Decolonising Practices

Coffee. Fanon. Bodies.

A reflection and conversation I love mulching on. About what colonisation did to bodies. And keeps doing.

We could go to bodies of land, of water, language, culture and ways of knowing. For this conversation, we're staying with those human bodies and psyches, though we know, they all intersect.

To some extent, we are aware what colonisation did to particular bodies then, and how some others were perceived.

It shaped which bodies were considered intelligent. Rational. Civilised. Trustworthy. Which bodies were othered and considered "furniture".

Which bodies were allowed to produce knowledge.

And which bodies became the objects of that knowledge.

Observed, analysed, used for trials. Some notoriously fatal. Some damaging. Many without consent.

As a Black woman with a colonised background, the way I practise and my lived experience are not outside that history. I'm very aware of that. And sometimes I'm reminded. Either way, it keeps showing up. There is no finishing line to this work: it's an ongoing practice of noticing, questioning, unlearning and discovering.

Psychology carries a colonial legacy of its own. Its ideas about normality, intelligence, behaviour, distress and even what constituted legitimate knowledge developed within particular historical and cultural systems of power.

And somewhere in that conversation I looked at where I was sitting and thought:

How exciting that I get to be here.

Because as a Black woman, historically, a body like mine was probably not expected to be in the position questioning the framework itself.

I was much more likely to have been on the other side of the encounter: studied, interpreted, DSM-ized, compared against somebody else's idea of normal and pathology

And now I get to be inside the profession itself and ask questions of it.

I find that incredibly exciting. And opening.

To remain curious about what we inherited. And to question what we've been told, taught and trained to accept.

I'm ever so curious about who defined normal? Like... how ? Looking at whom?

Whose knowledge made it to the Big Book of Theories?

Whose understanding of the human experience became universal? A benchmark against which everyone else will be understood, regardless of context, culture, history and environment.

What happened to ways of knowing that were embodied, ancestral, communal, spiritual or interconnected when they encountered a discipline that discarded them as knowledge?

Knowledge didn't begin when psychology “arrived”. People had ways of understanding pain, grief, relationship, the body, the land, the sea and one another long before there was a counselling room to name any of it.

In Mauritius, I can see how some of that knowledge survived colonisation. Some of it transformed. Some became Creole. Some of it lives through stories , carried in bodies and memories, in the rhythms of Sega, in drumming, in food, in our gardens, in the sea, in the wind and in things our grandmothers and grandfathers knew without ever calling them “interventions”.

Our responsibility is to recognise that knowledge and make space for it.

There's one more possibility that excites me:

What can psychology become when the people who were once predominantly positioned as its objects also become its practitioners, researchers, writers and knowledge-makers?

Pausing.

Feeling the moment and movement.

I can hear it...The creaking of the heavy-duty door of decolonising practice, slowly opening.

Peeping through it, it suddenly feels generative and warm. We can hear "what becomes possible through us now?"

Past wounds can be looked at, tended to and transformed.

We get to a place where we can recover, where we can refuse to reproduce, where we can choose who and what we can bring back into the room.
And where we can create what perhaps wasn't possible before.

I get the opportunity to bring my ground from where I stand: History, people, places, other ways of knowing. To question what the profession was built upon, what it has overlooked, and what else we might build from here.

That comes with a huge responsibility.

But what an incredible possibility!

There is indeed something quite beautiful about sitting with Frantz Fanon and Jennifer Mullan, coffee on the table, having exactly this conversation about decolonising therapy on a quiet Saturday morning.

The quiet beauty of possibilities.