lot of places...just...not...here.

Another piece of the Black "indigenous" misnomer is about an avoidance of the knowledge of the peoples who originally occupied those islands, some of whom are still there. Black Africans living in the diaspora have prided themselves on the creations of "new world" musics - jazz, blues, r&b, funk, house, hip-hop, soca, calypso, reggae, dance hall. We've prided ourselves on maintaining links between Africa and our present locations as evidenced through a multitude of creoles and dialects. We've synthesized traditional African dress, art forms, cooking and the list goes on. We've created cultures that have traveled and morphed...which is a beautiful thing.

We've re-created ourselves post emancipation, fresh, new and more human and smelling of the salt sea breeze. We celebrate for a whole month, every year, our history and herstories of collective self re-creation and "politicized" revolution.

We throw giant Diasporic Settler cultural festivals (Carnival, anyone?) in different parts of the Americas trumpeting our presence here out for all to hear. Settler revelers parade in costumes that to my eyes could easily resemble the fancy dance wear of some Native peoples.

We party and revel and remember struggles for our own civil rights while legitimizing falsified land claims that have allowed us to ignore our ethically and morally bankrupt status as Colonized Settlers in the Americas.

Why, in Toronto, folks even complained about having the big Colonized Settler Carnival removed from the downtown core to the lakeshore lands south of the city proper. Now keep in mind WE weren't taken out of our homes and moved to the lakeshore lands, forbidden to travel or to identify ourselves as ourselves if we left those places without permission. Please ground in the reality that OUR CHILDREN weren't taken away from us, moved to the lakeshore lands there to be subjected to a state sanctioned, massively traumatizing, abusive and brutal (mis)education program from which they and their descendants would never fully recover.

Nope, our big, once a year, tourist money making, weekend fete was moved to the lakeshore lands.

No disrespect or erasure of police stalkings of Black Colonized Settler youth during this city's Colonized Settler carnival festivities, meant. I'm just trying to add some new layers as I broaden my own perspectives and adjust my picture.

Still, can you just picture in your mind's eye the Colonized Settlers party, drink and honour links to Middle Passage ancestors while jumping up on soil that is ancient, bloodied, in bondage and still at war? These are big parties even the white Settler Colonizers come to when they want to forget themselves and the horror they've birthed onto the land. These are comfortable places for all of us to go when we just want to have a good time.

Our carnival songs, our freedom songs, our redemption songs, our songs of revolution do not reflect who we've become in this place - Settlers. Our politics of resistant, with very few exceptions, does not reflect the knowledge of our history of collusion and participation in the harm. Our cultures serve the function of supporting the erasure of Native peoples who don't exist tangibly in our new settler stories, songs and other expressions of self. The settler agenda is reified, Native people just don't exist. And if they don't fully exist, then we don't have to ground in our colonized Colonized Settler realities.

I'm thinking about the nationalism of the denizens of the caribbean islands and about the dna of Native people still flowing through some of our veins. I'm thinking about Black people and Asian people and Arab people and South Asian people working, buying, owning and governing native (is)lands.

I'm thinking about South Africa during the era of (official) apartheid. The category of coloured was invented, literally brought into being, a space reserved for South Asians and Asians who didn't have to be lumped in with the roiling masses of Black African people. Although they weren't going to be able to access the privilege of the white colonizers, they were offered some perks and privileges. In this way most willingly chose to function as human buffer, a middle class existing between the dangerous darkies and the lily pure and powerfull whites. Many defended that settler project because defending it meant maintaining the access they enjoyed.

I'm thinking about Black Nova Scotians, about the Black people in southern Ontario...
I'm thinking about African- "Canadians" and African-"Americans" who proudly claim a place in the bosom of these apartheid states by hyphenation, linking themselves by name.

Our focus, whether it has been to struggle for better treatment or to be seen as fully human (meaning as good as white) or demanding more say or better wages, has always been about understanding the white settlers/colonizers as center, as the legitimate "owners" and "rulers" of the land...erasing the land rights of Native People.

Might (the ability to emotionlessly torment, dominate, rape, pillage, steal, poison, drug, torture, starve, imprison, massacre, lock away, partition off) means right. And because the white Settler Colonizers had "might", we allied with them becoming a part of their settler project.

Black folks living in the West, those descendants of stolen Africans set a precident for all coloured folks who would come later: Don't undermine the Settler Colonial project, see what you can get out of it and agitate behind the scenes, sabotage if you need to, but don't destroy the project. If there's something you can get out of it, there's no need to throw the putrid, diseased, rotten, cancerous, virulent, contagious, insidious baby out with the bathwater.

We set an example for all coloured peoples who came later: Even the dispossessed can look forward to having a share of the land. Might get spat on, might get lynched, might get cheated and fuk'd wit' but always remember you're a part of the new state being built on the ashes of scorched earth, blood soaked land. You have a right to a share of the booty.

Black people set an important imperial standard. We made an example of ourselves:
If the human offal they worked and bred and killed and raped and damaged and mind controled don't mind lending a hand, tilling the land for a share of the profit however meager, however dusty the land, then life here in the western hemisphere, in "the americas" (caribbean totally included) might be lived out within acceptable parameters.

If the slave times had really that bad, there would have been mass exoduses back to Africa, there would have been mass murders the moment Black people were declared "free". It would have had to be us or them. They would have had to deport us en masse...that or massive group burials of really dangerous, rabid, foaming at the mouth "freed" men, women and children.

