Colonised, Coloniser, Complicit
There is a village I have never been to that lives in my bones.
There are people I have known through and through. I am with them and without them. I cannot remember and I can never truly forget. Who am I now without them.
There is a ship on the water. I have always felt it before I could see it. It carries something I have been afraid to name.
I must believe it will be better. Or I would not have come.
Something stopped in my heart of hearts. I cannot remember what the stop was. Only that I could bear to hear no more.
The silence that followed roared. You can't submit. You must submit. Back and forth until I no longer remembered who I was.
It became a debt. It became armour.
I gave myself up believing — if I do this, they will forgive me.
When I look toward them now I feel the ache in my heart and the blood in the land that holds us together and apart at the same time.
I want to come home. Find a soft place to land. Even inside the turning.
I carry the possibility of grace returning. I live in a world where I can no longer feel it.
And so I reach for my people. And find not one thread but three. And none of them innocent. And none of them free.
There is the colonised. The one whose land was entered without asking. Whose language became dangerous to speak. Whose ceremonies were renamed as primitive. Whose grief has no grave to visit because the loss was too large to mark.
There is the coloniser. Not as distant villain but as inheritance. Fear living so deep it forgot what it was afraid of. A hunger that lost its relationship to the sacred. A separation from the living world so complete it could no longer feel what it was taking.
Harm does not always begin in cruelty. Sometimes it begins in disconnection.
There is the complicit. The one who did not begin the violence but learned to live inside it. Powerless in a way that required a choice. Survive by bending. Survive by looking away. Survive by standing close enough to power that its shadow offered protection.
This is the strand that lives most quietly in the body. And costs the most to name.
Love did not disappear here. It went underground. It made a deal.
Underneath the three strands runs one thread.
The sacred.
The coloniser weaponised it. Turned the divine into permission, into justification, into a cross carried at the front of conquest.
The colonised hid it. Buried it inside ceremony, inside memory, inside the body itself where it could not be taken.
The complicit surrendered it. Traded the connection that could not be bought for the survival that required everything.
Three different losses. One original wound.
To name these strands is not to solve them.
It is not to find the right side of history and stand there untouched.
There is no untouched place.
Colonised.
Coloniser.
Complicit.
I name them because what remains unnamed continues to move through the field. Because the body cannot digest what the mind refuses to include. Because silence has asked too much of the living and the dead.
There is no final digestion of all this. Some things are too large. Some may never be fully metabolised in one body, one lifetime, one generation.
But something changes when there is no secret agenda.
Not to be forgiven. Not to be innocent. Not to be seen as good.
Only to look at what others may not have looked at. To meet what is ready. To make room for what cannot yet be digested. To stop handing the silence forward as inheritance.
Underneath all of it, something luminous remains.
Not untouched in the sense of unaffected. Untouched in the sense that the sacredness of life was never dependent on our ability to remember it.
Even when forgotten, it walked beside us.
I do not know how to come home cleanly.
But I can turn toward the village I have never been to.
I can feel the ship on the water.
I can feel the land beneath the blood.
And I can begin here.
Not with innocence.
With truth. With grief. With the ground.
With no secret agenda.
