Hells Bells… Am I Hearing the Queen of England on my Left and a Thong-Wearing Australian Gal on my Right?
A surreal experience interweaving politics, personal experience and waking from a deep slumber
When I open my eyes I see a dark-skinned woman with strongly African features sitting at the head of the table, (Maureen) and to her right, sits a woman with typical Chinese features (Jenny).
The voices, accents, gestures all seem to unite in making the statement, “Whatever you, Whyte Massa and Whyte Missy can do, I can do even more to those unwashed masses”.
As I drag myself out of sleep, I have images of Kamala, Obama, Sunak, and the horrible Suella Braverman who actually declared it was her life’s mission to deport the refugees from British war crimes, to Rwanda… They are all on a stage, the top half of their bodies in typical business attire. But they are doing the can can dance, wearing short skirts and stockings!
And in the middle of the line-up, on a blue and red star-spangled floating table shaped like a lotus flower, is seated the dark- skinned African- American, Linda Thomas- Greenfield. She is sitting like a cross-legged Buddha figure. But instead of the peace greeting she has her hand raised like teacher’s pet answering a question. And there is no beautific smile on her face. Rather, she’s sitting straight up like a stuffed dummy, a blank- faced defiance on her face. She is blocking the call for a ceasefire in the Security Council of the United Nations, concerning the ongoing massacres in Gaza.
Still sleepy, I blink and rub my eyes and sit up on the sofa.
Through the open doorway into the kitchen with its large wooden table in the centre, I watch the Queen of England preparing carrots and potatoes to cut up and roast. Not only does she delicately sip her tea with her little finger proudly raised, like the British flag planted on lands far beyond Europe, but she uses the paring knife on the vegetables in the same way. I want to laugh and yet I also feel a strange disgust. She’s also sitting in an unnaturally upright way, and delicately, slowly strokes the knife along the carrot’s surface. On the surface, Maureen, (who I was introduced to in passing a bit earlier in the day) is a Black African-origin woman but her demeanour casts her as The Queen of England — obviously, quite unfamiliar with the lowly task of preparing vegetables for the oven.
It was my first evening at the women’s holiday hostel. I had volunteered to help out for three days. The two women in the kitchen were there as paying guests.
My nap on the sofa had turned into a deep sleep and now I felt disorientated, like I’d woken up in some strange dream — perhaps a drama class where I was being shown by a Black British woman, how the Queen of England, while wearing her Crown Jewels, would prepare her evening meal!
I decided I needed a strong coffee and padded through to the kitchen to put the kettle on.
Then I sat down opposite Ms Beach Babe. I still felt disorientated.
The woman sitting opposite me looked throughly, stereotypically Chinese. She introduced herself as ‘Jenny’ . I found the Anglo-Saxon name jarring in relation to her appearance. My friend of 18 years who was born and grew up in Hong Kong, to Chinese parents, was called Ming. Her friend from Beijing — a doctor, was called Wen. But unlike Ming and Dr Wen, Ms Chinese Asutralian Beach Babe grew up trying to fit into Whyte Australian society… and the name ‘Jenny’ given by her parents, was intrinsic to that mindset and aspirational orientation.
When talk turned to my family origins, and I explained how West and East Pakistan were created by the British, Jenny flashed absurdly wide smiles.
When I shared in more detail, the devastation deliberately caused by the English as they left India, with northern and eastern parts sliced off to create East and West Pakistan – a geographic and administrative absurdity that guaranteed to engender conflict and mayhem, with vast loss of life — I mean, millions of people lost their lives and millions more, their entire properties where their families had lived for generations… neither Jenny the Beach Babe — nor the Black Queen of England had anything to say. They just looked uncomfortable and changed the subject .
Ms Chinese-Australian Beach Babe started to look even more uneasy when I mentioned the annexation of Hong Kong, and how there were no goods — nothing the English had, to trade with the Chinese,, whose silks, porcelain, tea, and a thousand other goods unobtainable in Europe, the English lusted after … and so the the Opium War was started, by which the English were trying to get Chinese addicted to opium and thus they got the excuse they wanted to wage war on the Chinese authorities who tried to stop their opium peddling.
“I don’t really know much about that”, she mumbled.
I realised I was looking at her like she was insane.
Indeed isn’t this what the Marxists call, ‘false consciousness’?
