Your grandfather loves gardening and you spend afternoons watching him walk out into the garden, back bent over with age, cane in hand, to examine his flowers. You remember when you were younger, how terrified you were of being caught picking his flowers. The year is 2019, you think about Cabral’s metaphor of culture being to history what flowers are to plants. The way flowers (culture) carry the capacity and responsibility of ensuring continuity of history. You realize the role language specifically plays in this transmission, you realize how lost language is on you.

The year is 2009, you are a girl with big eyes who lives in a whirlwind of stories. You live in a world of fantasy, surrounded by storybooks, always looking forward to your Creative Writing classes. All your stories are about girls with blue eyes who are always named Matilda or Melanie. It will be years before you question why a Pakistani sounding name never felt appropriate to you, why you never found it worthy to name your protagonists a name that sounded not-European.

The year is 2014, you are an O’level student at an elite private school in Lahore, aspiring to attend a foreign college. You are meticulous and systematic, noting quotations on yellow flashcards just in case need be. You remember shrugging off the quote when you first read it. How it stung but only slightly, not long enough for you to question it. You are now at a point where you pride yourself on your growing collection of English Penguin Classics, you do not think twice about how you never read Urdu outside of the O’level curriculum. The irony of the O’level batch at your school appearing in the examinations with English as a first language and Urdu as a second is lost on you.

‘A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’

The year is 1835. A man from a foreign land decides how a ‘heathen’ people in British India should be educated. Lord T. B. Macaulay circulates a Minute on Education offering reasons why the British government should spend money on the provision of English language education to a people who ‘can’t at present be educated by means of their mother tongue.’ Nothing of value is left in your native tongue and so your people begin to assimilate. At the end of the day ‘imperial domination’ and ‘cultural domination’ are big talk ordinary people are not concerned with. You are more concerned with having a job to keep food on the table. Suddenly, literacy is tied to your proficiency in a language that isn’t yours; you will spend years struggling with the language, promising to send your children to schools where they will learn the right pronunciation for words that still feel strange coming out of your mouth.

The year is 1947, the British depart but cultural domination does not leave with them. In a world of globalization, Macaulay leaves the subcontinent a legacy of preferential treatment of one language over another. Cabral argues that to dominate a nation, you must neutralize and paralyze its culture. Macaulay’s reforms set in motion a series of education reforms that cut culture at its root– language. You are a country of 74 languages yet you prefer Urdu, a language only 7% of the country call their mother tongue. The division between Cabral’s ‘indigenous elite’ and ‘popular masses’ becomes generational with the cultural capital a private school offers over a government. Long after the British’s departure, the English medium schools remain accessible only to the ‘petite bourgeoisie’ who inherited the schools from the British.

The year is 2019, you think about the flowers your grandfather grows, you think about the way the way flowers are to plants what culture is to history, you realize you have picked the flowers without even meaning to. You realize that you are the amalgamation of Macaulay and those after him and their reforms. You are the child that is alienated from its own culture, a coconut, a girl writing stories with protagonists with European names because she harbors resentment for her own people and thinks names like Melanie and Matilda portray superiority. You are the child assimilated into the mentality of the colonizer without ever living in a time of colonial rule. You think of Cabral’s idea of re-conversion or re-Africanisation in his context, you hope to develop a love for gardening like your grandfathers.

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