I will be attempting to write myself into this project, seeing it more as a form of self reflection and exploration with regards to the theme of home and belonging. Being both from here and not, my relationship with the idea of ‘home’ has always been fragmented, feeling that I do not have the complete right to call either place my own. This is a question that has recently become more recurring to myself, and since I have never fully allowed myself to explore its depths, I feel this is an appropriate point to begin from.
Most of the kinds of writing that I have been inspired by are non-fiction, autobiographical pieces, especially Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and this is deliberate. I find this form/method to be the base of the stories itself. They allow the author to directly speak to the reader, so there is in a sense, a greater moral obligation to appreciate these experiences. I see the difficulty in articulating, let alone narrating one’s life and would like to explore this as a means through which I can find redemption in our past, through the banal instances of the everyday.
I am unsure to call it a privilege or a burden, but I have had the experience of living in another country and therefore imagining a life in another country from a very young age. It has been built into me, this double sight of the world, always relating one to the other and finding myself in between. And so it is exactly this ‘in-between’ that I want to divulge as a decolonial aesthetic, finding a way to reconcile my experience as the ‘other’, in both my ‘home'(s).
My project will most likely culminate into a paper; providing vignettes of my own life upon which I will draw an analysis. I will also be employing poetry and music into my work, since I feel these are two outlets that beautifully capture the rawness of emotion, and can also be accessed in different ways, attaching our own interpretations to them and finding a way to voice our own pains.
Decoloniality and Decolonization 