How very pitiful!
I realised these two women had focussed all their attention and energy, their entire life-long, on gaining whatever attributes they could in terms of their accent, dress code, mannerisms etc etc, to distance themselves from their ethnic and cultural origins.
It was their survival tactic, taught to them by their parents, from earliest childhood. Is admiring and supporting Whyte supremacy , a trauma response? Fight, Flight, Freeze or Fawn…
Both Jenny and Maureen’s families had moved to Whyte-only areas of the UK and Australia, from the ‘Global South’, and both of them had been in a minority of 2 or 3 or perhaps even the only person of colour in their school, growing up. Jenny’s parents wanted her entire focus to be on learning English and to speak it ‘like a native’. They saw it as a survival issue. Jenny meanwhile, must have been ashamed about her parents ‘broken English, ‘ as a child. Her parents did not want Jenny to know any Mandarin in case it interfered with her learngin English. They also gave her a typically English name to help her to be assimilated and accepted.
I asked Jenny if she knew any Mandarin and she smiled and shook her head.
“My parents never had time to teach me, and then, as an adult it was too hard to learn, while juggling study, fulltime job etc etc…”
“Oh that’s such a pity… I think another language gives an additional window to the world.. I’m currently improving my literacy skills in Urdu, but I’ve always spoken my parents’ language at home. My parents accepted their children needed to learn English to manage life in England, but they always thought of it as a language that lacks ‘thameez’ – meaning, dignity and manners”.
“Er… not sure how a language can lack manners, ‘ responded the Queen of England archly.
“It’s the values inbuilt into the grammar – in the South Asian languages there is a polite form of addressing those who are elder, and honorific are used, for example, we say, ‘ji’ after someone’s name, to give respect . But er…. in English culture generally, you are given respect depending on the size of your house, the money in your bankk account …. And you know, there was a property qualification before you could have existence in a civic sense. That’s why only the propertied class could vote till about the 1880’s.”
I realised these two women had focussed all their attention and energy, their entire life-long, on gaining whatever attributes they could in terms of their accent, dress code, mannerisms etc etc, to distance themselves from their ethnic and cultural origins.
“Come on, we all know money talks – that’s the case everywhere”. The Queen of England sure was wealth-focussed!
“Actually that is not true — there are still Indigenous communities where honour counts for more than material gain. Case in point… look how not one Palestinian betrayed the heroic Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, no matter the cash rewards and new life they would have secured.”
I looked away from the two women, through the window and into the garden beyond. Plants are more honest than people, generally speaking. That’s why I like gardening so much. Feeding the soil, companion-planting do things right and you are rewarded with so much beauty and nutritious veggies!
With no community as a reference point, these two women had been positioned and trained by their parents to smile, bow and wheedle their way into acceptance by the Western society.
As I consider the photo below, which I’d been looking at before I fell asleep on the sofa, I see the hand raised in order to refuse censuring Israel for its crimes in Gaza, by the very dark-skinned Linda Thomas-Greenfield, (married to a Zionist of course, just like Suella Braverman and Kamala Harris), and I see how how there have always been people who look up to European power and want inclusion and acceptance at any price. And they make a good living out of it, shamelessly celebrating their power and privilege as turncoats and traitors.
With that one raised hand, vetoing the Algerian proposal for a ceasefire, Linda Thomas-Greenfield consigned thousands more Palestinians to loss of life and liberty and the destruction of the entire infrastructure of their society.
Despicable.
In the video above, Shahid Bolsen makes a searing analysis of the significance of the USA blocking the move time and time again, to impose a ceasefire on Israel. He makes the argument that the Global South must seek the only solution : to invoke Article 6 and kick the USA out of the Security Council for continuously breaking the foundational rules of the United Nations.
Eight months on, so much torture, starvation and death of innocents! And Israel continues to break all rules of civilised conduct, assassinating the senior leaders of other sovereign nations and setting off thousands of pagers in use in all manner of civic contexts and private homes, to terrorise, wound and kill in ways that result in inevitable civilian woundings and deaths.
This is barbarism for the sake of gaining others’ land and resources, pure and simple.
Come on BRICS nations, the whole world awaits your assertion of a rules-based order against the madness of Whyte supremacy and its fascistic, Zionist permutations.
