“Nana – Unstable Memories” is a short video about how colonial values are transmitted generationally. It considers cultural blindness and the challenges of self-appraisal.  In this case, my own experience of reviewing attitudes and long held impressions led me to some sad home truths.

Nana – Unstable Memories 

My Nana was frail, she was beautiful. Her white hair was swept up in the memory of a long gone past.

I knew even then that her world was gone. Henry, Archie and Bert, the boys she raised to manhood treated her like a child; they embarrassed her. I told her one day that I was collecting postcards and she sweetly gave me her collection. She gave me a family album too full of treasured memories. It seemed strange that she would have given them to me, the child of her son’s new flame, but then again, this son spent his time belittling me too.

Perhaps she saw an affinity between us. Perhaps she knew that I would save her  memories and the record of a time that was also being discredited. This then is a difficult walk, a colonial walk of privilege and arrogance. Yet, this tiny woman who raised sons, was gentle and understood the eight year old me that declared “I’d like to become a missionary in Africa.” The only place that I could be adventurous and useful. The only role I’d seen modeled in books that wasn’t a wife or a nurse.

This then, is a secret that we shared in the sin of the colonial.

Nana’s house was full of things brought back to the motherland from India, from China, from Japan, Korea, Istanbul, Egypt, Africa, and where had they not been? Colonials now without a colony.

Her son Harry, a retired Lieutenant Colonel who cooked shrimp omelets as he had learned in India, was now the seafront controller. We teased him with comparisons to King Canute. A retired colonial who is only left the English sea to command as if it were any more possible than the steady momentum of modernity and the liberation of the colonies. They knew, they all knew that their lives’ work was being thrown aside and that instead of being the pride of the Empire, they were now its shame.

Nana, always hobbled by her womanhood, only saw the schools and hospitals they built. She saw the canals and roads. She never saw the rest. The way that the colonized were belittled. So simple for some, so complicated for others.

Now, as I look longer at my revered postcards, I see that the images are not holy or benign. They are all reminders of British paternalism and dominance. The landscapes are charged with memorials of British massacres brought about by brutish control and suppression. Or, the pictures only show happy colonialists whose carefree faces have crowded out all the other faces, the faces of color. Those people only appear as curiosities, exotica, anthropological specimens, or to show the benevolence of their foreign rulers.

I had remembered this world as a lovely place, but now I’m horrified to see its remnants in my hands, in my face, in my psyche and in these relics that I have so long treasured. I find a dreadful self-willed blindness.

I look at Nana and I find her in myself.