dewdrops on the spiderweb, catching light
or: on decolonialism
or: on wishing for the erasure of the first 30 years of your life
or: on the product histories of stockfish and wax prints
or: on inheritance
lz says colonialism and postcolonialism have a relationship with each other that is not necessarily temporal. they can concur, crisscross, or cycle. it's decolonialism that invents "before". it presupposes something to return to, or some pure origin
D imagines the memory as a spiderweb that registers every disturbance. here i'm grown, biting my fingernails raw, imagining melting into the floor, replaying replaying replaying me: 8 years old, parroting my father who prays to the church of brands, saying to my best friend your shoes are awful because they are cheap.
me, grown, doesn't melt into the floor, i can't. and i can't erase the memory, or reattribute it to someone not-me—i can only continue.
last week my nephew, 8 years old, stewing a jealous rage bc a little girl at school has a crush on his cousin and no one has a crush on him, said to his cousin, that [little girl] is “chopped.”
and my brother laughed, and another brother, and my older nephew laughed too, and i said wtf
in the car, on the way home, i looked in the rearview. he only comes halfway up the seatback, his feet don't touch the floor. "remember when you said--- that was extremely mean and disrespectful. do you know why?" it was like bullying, he said. and his big brother said yah it was not a gentlemanly thing to say, and i thought -
but that's not it either... so then how, in this family of strict genders, and roles and brands and traditions, can i say—to this kid i see once, maybe twice a month—something so nuanced that he won't even notice that it contradicts with his mother's, father's, grandpa's stories.
to love this kid, and want him kind—but not 31, curling up and wanting to wither into floor.
The fish is prepared immediately after capture. After gutting the fish, it is either dried whole, or split along the spine leaving the tail connected. The fish is hung on the hjell from February to May. Stable cool weather protects the fish from insects and prevents an uncontrolled bacterial growth. A temperature just above zero degrees Celsius, with little rain, is ideal. Too much frost will spoil the fish, as ice destroys the fibers in the fish. The climate in northern Norway is excellent for stockfish production, and remains so even with changing climate conditions. Salted/dried whitefish (klippfisk) was more common in the fisheries districts of Western Norway. Further south in Norway, the cod was salted in barrels from the 15th century.[8]
After its three months hanging on the hjell, the fish is then matured for another two to three months indoors in a dry and airy environment. During the drying, about 80% of the water in the fish evaporates.[9] The stockfish retains much of the nutrients from the fresh fish, only concentrated: it is therefore rich in proteins, vitamins, iron, and calcium.[10]
wiki for stockfish
thus vikings preserved fish for seafaring, and brought it south to portugal where it became bacalhau [or is that only salted cod?]. portuguese seafarers brought it to africa, traveled up the niger delta. now in igboland it's called okporoko, and it's so ubiquitous, people imagine it's an indigenous.
ankara is so synonymous with west africa it's hard to imagine it's a result of the dutch trying to mass produce indonesian batik in other markets.
decolonize this, decolonize that
dewdrops on the spiderweb, catching light,
and the things we imagine indigenous are implicated too
theartofmadeline
romaincrisis
gracieabrams
origamiaround
vaporwave
dailybridgerton
germansingergirl
yousharknotpass