Washington would have been burned to the ground. North and South would have been fighting on the same side for their fucking lives, not against each other whistling muthafuckin dixie. Scarlet and Rhett wouldn't have had the time to make any little tow haired settler colonizing babies, they would have been building a goddam siege wall around Tara and praying to their Gawd to save their scrawny white necks.

The white slavers, plantation owners, polite white families in their big houses, the folks who were there when the hurtin' happened, who were the reason for the hurting would have been struggling against us for their very lives, no?

But that's not what happened at that particular historical moment in time.

The white Settler Colonizers went on to breed, expand, steal some more, murder some more, rape some more, dominate and terrorize some more. They built cities and countries and they're still here.

And Black people, the descendants of those African slaves?
Well, we're still here, too. We're still here.

And collectively we own a sight more than forty acres and a mule. Some own homes, cars, jewelry, stocks, bonds, planes, businesses all on the land. Some of our children can attend schools alongside the descendants of the settlers who colonized our ancestors, stole the land and killed its people. We hang out with white settlers, joke and drink and play and fuck and get better jobs than some of them too. We teach in their schools and get tenure in their institutions of higher learning. We work in their imperial banks of commerce, protect their investments, and put our money in their banks. We attend the churches where the bible (they used as an excuse to indoctrinate and brutalize Native children after they had been torn from the arms of their family members and put in residential schools) is read each and every Sunday. We shop at their Hudson's Bay Company (been bought by American settlers for a tidy sum), store still decorated with the colours of the measles blankets they used to murder millions.

And all the while the conscious remember to celebrate Kwanzaa (the festival of first fruits of this land), wear ethnic prints and decorate their/our homes built on the land, with African objets d'art.

Collectively we've arrived...neo-settlers, the nouveau riche occupying stolen land as we attempt to deflect enough racism which will allow us to claim our "share" of the land.

But even those who haven't managed to get a full share of the spoils of the land, those who haven't quite "made it", know they can dream about the day when they too will be able to be more privileged descendants of slaves morphed into settlers reaping the benefits of stolen land.

Colonized Settler Oprah rules tvland. Colonized Settler Condi plans out new imperialist wars. Colonized Settler P Diddy is making millions from perfume. Colonized Settler Tyra is binging and purging and complaining about fucking being seen as, constructed as fat while making millions. Colonized Settler Whoopi has to be tracked down by desperately pleading officials from impoverished Guinea-Bissau after a PBS television show traced her million dollar DNA back to Africa. Colinized Settler Spike makes a documentary about how badly the Black Colonized Settlers were treated in New Orleans, how so many of them still don't have anywhere to live, anywhere to call their own. Colonized Settler actors complain about not getting enough representation on the silver screen...they want more oscar nods from the white motion picture academy, a bigger share of the profits and more attention for their/our Colonized Settler movies and television shows.

The white settler colonizers visit the Caribbean and sip drinks alongside the wealthy Colonized Settler descendants of African slaves, while not so wealthy Colonized Settler descendants of slaves beam hate-filled, jealous smiles, braid hair on the beach, mix drinks full of spit, clean their hotel suites, plot tourist murders in cane fields for the lot of them and dream of the big time...all on stolen land.

And all the while...
Colonized Settler civil rights activists stage demos, marches and the like demanding better treatment for themselves and their settler communities...ourselves and our settler communities while the original custodians of this place and their children cry foul and shoot us dirty glances we claim...I claimed not to understand or deserve.

And all the while...
Black Colonized Settlers ally with Coloured Colonized Settlers who ally with white Settler Colonizers to protest domination of Palestine and its people by Israeli Holocaust Survivor Settler Colonizers. Now, say that ten times fast.

So, here I am, even still more layered and complexly vexed. The culturally and racially mixed and mixed up descendant of stolen peoples "freed" only to turn and enslave the land and undermine the struggles of its peoples.

I'm bloodied and not all the blood I'm trying to scrub off is my own.

Can't go around this. Can't go over this. Can't go under this. Gotta go through it even though I know I'm not gonna be able to take back what has already transpired. I've got a shitload of options and choices to make or break up ahead. One things for sure...

I'm a settler.
I am a settler.
I really don't feel comfortable being a Black settler colonized and colonizing.
Identifying as a settler doesn't feel attractive, neat or clean. It feels ugly, messy and embarassing like I've got my own shit stuck on my shoe. I want to scrape it off, off, OFF!

I don't want to have to add this to the identities I claim. I don't want to add this to the list of ways this oppressed body can oppress.

HOLYSHITHOLYSHITHOLYSHITHOLYMUTHAFUCKINSHITFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK. Somebody, ANYbody EVERYBODY SCREAM!

I'm a Colonized Settler breeder meant to birth millions/minions to solidify false land claims to stolen land by sheer force of numbers.
I'm a Colonized Settler mama, part of a plague virus that spread across the land.
I'm a Colonized Settler mama who can either decide to breed settler dissidents or Colonized Settler dominators hungering for their (un)fair share.
I'm a Colonized Settler with no choice but to embrace difficult consciousness and spoonfeed it to my colonized settler babies so they will know the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

This is crucial.

This is how I got to this breaking point, cracking my own false consciousness wide open, pealing off what feels like a layer of my own skin in an agonizing home surgery.

Mamabrain or no, my five year old needs me to have a brain and to make use of it. My daughter's questions are keeping me honest...much more so than I would have liked, much more so than I would have planned.

Today...
I had to explain to her that we're Colonized Settlers who have helped to steal the land and dominate its people...
She'll want to know more, want to know how and why. She'll come back with more questions...I'll need to understand more about me and US so I can give her some imperfectly layered answers.

Happy Black Colonized Settler History Month.