By Usraat Fahmidah
Jamaica Kincaid was just a child, seated at her school desk, when she was introduced to England which defined her worldview, and her place in it. “When my teacher had pinned this map up on the blackboard, she said, ‘This is England’ – and she said it with authority, seriousness […] It was as if she had said, ‘This is Jerusalem […] We understood then – we were meant to understand then – that England was to be our source of myth and the source from which we got our sense of reality.”
The Antiguan-born writer, now a Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, describes how her sense of reality was first formed through her schooling experience under British colonial schools in an autobiographical essay “On Seeing England for the First Time.”
Kincaid’s childhood lessons glorified England. Yet, as an adult, her perception shifted when she finally visited and encountered a reality far from the version she was taught at her school. There is so much anger in her voice when she writes: “In me, the space between the idea of it and its reality had become filled with hatred, and so when at last I saw it I wanted to take it into my hands and tear it into little pieces and then crumble it up as if it were clay, child’s clay.”
As Kincaid’s consciousness evolved into adulthood, it created a fracture in the reality she had formed as that impressionable young girl living under British colony. Now, the adult Kincaid writes in an aphoristic way: “The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart – idea of thing, reality of thing – the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.”
This idea that she talks about here: “Between the idea of something and its reality” is so potent that it made me reflect on the formation of realities. My sense of reality, like Kincaid, was also formed at school through lessons in history and science, economics, and math, through the algebraic formulas, and through the glorified heroes of the past.
But as time went on, I started noticing the fissures in that manufactured reality and grew to loathe the distorted version that was forced upon me. Your childhood heroes? They aren’t infallible. Single use plastics? Probably won’t save the planet. Planting more trees? There is more to it than mindlessly planting while the vilest politician you know whitewashes their sins with a sanctimonious tree-planting campaign.
This world is a farce, and the deeper you see, the darker it gets, and it’s nothing like what you have been taught in textbooks.
Going back to Kincaid, her fabricated sense of reality was a country – Britain. This construct shaped her understanding of the world, her place in it, and the power dynamics between colonizer and colonized. But others, it could be a different construct altogether, shaped by their own histories.
I see the events leading up to the August 5th uprising in Bangladesh as a moment when people collectively began to recognize the fractures in their reality. This challenge to the dominant narrative is unlike anything I’ve witnessed in my 21 years of existence, 15 of which have been under Awami League rule. It seemed the masses, disillusioned by the gap between promise and reality, finally chose to reject the status quo they’ve endured for nearly 15 years.
Think of the promise of a “Smart Bangladesh” that we have been sold, it was anything but smart. When you examine closely, this constant chorus of “smartification” and “digitalization,” as sung by the state, was merely a euphemism for an increasingly invasive surveillance apparatus and a burgeoning police state.
Looking back at the events of last July, I think, how at one point, the desperate effort to construct that false reality became so intense that the state resorted to cutting of all forms of internet access. However, no number of manufactured narratives could withstand the growing frustration. People had reached their breaking point.
In the essay, Kincaid talks about dominant narrative. Columbus clung to an idealized vision of conquest, even when confronted with a far di erent reality. This clash between his expectations and reality ultimately fueled his colonization, you see how the weaker of the two – reality – dies.
When ideas collide with reality, they often expose discrepancies that fracture our perception. We all have experienced such painful fractures, no matter the scale. Like a young protagonist in a coming-of-age novel, we will all inevitably encounter a fracture in our own realities at some point in our lives. This shattering of illusions is a rite of passage, a precious and necessary step on the path to true understanding. Like that young protagonist, we will reach a crossroads where we must make a choice: to either face the truth and to find our place in that world rightfully, or cling to our illusions and maintain a fractured worldview.
Although Kincaid does not wade those waters in her essay, it seems that both Kincaid and I share a common enemy: the oppressors who only seek to uphold their power by offering a dominant narrative like that of Columbus.
But we aren’t Columbus. The fractures in our reality, painful though they may be, offer an opportunity to dismantle the oppressive machinery that binds us.
I would say for Kincaid and me, as inheritors of the colonial past that still lingers on, the fractures in our realities are our catalysts. The fractures in realities are catalysts for aspirations; and these cracks in our realities open doors to ideas that are far beyond the chokehold of oppressors.
