Over eighteen months in London and more than ten years away from Zimbabwe, and I've been wanting to write for some time now on identity and the postcolony. Is Britain a postcolony - in the sense that it is a melting pot for dilemmas and debates around history and identity in the wake of colonialism? Google doesn’t help on that particular search query. Yes and no. I guess I've always felt very postcolonial being here, even before displacement started permeating the lives of so many Zimbabweans. I recall my anger during my first few years in England, about the ignorance that I experienced among many Britons about colonialism's legacy. This reinforced the sense of a nation which had unravelled and re-made other people's histories and then conveniently erased that from its collective memory. There's this disjuncture between Britain being such a reflective and dialogical society (what with its vibrant media scene, all those institutionalised radio programmes, all its debates) and its own sense of being at the centre of the universe where, as a friend put it recently, things are simply "what they seem". This has always bugged me, alongside the damp predictability*, tidy little hedged fields and 'myriad small cramped lives'**. It’s simply all too orderly - and that orderliness is an unsettling reminder of how the past has been tidied over.
This of course resonates with the society in which I grew up. Maybe that’s why it makes me so mad. Every place has its own illusions and silences. I grew up without history; I didn't learn any Zimbabwean history until I left the country, aged sixteen. The scars were still too fresh, I suppose, and I think children just knew somehow that one shouldn't linger on the topic. And so instead the teachers at my private school fed us ancient Egypt and the World Wars instead. Earlier this year I watched the Gaza demonstrators walking down Edgware Road, and was struck by this image (not an original one, by any means) of London as many nations, many exiles, many postcolonials. Negotiating our identities and our relationship with capitalism. I'm reminded of the patchwork of exiles I've met here - like the Indian Ugandan woman who I met at a school community fair that I stumbled across in Marylebone. She was expelled under Idi Amin, and made these delicious samosas, incidentally. And of another in-between friend whose academic parents were banned by the Apartheid government. And of the Zimbabweans anxiously waiting for their destinies to be determined in the bureaucratic bowels of the Home Office.
Meanwhile back on the ranch, each time a new British historical drama is released with generous doses of all the usual staples - class tensions, a nostalgic romance with the countryside, homoeroticism, and preferably Keira Knightley [Atonement; The Empress; The Young Victoria; and by the way, just how many times will they remake Pride and Prejudice?] - I wonder if it's some kind of backlash against the contemporary 'multiculturalism' that Britain prides itself on. Indeed, back to London and all its oddities: the Moroccans downstairs who I barely know, but who gave me a bottle of vintage Veuve Clicquot for my birthday; the women in full burqas wandering around Hyde Park; the anorexic girl who waits at the gym door ahead of opening time on weekend mornings; the pair of working class artists in Greenwich market who paint about how they detest New Labour...and all these strange yellow spring flowers and accompanying birdsong which reminds me for the most part of undergraduate exams and how this remains a foreign land.
*Luhrmann
**Lessing, The Golden Notebook
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