american cultural imperialism and my psyche? curios, suspicious, unmasked

Its curious. i haven't written or opened this blog in over a year and i'm looking at my past writing style with curious suspicion. Style might not be the word but my voice in earlier essays sounds uncomfortably american. i'm embarrassed to realise that my many years of consuming american popular culture, often without much thought, has implanted an identity i have no business embodying.

I chalk this up to my childhood of course. My siblings and i raised one another. We were home alone for most of our childhood while my parents worked ridiculous hours at low-paying jobs, leaving us with triple-locked doors and a TV that played too many american children's programmes.

Regardless, in those pockets of time my pan-African father was around, he instilled pride in our culture and black africanness. He would remind me of our setswana heritage and had a policy that we should leave the english language we were taught in school at the gate. As soon as we entered our home, setswana was the only language we were allowed to speak. He bared us from speaking izizulu too; his reasoning here was less anti-colonial and more civil war-trauma-induced tribalism. During the inkatha war, he was shot in the leg while fighting amazulu from the nearby hostel. According to him, the bullet was lodged in one of his knees and doctors declined to excise it. So, he's still walking around with a bullet from mazulu a ko hostel.

To this day, my speaking accent gives my setswana heritage away but the accent of my creative writing pursuits? black american, it seems. 

Not for long though, i hope. In my work of unlearning and unmasking coloniality, i'm now tasked with interrogating the cultural imperialism that the usa has on my psyche...as an extension of the states' tendency to impose onto the majority world in a quest for 'democracy', 'liberation' and 'bi-lateral agreements' that ensure economic development. At the core, neoliberal capitalism has cultural implications that, when i'm feeling generous, can concur that this is just how globalisation works and it has incredible powers to foster shared experiences (and perhaps cultures) beyond nation borders. But am i feeling generous at this moment? no, its saturn's day and i write this with saturnian self-righteousness. 

What am saying then? my work as i return to essaying my journey through consciousness and, inshallah, liberation is to unearth a voice that i'm not too familiar with, a voice i know exists because i have faint memories of it from 25 + years ago. a creative writing voice that sounds like me. i hope to look back at earlier entries on this blog with satisfaction of the many masks im shedding...in time.

with love always,

inolofatseng-writing into the void