Our Colonized City, by Rosicky Jones

I don’t understand the traffic in Detroit.  I was teaching an undergrad course, I intended on getting there early, making a good impression, and finding out which student I could trade good grades for weed with, but I was late due to the standstill traffic.  I don’t understand where all those fucking people were going; god knows they weren’t going to work.  Detroit looks like Oliver Twist with a tan. It’s hauntingly depressing, yet the roads still resemble the Clinton years.  I’m under the impression that the jobless lot haven’t given up the monotonous routine of occupation and might actually enjoy the torpor of rush-hour traffic as it implies employment.  It is both sad, from the secular humanist perspective and offensive from the road-rage quelling perspective.

I was dodging pot holes and tattooed panhandlers while growing infuriated that I chose Jay-Z to serenade me.  We get it Jay, you have the baddest bitch in the game wearing your chain, I don’t need to be reminded of this fact over and over again.  And why do the poorest cats rock the baddest tats – I’d rather not see an extended hand requesting change that’s adorned with a Brandon Bond design.

Anyways, the class I had to teach was on Homi Bahhba’s work on post-colonialism; to a cohort made up of about 60% Indians, dot not feather.  I felt guilty talking down to these tiny brown geniuses; they should have been teaching me about colonialism.  But I guess it goes without saying that an American would teach products of colonialism about how colonization affects cultures.  What a twisted ass web we weave.  I was going to touch on Edward Said’s theory that colonialism retards a culture’s identity to properly develop.  But then I remembered that my doctor is an Indian, and most of my profs are Indian, and most of the rich fucks I wait on at the bar are Indian, and Aziz Ansari has become the comedian du jour, that I like Tiger Balm, and that I regularly masturbate to Priya Rai – so if their attempt to become the new Jews is a retardation of development then thank Vishnu that they were retarded; otherwise I would have a thick ass mustache, be married to a dotted broad, brush my teeth with my finger, hate Pakistan, know that Kashmir is more than a Led Zeppelin cut, and periodically break out into a Bollywood-inspired song and dance in my sandy backyard.

But maybe I do understand colonization, because Detroit’s impoverished state certainly feels like the work of a foreign oppressor.  We must have been colonized; because there is no way a nation governed in the vein of self-determination would allow legions of homeless, hungry, and destitute to exist in limbo. Would they?

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