The Inherited Pains of Colonialism 🪢
A peek into epigenetics and the ugliest endpoints of the fashion industry
How much of the way you function draws from the prisms through which you see yourself? Your upbringing, the latest fads, or even global interactions? You know the answer to this already. People are porous to the movement of others, sponges and mutations of the interests, failures, and victories they observe and experience from their surroundings.
There’s no confusing the pervasive effect of social, cultural and systemic environments. The real questions are: how far down in history do they extend? Can these bone-deep influences perhaps manifest biological changes? Where do they exist today?
Inherited Pains of the Body: Epigenetics
Enter epigenetics. In simple terms, it’s the study of cellular-scale change and adaptation in the body that occurs as a result of certain behaviours and environments. These biological effects have been observed in children of famines in India, China, and Holland.
There were approximately 25 major famines that killed at least 60 million Indians under 89 years of official British colonial rule. During the Bengal famine of 1943 alone, over 3 million people died from malnutrition. There were severe food shortages due to Winston Churchill's government diverting vital resources from India to support British war efforts. Even when London was turning down the viceroy of India’s desperate pleas for over 1 million tonnes of emergency wheat, rice reserves were still leaving the country.
Generations later, 2 billion South Asian people are still paying the price of deprivation. Their genes have become starvation-adapted, with a tendency to store fat longer, amassing low lean muscle mass. This means that India has some of the highest rates of diabetes in the world today.
Adjacently, a study at Brown University revealed that surviving just one famine doubles the risk of diabetes and obesity in the next generation. The chances of hyperglycemia and type 2 diabetes were markedly increased in hundreds of individuals who were gestated during the horrific famine that struck China in 1959 and 1961. More startling was that even though the famine had long since ended by the time their children were born, they too had far increased chances of hyperglycemia.
What the media really latched onto was Dr. Rachel Yehuda’s research where she noticed a change in the chemical marker attached to the FKBP5 gene of Holocaust survivors, a gene that contributes to risk for depression and PTSD. She suggested an epigenetic adaptation or response to the horrific period, which could be observed in their children in the exact same spot.
Settling Uncertainty
It’s obviously much harder to pin psychological effects like trauma on epigenetics with confounding factors like the child’s upbringing, so take this with precaution. While I’m no expert of the field, an article by geneticist Razib Khan helps clear the haze on this study that’s accrued enormous sensationalised cachet, and thus a lot of misconceptions and exaggerations.
While intergenerational transmission may explain certain changes two generations down, transgenerational transmission that imposes permanent change seems more improbable due to humans’ reproductive biology. If the latter case were true, we’d be seeing people today biologically impacted by genocides that date back to the 20th century. And of course, correlation does not equal causation.
However, what’s been discovered so far can’t simply be dismissed. It’s still uncertain why these changes happen, but the relief that children of struggle may feel from hints of understanding can shape the care they put into the predisposed challenges they may face.
Inherited Pains of the Fashion Industry
Science is one thing, but inherited pains make themselves known by present-day systemic exploitation and oppression. And they’re no whimpering creatures. They’re beasts with globally outstretched arms of colonialist roots. They’re embroiled in more political polemics and penetrative across international borders.
If you’ve grown tired of a shirt you bought last season and decide to donate it to charity shops, what happens if they don’t get sold? The warehouses at these big-binned op shops have capacity limits too, as cavernous as they may seem. Globally, only 10-30% of these clothes are successfully resold. In Australia, almost 75% of textile, leather, and rubber waste in FY 2018-2019 was sent directly to the tip—and this figure doesn’t include those thrown overseas.
Where are the master dumpsites? Aja Barber’s book Consumed (The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change & Consumerism) touches on one of them, the Kantamanto Market in Ghana. Each week, 15 million garments that don’t make the cut at charity shops are shipped to the world’s largest second-hand market. Importers mainly from the US, UK and Canada offload 2x3ft bales of clothing wrapped in plastic, as local porters scramble to buy them in bulk in hopes that a couple pieces strike gold. They “restock” new styles twice a week. Though they have no idea what every item looks like, so it’s no wonder only 20% of Kantamanto retailers make a profit.
The gamble is expensive and the clothes have only decreased in quality. Many sellers have to cycle through debts from multiple banks to fund their trade, but what other choice do they have? Even the Ghanaian government has to bear the burden, spending over $100k a year for tipping fees—into landfills that have caught fire, beach shores with mountains of fabric, and even at the doorsteps of derelict houses in Old Fadama where people live amongst this waste.
You know the game. While the concept of colonialism may not exist today as it did centuries ago, its legacies are still felt in the way it pervades international value systems.
Developing nations will always remain in development because of these fashion owners in developed nations, yes, both billionaire brands and small-time labels. Unless their labour, materials, and means of production were exclusively locally sourced and assembled, it’s reasonable to say they have hands in assigning the low cost of talent in developing nations. Your favourite brand’s contacts might still be in India or Bangladesh for cheap cotton.
Women in the Global South are employed to sew clothing with skills that could one day land them among the ranks of artisanal fashion designers and dressmakers, but what about becoming household names? Why does the West get to decide which resources and skills are considered valuable and ‘developed’?
Can you name a single fashion designer born, raised, and residing in Africa? The West might give them booths at a pop-up showcase, but the vast majority of the names you know are busy making Western-style clothing that shall always be the symbol of civilisation and proximity to power. And everybody else will follow this gold standard.
Things like circularity and recycling bins for clothes around the store will become yet another business model for companies to take your waste—which they produced—and control its reproduction to further line their pockets. This traps its victims in a system that only provides enough support to keep them in poverty and not enough to reclaim their power. If we let the people who created the issue take credit for the fix, we’ll never be able to escape this lethal loop.
A Self-Imposed Challenge
Imperial (and capitalist) hubris is still very much to blame for the destruction of sustainability, culture, and equity-paved roads. All this energy could be spent berating those who’ve built the walls in to shut people out from liveable conditions (“We’re giving them jobs!”), but it’s possible to do that while simultaneously helping decrease demand for extremely seasonal wear.
As a start, I’ve challenged myself to 4 months without buying clothes. If what I’ve written has touched you in any way, I encourage you to try this out too. Second-hand clothing is always encouraged where needed, but be aware that it’s only a bandaid solution to the big picture. It’s admittedly become difficult to avoid trendy fashion because of invasive ads, so maybe that’s a sign to also work toward decreasing my screen time.
If we undo the acts of refraction that contemporary righteousness has painstakingly arranged to dismiss the not-so-silent presence of colonial settler ideology today, it’s possible to see the plain and simple mirror, mirror on the wall: metabolising all this inherited pain won’t do us any good. If cutting back on consumption or building long-term support by buying directly from the source (i.e. marginalised communities) themselves is feasible for you, it would make all the difference.
Democratising the playing field for everyone is a battle when colonialism persists within billion-dollar industries down to the cells of our bodies. In saying that, quietude should no longer be poetry for our forlorn civilisation.
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