Daily Complicities

Some time ago I went to my bank, and walked right in with the little book I'd been reading on the metro in my hand. The bank was CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce), the book was Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction.

As Ros says to Guil in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, " I didn't know where to put myself" ... with uneasiness and embarrassment. Such high intellectual aspirations; and such low economic grovelling.

So I am hereby reminding myself of the complicity with which I live daily. Of the heavily polluted cloud of past horrors I breathe in unthinkingly. Of somebody else's visceral, vomit-provoking reality of which I know nothing, of which I've only seen pictures.

Like this one from the cover of an edition of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (photograph of ivory-trading in the Congo, ca. 1890):

Just another colonial scene. And yet. Like a barely audible but unmistakabe note in the air, something striking pervades the photo. Despite the power-indicative position of the African equivalent of the Indian white sahib, (proper terminology, anyone?), seated on a chair, fully dressed and helmeted, holding a whip in the right hand, and judging the offered tusk domineeringly -- the unobtrusive supremacy and superiority in this picture undoubtedly belongs to the group of African traders, gathered around the white man. Whether seated or standing, they hold themselves with a healthy confidence and natural elegance. If they seem to obey the command-giving European, it is out of politeness. They are free and beautiful, they owe nothing to no one, their bare feet touch the ground fully and firmly, they are from here.

And they are about to be dislocated, disjointed, chewed, swallowed, and defecated by the whip-holders.

Perhaps complicities aren't always accompanied by paradoxes, but that is the case here: the CIBC bank has nothing to do with this picture, and it has everything to do with it.