Replacing.
Deleting.
Reorientating in
the cause of a
sensibility and
an ideology that
will pass like the
fashions at a horse race.

De-colonising.
Re-inventing.
Re-writing.
New imaginings.
Throwing out the old
on the trash heap of dead culture.

Bringing in the corrected new
as the official and sanctioned view
without a full understanding of
that which has really passed..

Well-meaning change and
re-dreaming what was
to something undefined that’s looking
for a past that it cannot fully know.

Censoring, withholding,
turning histories and stories
into stone to grey and decay
so that other voices will
be heard in the silent new day.

Is this the state of othering and
covering the past with a smiling mask
that we want for our children?

Bring me to it all, I say.
Let me have all of it without
the work of coloured hands.
Let me hear the old and the new
in marvelous synchronicity.
Let me hear stories of empire alongside
the sacred knowledge that
has long been ignored.
For in the hearing of what was
and is and might be, I can fully learn
this complexity, and so can you.

And I can ask questions and add what
was, and all that we did not understand
in times before this conscious space, to the
new narratives of who we are that will take
us forward to times of new dreaming and respect.

So, all of you who want to rewrite history
and refashion stories after your own
graven image, know this: learning is not
built solely on what is now and constituted
only in finding new truths once ignored in old places,
or through pulling down the vestiges of a
stale civilisation that shaped our ragged ways,
but finds its proper ground in the clever structures
we engineer as we erect the new on
top of the old and see the moving potential in
finding the possibilities between the two.

 

20/2/2023