My father’s sentimentality for the Soviet Union reminds me that the destabilization of Afghanistan was a multi-generational project.
It was the ’60s. Students like my father—high performing, disciplined, achievement-motivated pupils, eager to escape the crumbling infrastructures of their targeted homelands—were rewarded for their academic survivalism with invitations to study in Cold War countries on scholarship. My father’s drive was also fueled by a distinct desperation that came from being orphaned. It was this motherlessness, I think, that primed my father for motherlandlessness later in his life.
This regime, which starved and destroyed the lives of millions, simultaneously invested in foreign students like my father. They readied their urban population to welcome them with celebrity-like status, offering generous stipends and express lines to movie theatres and grocery stores. Overnight, my father became a state-sanctioned somebody. Raised by a government who indulged him with bare necessities: pocket money, religious freedom, education. He returned back to Afghanistan resentful and loathing of the so-called old country which gave him nothing but landlockedness.
When the coup took place, the Soviet Union had parented a generation to side with their colluders and positioned them with the educational privilege to leave. My father told me he hoped to see Afghanistan as abundant as the Soviet that raised him. Except, as we know now, the stability he experienced was a generous bribe. Only with the insight that retrospect affords us, does he realize he was part of a carefully orchestrated brain drain.
It is my father’s story that makes me hypervigilant about Canada’s imperial bribe and my positionality in it: what is the cost of a nation and who pays for it? In an inescapably globalist time of displacement that deeply interconnects the revolution in Iran to the so-called peacekeeping efforts in Afghanistan to genocide of Indigenous Columbians for Canadian mines to the frontlines of Wetʼsuwetʼen against TMX pipelines to the invasion of the Ukraine, settlers shifted from citizenship to what Toni Morrison calls “clarifications of foreignness,” which sources from our disrupted ideas of home. In exchange for a right to belong, we are to upkeep its colonial mythology of “geographical sanctuary.”
I’ve watched my newly immigrated cousins who struggled with English come home socialized with basic Canadian conversational etiquettes: to ask, “How are you?” make conversation about the weather, and find a way to parrot the myth that all Indigenous people don’t pay taxes. Upholding systemic racism becomes a form of social citizenship that fast tracks settlers into dominant white supremacist culture. One can leverage an existing xenophobia that can even “reduce an entire native population… into despised foreigners in their own country.”
While the casual racism of the ‘90s is no longer fashionable, I witness a new trend emerge with extended family: the gratefulness of Canadian saviourism, which compares us as a safe haven against the US and countries in turmoil. Thank god, we say, we aren’t in the States. Thank god, I’m not in the old country. Thank god, we’re in Canada. Thank god, for the safety that being so close to the seat of the oppressor affords me.
After my arrest at Ada’itsx, I witnessed the law and how it shaped itself around the sheer number of those in resistance. Hundreds of environmentalists, researchers and activists worked together to exercise their right to protest, all with deeply personal intent from the conservation of endangered marbled murrelets to campaigning for just transition to an exercise in anarchy as a liberative tool. I was among them: strategically minded, able-bodied, equipped with community connections for materials, supplies and funds, desperate to stand off in direct action after consecutive years of raging wildfires and 700 heat dome related deaths, eager to fight for Indigenous sovereignty justified as protection of old growth. Nearly 1,200 of us were suddenly faced with a “justice system” that designed a new charge: criminal contempt, a hilarious oxymoron that could deliver criminal consequences (jail time, house arrest or community service) for protesting, without any public record of this time.
My probation officer called it an act of transformative justice; that a nation would grant its citizens the right to protest but hold them responsible for their actions without the lifelong impacts of a conviction. But the gross appropriation of this term doesn’t guise it from what it is: the ability for a secretive division of the RCMP to target and demoralize all those involved from engaging in future mass protests that disrupt industry using intimidation, force, brutality, destruction of property and arbitrary detention—while also allowing the state not to lose its workforce to an uptick of criminal records in an economy recovering from a global pandemic. The imperial bribe then becomes a “second chance” to rethink what one is dedicating their life to; a colonial course correction free of the consequences of incarceration that isn’t granted to Indigenous People defending their homelands from ongoing occupation. Only with the insight that retrospect affords me do I realize that the largest act of civil disobedience was a state sanctioned demonstration. If attempts for revolution fall in a rainforest, will anyone feel its effects?
As a descendent of Javanese revolutionaries, landback is part of the same inevitable future that saw Indonesia achieve seemingly impossible sovereignty. After more than 300 years of Dutch occupation, it was freed from a colossal colonial force—and not as an anomaly either but as a chain reaction of anti-colonial efforts across South East Asia by socialists, Marxists, feminists and communists that was built years upon years before. While nearly 80 years of merdeka (or freedom) is not without neo-colonial extraction of resources and a history of US-backed coup that killed the same revolutionaries that liberated Indonesia, regions like Java and Bali are used as a global case study for cultural resurgence.
The present-day question of landback becomes, not, how will we get there, but what will we have done to dismantle the infrastructures that keep us in comfort as a future of Indigenous sovereignty approaches? And because capitalism and colonialism are inextricably linked, how does a revolution take place amidst the continued comfort of the majority?
The fear of revolution is in its depiction of destabilization of so-called civility. Unlike reform that claims the possibility of slow, steady and peaceful change, revolution is imagined as a violent tipping point where infrastructure is decimated in hopes of a shaky and sacrificial restart. But revolution is not a point of collapse—it is Tla’amin burning the Indian Act to celebrate self-governance after a 20 year process, it is a Chinatown land trust project in Tkaronto in the midst of a conservative government, it is Haida Law hand painted on driftpile in front of every house to affirm its actuality, it is over 150 years of documented cases of settlers transferring land ownership back to Indigenous communities before it is seized again by the Canadian government. It is a collection of intergenerational acts of solidarity that sustains throughout history as unnegotiable despite the colonial contract of capitalism and its ability to shapeshift.
As adrienne marie brown has said “Everyone can trace their personal lineage back to people who were revolutionary… your job is to pick that up and bring it to present.” If an entire generation can be used towards reaffirming the state, then what can be achieved in a lifetime to interrupt it? What if revolution is our inherent responsibility to do so? Even if it is only in the subtle, the secret, the quiet shift, the micro-moments, the slow withdrawal, the ease, the breath, the embodied knowing, the now?
And when a system which cannot sustain itself without a population neatly in line inevitably takes its last fighting breath, do not mistake the ways it tries to take everything down with it for revolution. Revolution may be, instead, something we realize takes place only in retrospect.
