Frontiers and Decolonizers

by J.D. Isip

for Chris Gonzalez

There really are no more eager keepers of borders than those who profess to hate them. In the

academic enclaves I’ve been able to, almost accidentally, inhabit, as soon as I’ve shown some

incipient interest in a work or a writer or a theory, I’ve been told it is out of fashion. Nobody, for

example, talks about magical realism anymore. So much for the cloud animals coming to life.

And put away that Shakespeare – you’re here to acquire what came after we figured him out.

Guess I’ll never find out about poor Yorick. Whatever you have to say or ask about race or

gender or politics or religion has all already been done (and please stop saying “all already” since

nobody says that these days). What a ridiculous idea, they told me, to want to revisit Turner’s

frontier thesis, such a condescending colonizer view of history and progress. How could I know

that, I asked, if I was not given the opportunity to read it for myself? Nobody is stopping you,

they’d say, before asking the (white) others if they had a (better) question (more) relevant to the

conversation at hand. That conversation being one that had started seemingly a century before

my ignorant brown ass nervily ventured to ask, if it weren’t too much trouble, for someone to

hold open the gate. Always some kind soul there to tell me they’d already won the wilderness for

me, offer their noble hand to my savage ignorance, start in on Marx and other incantations.