Colonial Legacies: Land and Body as Sites of Violence

BordersColonialismBinariesConversion TherapyDivide and RuleGenderIntergenerational TraumaTrans RightsLandRacismWhitenessWhite Supremacy
Written By Radical Therapist Network

Audio Version

By Sage M Stephanou 

Published on 5th May 2022

For me, being trans is a sacred living record of expansiveness, survival, creativity, resilience, power and authenticity. However, it is also an experience that is layered in trauma; rooted in the legacy of colonialism and British Imperialism which enforced a psychological and physical split within my homelands of Cyprus and Ireland. For me one part of being non-binary is a fight to reject the colonial polarisation that sought to divide and destroy whole nations of people, our languages, mind-bodies, cultures and lands. 

We see this tactic of divide and conquer being used today; an attempt to create a divide between trans people and cis lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Trans people have become the scapegoat and distraction from wider systemic issues. We are perceived as a threat to the liberation of gay people, and the safety of cis-gender women. As I write this the UK government has announced that it will support the ban on conversion therapy for lesbian, gay and bisexual cis people, but not for trans people. This is following a recent backlash against a leaked report stating that Number 10 planned to scrap the conversion therapy ban. It tells the world that our queer, trans bodies should be subjected to torture.

Similarly, a divisive 2021 report published by a Tory-dominated Commons education committee purported that learning about white privilege in school is failing white working class children and young people. This red herring distracts from systemic issues affecting all working class children, namely the devastating impacts of over 12 years of austerity. Research published in 2021 highlights that austerity measures put in place by the Conservative government have led to tens of thousands more deaths than expected: “the constraints on health and social care spend during this period of ‘austerity’ have been associated with 57,550 more deaths than would have been expected had the growth in spend followed trends before 2010.” (BMJ, 2021)

The result of food, job, and housing insecurity, living in poverty, relentless cuts and barriers to accessing benefits and healthcare, ongoing surveillance and harassment by the state, especially toward Black and Muslim youth and adults, as well as over a decade of cuts to fundamental community resources - compounded with the trauma of classism, ableism and racism - is the reason working class children are not thriving in school, not learning about white-fucking-privilege.  

These fallacious binary conflicts are a racist attempt to cement a racialised white-black divide between working class people, and a gendered cis-trans divide between queer and gender diverse people in order to divide and rule. 

This is an age-old White Supremacist tool of domination, that was used by colonialists, settlers, and plantation owners to convince white working class labourers and minoritized Europeans, including Irish, Spanish and Jewish people, that they were superior to enslaved African people (Menakem, 2017; Ignatiev, 1995). They were offered (stolen Native) land to cement their loyalty to Whiteness. This alliance, and the power associated with being racialised as white successfully separated out poor white/light-skinned labourers from enslaved diasporic Africans to prevent and thwart shared solidarity and potential rebellion, but ultimately to ensure that white landowners could maintain White Power through the running of their plantations. As Fredric Douglas summarises succinctly in a speech in 1853; 

“The Irish people…sympathising with the oppressed everywhere, when they stand upon their own green island, are instantly taught, on arriving in this Christian country, to hate and despise the colored people. They are taught to believe that we eat the bread which of right belongs to them. The cruel lie is told [to] the Irish, that our adversity is essential to their prosperity. Sir, the Irish-American will find out his mistake one day.”

The social construction of race was pivotal in upholding and maintaining unequal relationships between White people and the racialised Other in order to continue to exploit land and bodies for profit. White Supremacy carved out [hierarchies of] race, class and gender as weapons to legitimise the dehumanisation, subjugation and murder of people of the Global Majority as part of the colonial project.

To become white as an ethnic minority is to become human. I consider this racial assimilation into the binary camp of Whiteness, as an abandonment of self, culture and home, in exchange for the false promise of safety and power within white supremacist culture. In claiming my mixed-ness, I can reclaim an inherent part of my power, as well as honour the wounds of intergenerational trauma, and the abundance of my ancestors and elders. It is critical in this moment, to also acknowledge the power I hold due to (usually) being racialised as white, and to work relentlessly to use it ethically, but ultimately to give it up in the ongoing work toward racial justice and shared liberation.

I first felt the impact of colonial polarisation in my body before I had the words and knowledge to understand it. ‘It’ is the bloody fractures in the land that the British created between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the Green Line that divides Northern Cyprus and the Republic of Cyprus. 

My maternal grandfather’s village, Petra, was once abundant land where the roots of olive trees embedded themselves deep into the ground, where wild oregano grew. My ancestral home was invaded and destroyed by the Turkish military, with the British lingering in the shadows, patiently waiting to extract and exploit the fractured land and people. The once mixed village of Greek speaking and Turkish speaking Cypriots, is now desolate. My body was the site of violence long before I was born.

As Gavalas (2022) writes,

“within the landscape of Cypriot political consciousness, right-wing mainstream narratives (professing that Cyprus is either Greek or Turkish) are at war with each other. Yes these two clashing ideological positions are in fact two sides of the same coin: they both derive from British colonial policies, attitudes and ideas that sought to untether us from our Cypriot indigeneity, and fragment our sense of communal Self”. 

Whilst my home-lands are partitioned – cut up by borders; whilst my communities are fractured by race, class, and gender & sexuality divides, my spirit fights to coalesce with plurality, to heal and liberate beyond colonial rule. My felt sense of gender non-conformity gently guides me on my travels toward to a borderless, non-binary place within myself and my communities. Toward home.

My heartfelt gratitude to Nicholas Frealand and Dr. Onni Gust for their generous feedback, and Lucia Sarmiento Verano for feedback on the final draft.

References

About Sage

Sage M Stephanou (they/them) is the Founder and a Co-director of the Radical Therapist Network. They are an experienced art therapist, educator, group facilitator, supervisor and community organiser, with a specialism in anti-oppressive therapeutic praxis. Sage’s work is abolitionist and social-justice oriented, and works within a radical, anti-oppressive framework to dismantle white supremacy within the world of psychotherapy and beyond.  

Their work and community practice is centred around collective care and healing justice, dynamics of power & oppression, disability, social and racial justice, anti-capitalism and anti-racism. Sage’s expertise is grounded by their lived experience as a non-binary trans, disabled, queer, mixed-heritage, and working/underclass person. As such they have a special interest in exploring the liminality of belonging at the intersections of Otherness and its connection to a history of colonisation. 

Contact

Website: www.theradicalqueertherapist.com

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Social Media: @SageStephanou

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