Minna salami She was walking through Hong Kong one day – where she had arrived on a scholarship as a writer, in 2016 – when she passed through the door of the university’s Chinese medicine institute and a sign caught her attention, because it seemed that it was speaking to her. “Learn from the past, but don’t lock yourself in it; learn from the West, but do not abandon what is ours ”, said the words of the sage Zhang Xichun. This anecdote is told by Salami in his book The other side of the mountain. This is how you would see the world if a European white man did not always tell you (Temas de Hoy, 2020), whose content sheds every time the opportunity arises, as was the case of the conference at the literature festival Chapter One, in the Matadero de Madrid, a few days ago.
Minna Salami is Ms. Afropolitan, or the author of the popular blog created in 2010 in which a Nigerian woman, born in Finland in 1978, and raised between Lagos (Nigeria) and Malmö (Sweden), talks about almost everything, from importance from sensuality in the sphere of knowledge to the challenges of the new blackness. Here is his declaration of principles, which can be read in one of the first chapters of his essay: “In the Euro-patriarchy, everything is binary: either one thing or the other. Or mind or body; or reason or emotion; or local or global; or inherited or acquired; or feminine or masculine ”.
Better than anyone, she knows that the real world is not binary, and she has known it since childhood, when she had to leave her home in Lagos, where she grew up with her Finnish mother and Nigerian father.
Better than anyone, she knows that the real world is not binary, and she has known it since childhood, when she had to leave her home in Lagos, where she grew up with her Finnish mother and Nigerian father (they had both met while studying in Germany), to go to live in a third country of unknown language and colors: Sweden. “In 1991, when I was 13 years old, due to the Nigerian dictatorship, my mother and I left there, leaving my father behind, which was very hard. That change in adolescence meant a great break. I did not want to go to live in Europe, although, when you come from a colonized country, everything in the West seems to shine … But my friends were also moving. You had to learn a new language, at some point I was excited, but then it was all very sad. My childhood in Nigeria had been very happy, full of friends, and then, in Sweden, just when I was beginning to become a woman, there was a time of racial aggression, for which I suffered school bullying, even suffered physical violence from skinheads. He did not speak Swedish and had no friends. In a couple of years, things changed, because I learned the language and made friends. I lived in Sweden until I was 22 ″.
Salami then went to New York, where he lived for three years before moving to London, where he has been for 17 years and which he feels is his city in the world, even though he spends a third of the year in Lagos.
His language has always been English, and precisely the fact that he does not speak Yoruba – the language of his paternal relatives – is one of the “regrets” of his life. In his book, he writes: “There are dead ends when we think about decolonization of the mind if we do it only in English, French, Arabic, Spanish or Portuguese (…) Not speaking Yoruba limits my ability to extract the information I need at the time of elaborating the theories that I yearn to elaborate ”. When asked why she did not learn Yoruba, she explains that her father never spoke to her in their language and that all she knows is thanks to her grandmother, who only spoke to her in her native language: “I am so shaped by the language, in my psyche, in the way I look at the world, in philosophy, in metaphysics. I know there are ways to get to a place that I can’t get to, that’s what I feel. When my father tells things, sometimes, I realize that he lacks ways of explaining it ”.
All of this more than makes up for it, from his Afropolitism (a construction that alludes to cosmopolitanism but with the African continent as a starting point), taking an interest in emancipatory movements of native peoples of America or Asia. “I think the attitude that best reflects me is what Virginia Woolf said: as a woman I have no country, my country is the world. Africa is the center of my life and what has defined my psyche, but from there I can become interested in Bolivia or India, ”he says.
From that other perspective, there are issues of European feminism that have no correlation in some native peoples. For example, the issue of the fight against stereotypes in the assignment of colors, since pink or blue, depending on whether it is girls or boys, does not work the same in all planetary societies, which shows the relativity of the symbols of West.
Minna explains: “In the field of Yoruba culture, which is distributed throughout West Africa (and includes regions of Nigeria, Togo and Benin, among others), blue is a color historically linked to the feminine. Now, due to the western influence, pink has entered strongly, and coexists with the other tradition ”. And he says that, for example, in Yoruba weddings, the bride’s relatives all dress the same color and the groom’s relatives, another, and it does not matter that it is pink. “And we have not only imported those color associations but also the excessive gendered of the people … Even the issue of homosexuality is crossed by the English colonization, because it was they who imposed the homophobic punishments. The historical beliefs of our people show more open minds. In some families, one sees women who assume the role of the male brother and can join another woman, not exactly in the sense of what happens in contemporary societies. But, in agricultural societies, if there is no older brother, if he has died, for example, the sister inherits the duties and rights of the one who is not there ”.
It makes no sense to just keep protesting and blaming the white man. Of course it is important as a vindication, but we must change the policies regarding the creation of our culture
The basis of the creation of this very particular knowledge of Minna Salami is, precisely, her ability to question terms and concepts that seem immovable in Western culture. For example, identity: “My explorations are traversed by these questions, but deep within me, I don’t feel that I have an identity, but a personality. I do not like the packs of the ‘Scandinavian, Nigerian, black woman, etc.’ type. Perhaps what identity does give us is the possibility of curiosity between one another ”. In the same way, it addresses less abstract issues, such as skin whitening, which she refuses to condemn as a reflection of the colonized mind of someone who wants to look like white, and instead believes that men and women who face such treatment rather they want to appear exotic and stand out in their own societies.
About the derogatory way of mentioning identity, racial or sexual orientation issues, imposing the English nickname on them woke, as a synonym for something superficial (or fashionable), Salami expresses himself: “The word woke It is used negatively by people of the old right and conservatism. I would never describe what we do as woke. I think that although you may disagree with some causes or some forms of rebellion, it is so unpleasant for people who are trying to carry out their cause to be belittled with such expressions … I would say that the only thing that could be questioned concerns alluded to by that term (used as an attack) it would be a lack of something more depth. Because, today, speeches take the form of performances of the social media”.
Indeed, social networks and American culture, according to Minna Salami, “have influenced so that everything is homogenized, and that is also dangerous, because each society has particular problems to deal with.” This is his observation at the end of the conference in Spain, in which he was surprised by “how incredibly similar our conversations are anywhere in the world.” What he did notice at the Madrid colloquium was that the debate and “the struggle of the African community in Spain is very far, far behind”, of the places that have been reached in other countries of the world.
Finally, what are the issues through which the reflection on decolonization must necessarily pass from now on? “I think you have to decentralize the whiteness of the conversation about decolonization and #BlackLivesMatter. It makes no sense to just keep protesting and blaming the white man. Of course, it is important as a vindication, but we must change the policies regarding the creation of our culture. The task is to reinforce blackness, in terms of leaving behind shame, anger and grief. Decolonization should mean more what Africans and descendants really want, or what idea do we have of progress, development, or on philosophical issues such as love or friendship, without so much reference to what whites have done ”, he concludes Salami.
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#shame #anger #grief #reinforce #blackness