Ode to Colonialism/Shame

As the ritual unfolds I close my eyes and let the experience take me in, traveling betwen worlds separated by a wall of sound. An alien yet familiar rhythm beats out a spatial ream and an ear splitting howl cuts through the soundscape, shocking in its pitch. A tonal nightmare, a serrated knife edge of emotion.

Suddenly a vision is pulled from the hidden depths of my memory. A slum on the outskirts of Monrovia. Rusted corrugated chaos coats the homes of a thousands families. A baby's scream travels between this world and the waking, echoing the repressed spirit of its surroundings.

Against it is juxtaposed an Austrian fairytale on the hill above. The stark white turrets polished to a gleaming perfection by the black skin upon who's wealth and back its heavily guarded golden gates were constructed. More to keep a fantasy of safety in than the other out.

The bucked teeth of colonialism gnash for the camera, "If I'm forced to leave, I'm turning the lights out as I go". A civilising ideology left to fester and rot, removing all semblance of good faith, replacing it with hate. What was once patronising and alienating is now inhuman. Europe was the monster that took, but it also planted the seeds of a new beast. A leviathan that has grown to a proportion beyond all prophecy.

And the violence. It breeds with itself. Feeding off the past as justification for contemporary coercions. Action begets the hero, but it is too late for heroes. Action begets the human. Reclaiming that which was once stripped from it. A position, a respect afforded only the light of skin and the fair of hair.