Decolonising My Skin
Decolonising My Skin
I cannot decolonise my skin.
That impossibility is the premise of the work, not a problem it attempts to solve.
Our skin is the parchment upon which history writes itself, on bodies that never consented to become its archive. We are read through histories we did not choose. Skin becomes evidence of events it did not witness, sometimes an accusation for actions it did not commit.
The title names a demand: return the skin to a state before ideology assigned it a value. The work cannot meet it.
Colonisation was, among other things, the imposition of a story on bodies. It took a physical trait and made it a political category. Whiteness was placed at the top of a hierarchy as the measure of goodness, purity and civilisation, and that ranking was used to justify the subjugation of others. The harm was moral, physical and material, and it lasted. People were taught to read themselves and each other through a classification they had not chosen.
That story did not end when the empires fell. Its logic can survive when the direction changes. Where whiteness was once made an emblem of supremacy, it can become an emblem of inherited guilt. The verdict is reversed; the method remains. A body is still read as a position before it is met as a person.
I am a descendant of Pieds-Noirs. In 1962, at Algerian independence, my paternal family was forced to leave Algeria with a single suitcase. They were not favourably received in metropolitan France. The loss had no uncomplicated place in which to be mourned: the war was over, but the grief had nowhere obvious to go. This is not a counter-history. It does not cancel or diminish anyone else's. It is another history occupying the same body.
The plates work from photographs of the colonial period, among them the palanquin: the passenger reclining, the bearers beneath the poles, the servant standing by. My face is placed in every position. The clothing, the labour, the exposure stay as the photograph recorded them.
The face can travel. The burden cannot.
Here the work meets its limit. The pain and prejudice inflicted cannot be forgotten, redeemed or absolved. The trauma is an irresolvable burden that cannot simply be transferred from one body to another. I cannot walk in someone else's shoes, and my face set on another body does not put me in their place. The plates do not pretend otherwise.
Nor do they offer guilt as a substitute for responsibility. Curricula, institutions and the stories we tell about the past should be decolonized. But I believe guilt is the wrong ground for reparation: it asks people to carry an inherited verdict, keeps the divide alive and passes the wound down the generations, unhealed.
No one should be oppressed for the colour of their skin. No one should be conscripted into guilt for the colour of theirs. These are not equivalent harms. They are two ways of making a body answer for a story it did not write.
Where could healing begin, if it can begin at all? Perhaps precisely by recognising the burden each body carries, and that it cannot be handed to another.
