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I wrote this some months ago, and finally decided to put it up. Then a close relative died. It has a few more layers of meaning for me now.
Another piece of Some opening thoughts on race in (and as) science fiction dystopia(s) and Relative to What? Part One.
A relative of mine died in February. We were sent a very nice letter of condolence from the aged care home in which he had lived. In our culture, we don’t say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ when someone has died. It’s hard, when someone says that, with feeling, with care, and I don’t know how to say, I wish you weren’t. At the bottom of this letter, it says the usual thing, but, immediately before, ‘we extend the traditional greetings’. I am not sure if this was a marking out of the proper thing to say as being proper, or simply an additional sentiment. I think it is the former.
I don’t know how to deal with that. I don’t know why we have to translate ourselves back to ourselves.
We’ve gotten so absorbed in whiteness, because we’ve had to. There is white at our weddings, and there are black and ‘sorry for your loss’ at our funerals. There are bright pink dresses for our girls, and blue outfits for our boys, and they are rewarded for being born with a surname given them by their father, which, back and back, was given him by some white men who didn’t like the ways we marked out our families. This is normative now, and we have to keep translating to retain our own culture. We have to relearn it and remind ourselves of it in ways we don’t have to keep relearning white cultural norms, because whiteness is pushed on to us even to these major and sacred parts of our lives.
It’s bad enough to have to explain ourselves to white people at every turn, pull out our fascinating foreign culture. But having to keep explaining ourselves to ourselves, because there is the risk that the whole thing soon might not be real, if we let it, if we keep being made to participate in one culture at the expense of our source and heart…
We are moved to a distance from ourselves with every death and birth and wedding.
You write beautifully: and have taught me a thing or two today. Awful to feel that ones culture is becoming more distant.
I only started reading your blog recently, so I don’t know much about you. What culture are you talking about? I mean, I guess you could say most of the things about a lot of cultures that have been practically overtaken by the construct that is “the Western world” (I might say also cultures where the people were mostly white), but I’d like to put your experience into focus (sorry for sounding pretentious -.-).
And it is not as if the white culture does births, deaths or weddings in a meaningful way very often either. Particularly not deaths.
Thanks, Kate.
That’s not pretentious at all, Cluisanna. It may or may not become evident to you as you read the blog more. ;) Welcome.
I guess everyone has to find their own way of doing these things that is right for themselves, Elephant’s Child. What may be meaningful to one person, or in one community, might not be good for another.
First of all I’d just like to say I really like the whole new perspective your thinking and writing has put onto me, as someone from Asian descent. I’ve never personally encountered many of the issues you’ve presented in this entry; mostly due to my Western-based upbringing – so this blog entry has opened my eyes to all the things we’ve gradually lost upon being forced to conform.
I’ve studied the idea of Identity in my course, and the loss of identity through forced-conformation into different cultures/societies. It really is quite a morbid idea to consider. I think this issue is becoming less predominant after the White Australia Policy was abolished back in the 1970s, but is still lying under the surface of the culture. Speaking of which, this reminds me of an event that occurred a few months ago when an Indian family took over an Australian school canteen, and sparked outrage amongst the parents of the children that attended the school. Reason? The food served was all Indian. -shakes head in disbelief-
Thanks :). Were they outraged that “normal” food had stopped being served? *rolls eyes*
I don’t have substantive additional commentary, but this is a very thought-provoking entry and describes a privilege I hadn’t identified: not needing to consciously fight against cultural colonisation while celebrating or grieving.
Thanks, Mary.
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