5 Books That Saved My Life: Decolonization as a Process of Learning

1. The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

2. Orientalism, Edward Said

3. Women, Race and Class, Angela Y. Davis

4. The Doctor and The Saint, Arundhati Roy

5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley

“I was thirteen years old when Malala was shot in the head. I remember sitting in my eighth grade homeroom class, listening to my teacher read out the BBC news report of Malala’s standoff with the Taliban militants who wanted to stop her, and other girls, from going to school. As my teacher read on, the school bell rang and my class of Black, brown and Asian kids unanimously got up and left, cutting my teacher off with their unabashed apathy. Not one (of close to 50 kids) cared to stay and hear what happened to the girl who got shot in the head for going to school. It left our teacher furiously speechless. This act of unspoken, unconscious, unanimous apathy, highlighted for me the duality of education and the role of the classroom to an immigrant, a person of colour, or more correctly, a colonized individual.

At home, my Pakistani family, continuously watched news reports of Malala’s standoff in Northern-Pakistan and eagerly tracked her recovery. At home, Malala was a hero, a symbol of an unrelenting thirst for knowledge that every colonized person carries. At school, Malala was a victim. A reminder to all the Pakistani/Muslim/immigrant children, that our presence in the classroom was owed to the fact that our own people were too savage to teach us. Before the news of her miraculous recovery, Malala’s story was hardly unique to any of the brown children who watched foreign news channels over dinner, who regularly heard stories of children being killed, abused, stolen, or physically disabled for anything from trying to pray to writing an exam.

I can tell you the first time I heard the name of my home country in class. I was eleven, it was sixth grade and we were talking about al-Qaeda in social studies. My teacher pointed to all the countries where the terrorist organization operated. It was the first time most of my non-Pakistani classmates had ever seen Pakistan on a map—the first time some of them had heard of the country. I can also tell you the first time I ever heard the name of my country mentioned in class not in relation to 'terrorism' or 'Islamic extremism', I was twenty, it was my second year of university. I couldn’t help but wonder, was that everybody sitting in the class’ first time too? This disparity in our education is the reason so many of us grew up being called 'terrorist' by our peers. More importantly, it’s the reason why so many of us accepted being called 'terrorist'. While the example is specific, the experience is one that is universally felt.

Let’s ask ourselves: how do colonized children sitting in a classroom see themselves in relation to a colonized child fighting for the right to sit in a classroom? If they react with apathy in the classroom and compassion out of it, what does this imply about the classroom? Our state sponsored education would like to maintain the illusion of neutral objectivity, but the truth is, the classroom is where colonization is taught as a process of nature, as fact,

as norm, to the colonizer, yet more significantly to the colonized. When faced with the story of Malala, and the countless nameless children who shared her fate, the colonized children of my classroom exercised apathy as a form of survival. When seeing our nation’s maps under the heading 'al Qaeda' we practiced the self-preservation our colonial education taught us. We distanced ourselves from the image of the 'colonized' presented to us, learning both explicitly, and implicitly, that our humanity is linked to how closely we imitate the colonizer. We didn’t stay out of sympathetic shock of Malala’s struggle, we left out of recognition that her struggle would never be meaningfully recognized in the space we were occupying. To every colonized child in that room the hypocrisy of the colonial ideology was not stated but, whether unconscious or not, was unanimously recognized.

Colonized people have always lived with this duality. Colonization is not merely a procedure, a time period or an action. Colonization is an ideology. This recognition is vital. While 'time period' implies a fixed beginning and end and 'action' implies balance in the form of 'reaction', understanding colonization operates as an ideology comes with the understanding that ideas cannot be killed and do not disappear. They constantly manifest themselves through various figures, structures and systems around us. Once an idea is taught, it cannot be forgotten. To 'unlearn' is to actively engage in the learning of a different way of thinking. This is why the classroom is vital. It is where the external colonial processes crystallize into internal truths. It is also where the colonized individual gathers their tools to begin challenging those accepted truths, and in turn, the external structures that hold them in place. Tools such as writing, reading, and the navigation of language are key to the universal struggle for decolonization. The significance of these tools are recognized across the colonized world. Using the very language that the colonizer taught us as an imposition of his domination, the colonized individual unravels the colonial ideology and wakes the disenfranchised masses."