[This is just a short piece I wrote about a thought I had, not for submission to grad TA]
In the Colonizer and The Colonized, Albert Memmi manifest his own experience as being both experiencing the privileges of colonizer while also the downsides of being colonized due to his Tunisian ethnicity. He writes ‘A colonizer who agrees to be a colonizer. By making his position explicit, he seeks to legitimize colonization’. He further mentions that the colonialist mission is to bring civilization to the uncivilized terming it as ‘charitable racism’.
This made me wonder about something recently, in a conversation with an international friend of mine. As I shared the pictures of my sister’s wedding events, she was alarmed at the fact that my sister donned a pure bright red dress on her wedding – a staple traditional Pakistani wedding dress.
We immediately noticed and asked, why my sister wore something as bright as red when all other brides she had ever seen, in her own community, on television etc. were always dressed in pure white dress. Her question made me wonder for a moment, I never thought about why our weddings were so different from those shown on western TV shows, why our weddings weren’t bonded by the groom kissing the bride and the bride wearing a white dress. I never knew, and I never questioned.
Picture source: Freepik and ClipartKey
What was interesting however, was that I found many of the more ‘modern’ Pakistani bridges breaking the stereotypes of a traditional red dress and instead of opting for a white dress on their big day. For me this was alarming – white was something reserved in our culture for grief – a white cloth for the coffin, relatives wearing white to funerals, etc. This made white traditionally a color which did not resonate with happiness.
As I ponder about this concept of charitable racism, I see it present in this wedding dress phenomenon – I see white replacing the traditional red dress which personified bright futures and prosperity. And I see this happening at the hands of western influence, an approach colonizing our minds to the extent that we replace traditions that mean so much value to us. – naming it as ‘modernity’. But who described what’s modern? Why do we as colonized countries always adapt to these pre-conceived sets of ways of life while disowning our own cultures and values?
While the dress maybe a tiny piece of the puzzle that makes up how our minds have been colonized, it is indeed a part that is so closely linked to our everyday lives. I wonder if in the near future we will replace how a wedding is formalized with a nikkah in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, hampering not only our cultural roots, but religious roots as well.