What if the closest way to decolonize, is in fact, to start from looking within? What was robbed through colonization, was all of the ‘other’ ways of knowing, relating to the world, nature, and understanding history. To decolonize, sounds like a large concept that is hard to grapple with a single individual, but it can start here and now. 

As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o wrote, colonialism's "most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world." 

It begins with reflecting on our own mind and confronting the complicity we may have within us.

The first time I heard the word ‘dictatorship’, I was eating dinner. Not in school, not from a documentary. My grandparents said it casually, the way people mention typhoons they survived years ago.