Can we, as people of African descent, ever exist without the West as our measuring stick, our shadow, our perpetual point of departure? Can we ever shed the counters—counter-narrative, counter-plantation, counter-memory—and simply be? Not in pursuit of some imagined purity, not in the grip of essentialism, but in a space where our being isn’t always defined in opposition to something else.
it’s exhausting.
Toni Morrison described the problem beautifully but didn’t give us an answer: “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”
I think back to my undergrad years at Berkeley, where I minored in Mandarin. It was the first time I engaged with a language that held no ties to the West, no colonial fingerprints, no historical betrayals that I had to navigate. It was a liberation I hadn’t known I needed—to think, to express, to exist in a structure of meaning that had never been used to define or oppress me. Because the other languages I spoke, the ones I moved through with fluency, all carried the weight of empire. French, English, Haitian—each one, in its own way, a scar. And so I wonder, can we ever reach that place within ourselves? A language, a culture, a selfhood that is not in response to, but simply is?
This dilemma, this burden, is not mine alone. I witnessed it in the literary pages of Aimé Césaire to the streets of Harlem, where James Baldwin wrestled with the same ghost. Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, exposes the absurdity of European “civilization,” but he does so in the language of the colonizer, turning French against itself.
Baldwin, exiled in Paris, sought a freedom he was denied in America, only to realize that his Blackness followed him, that the West is still the frame, still the structure he must push against.
Even Chinua Achebe, in Things Fall Apart, presents Okonkwo not as a man simply living his Igbo identity, but as a man resisting—resisting his father, resisting colonialism, resisting the very forces that define him in negation.
And this isn’t just theoretical. We see it in the struggle for post-colonial nations to define themselves. Haiti, the first free Black republic, born in the fire of revolution, could never simply be—it had to be the counter to France, to slavery, to European supremacy. Its very existence was an act of defiance, and it was made to suffer for it. The same could be said of Ghana under Nkrumah, of the Negritude movement, of the Harlem Renaissance—all beautiful, all necessary, but all in some way engaged in the perpetually exhausting work of response.
Even in how we describe ourselves, the West lingers. We say Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin, African-American, forever tethering ourselves to some cancerous, cultural pus, something external that invades and attaches itself, as though our identity must always be a hyphenated affair.
Even in music—jazz, reggae, hip-hop, konpa—genres that emerged from Black innovation, the conversation is always framed in how they subvert or reimagine European traditions, rather than how they exist on their own terms.
So the question remains: can we ever just be? Can we ever arrive at a place where our culture, our language, our art, our very identity is not shaped by the gravitational pull of the West? Or are we forever locked in this dialectic, this endless negotiation with the forces that once sought to erase us? And if we can break free, what does that even look like?
