Assembly

by Natasha Brown

She understood the anger of a man who himself understood in his flesh and bones and blood and skin that he was meant to be at the head of a great, hulking giant upon whom the sun never set.

As if each morning, fresh mediocrity slides out of the ocean, slimes its way over mossy rocks and sand, then sprouts skittering appendages that stretch and morph and twist into limbs as it forges on inland until finally, fully formed, Lou! strolls into the lobby on two flat feet in shined shoes.

Any value my words have in this country is derived from my association with its institutions: universities, banks, government. I can only repeat their words and hope to convey a kind of truth.

I wasn’t sure that I was ready for any things. I knew these were the things to want, the right things to reach for. But I felt sick of reaching, enduring. Of the ascent.

I am everything they told me to become. Not enough. A physical destruction, now, to match the mental. Dissect, poison, destroy this new malignant part of me.

I pay my taxes, each year. Any money that was spent on me: education, healthcare, what – roads? I’ve paid it all back. And then some. Everything now is profit. I am what we’ve always been to the empire: pure, fucking profit. A natural resource to exploit and exploit, denigrate, and exploit.

As if that relentless overcoming, when taken to the limit, as time stretches on to infinity, itself overcomes even limits, even infinity, even this place.

But what it takes to get there isn’t what you need once you’ve arrived. A difficult realization, and a harder actualization.

Born here, parents born here, always lived here – still, never from here. Their culture becomes parody on my body.

It’s a fictionalization of who I am, but my engagement transforms the fiction into truth. My thoughts, my ideas – even my identity – can only exist as a response to the partygoers’ words and actions. Articulated along the perimeter of their form. Reinforcing both their self-hood, and its centrality to mine. How else can they be certain of who they are, and what they aren’t? Delineation requires a sharp, black outline.

The answer: assimilation. Always, the pressure is there. Assimilate, assimilate… Dissolve yourself into the melting pot. And then flow out, pour into the mould. Bend your bones until they splinter and crack and you fit. Force yourself into their form. Assimilate, they say it, encouraging. Then frowning. Then again and again. And always there, quiet, beneath the urging language of tolerance and cohesion – disappear!

Per bell hooks: We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival… yes, yes! But I don’t know how. How do we examine the legacy of colonization when the basic facts of its construction are disputed in the minds of its beneficiaries?

Pull at it, take these strands, gather them up and spool them around you; reconstruct yourself from the scraps. Say: I love you. I love working here. I loved speaking today. No, no it was nothing. I am fine, I am; I’m excited, yes, for the future – say whatever they tell you to say or not say, just survive it; march on into the inevitable. As our mothers, and fathers, did. Our grandparents before them. Survive.

Even up here, I feel it against my skin, the thumping nationalism of this place. I am the stretched-taut membrane of a drum, against which their identity beats. I cannot escape its rhythm.