Blog by P.B. Helbest

This reflection by P.B. Helbest directly links to their previously published poem, Linens. 

– Click here to read the piece: Poem by P.B. Helbest

My poem Linens is a poem I wrote about colonialism – from colonialism’s perspective. Being a second-gen immigrant, I navigate a world that isn’t meant for me. I learn, and relearn, points of reference for the majority culture around me in a bid for connection. When I tire of that and turn inwards, towards art and media, I find much of the same.

Having lived a lifetime as myself, and a comparable mirror lifetime of the white western experience through the people around me and the media I’ve consumed… It puts me in a strange position. I’m closer to racism – and the people behind the racism.

I took inspiration from an article I’d seen about a textile hub in Bangladesh reviving a long-lost muslin. It’s one example of a bigger pattern of lost textile techniques.

Artisan work, especially textiles, used to be sought out by the entire world. With the advent of European cotton mills and factories with the industrial revolution, ones which profited from the use of colonial trade for cheap cotton, the global market changed. Suddenly, such labour-intensive techniques weren’t so profitable anymore.

In this case, “the industry collapsed in the years after the 18th-century conquest of the Bengal delta by the East India Company, paving the way for British colonial rule.”

“pin-pricked, the shadow in my eyes,

fills up the shape of you and I,

I pour into you, that molten tide,

tilted so gentle, mercury in your mind”

In this stanza, I was thinking about the relationship the western gaze has had in defining their colonial subjects. Their supposedly benevolent guiding hands as a civilising force – the pin being a tool for textile creation, but here it’s used to create something else entirely. A ‘molten tide’ of metal, rigid once cooled, takes a shape that cannot easily be changed. Yet mercury has been used, a metal that stays fluid, and as we know, is incredibly deadly. It harms the colonial subject’s mind, yet it can be changed – and potentially ‘tilted’ back out.

“shear and ghosting, like long lost linens

threaded back together, with new fingers

I parse your strands, and weave-back once more,

I take back what’s mine, what was yours before”

Here is the most explicit reference to the muslin revival article. The image of ‘parsing’ strands is intrusive, like fingers that don’t belong have made their way in, and intimate, as if playing with someone’s hair. Even with the revival, and the efforts of new generations, colonialism’s hands are still present.

“three shipments, and four, and five after that,

I count my spoils, my love, my regret,

I find myself lacking, of all but one,

all that is will be conquered, by my hand or none.”

What it finds itself lacking of course can be up to interpretation. The people who were agents of colonialism didn’t do everything out of disdain or a sense of superiority, some were motivated by a sense of consumerism – just as many of us are, day-to-day. The well-off classes in England might’ve coveted the trade of the global south, loved and appreciated its textile techniques. Regardless, the result is the same – the hands here are instruments of violence, not creation. They take; they do not give.