The American Dream

Most Americans have never heard of settler colonialism, much less used it to describe their country. That’s because Americans prefer to call settler colonialism the American dream.

Those lines have been echoing in my head ever since I read them.

It is also perhaps the first time that I have read the phrase "settler colonialism" outside the academic contexts.  Of course, globally speaking, we are not referring to, say, Black settler colonialism.  In the academic discussions, the US and Australia are classic examples of white settler colonialism, in which the settlers displaced and wiped out the indigenous populations--very different from the colonization of India, for instance.  And, yes, one would add Canada and New Zealand to this list.  A slightly modified version was the case with South Africa and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe.)

But, to read "settler colonialism" in a New York Times commentary is a new experience. 

The author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, is familiar to me, only because we watched a multi-part documentary on Asian-Americans.  In one of the episodes in that series, Nguyen talked about his family coming to the US as refugees after the war in Vietnam.  I recall him getting emotional while sharing some of those experiences.

Nguyen's commentary is about how writers and poets might use their craft after the sociopath leaves the Oval Office. 

Trump was the continuation of the conservative counterattack. Mr. Trump clearly wanted to roll back the American timeline to the 1950s, or maybe even to 1882, the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Will writers become apolitical from 2021?

I hope not.  

In fact, from the kinds of books and essays that I have been reading over the past few years, I am pretty darn confident that writers--especially those who are not white or straight--are going to be increasingly political in their essays and books and poems.  Like Noor Hindi, whom Nguyen quotes.

I followed up on the link in Nguyen's essay and read Hindi's poem, which is also the best way to end this post:

Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying
By Noor Hindi

Colonizers write about flowers.

I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks

seconds before becoming daisies.

I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.

Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.

It’s so beautiful, the moon.

They’re so beautiful, the flowers.

I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.

He watches Al Jazeera all day.

I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.

I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.

Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.

When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.

One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.