Confronting the Coloniser Within Us: Unlearning Dominant Narratives and Imagining Possibilities Otherwise. By Sahibzada Mayed
sahibzada mayed is a creative alchemist with an extensive background in community organising, emancipatory research, participatory design, and speculative futures. mayed's work draws upon the rich, emergent lineages of critical design movements that are actively transforming the status quo. Through their work, mayed creates transformative experiences that cultivate shared joy, fuel our collective imagination, and weave visions for liberatory futures. As a serial entrepreneur and multidisciplinary creative, mayed has received significant recognition globally for leading grassroots, intersectional work at the forefront of creative innovation and social impact.
What if colonialism not only alters the realities we live under but the worlds within us? We are often taught to recognise colonial legacies in how borders are carved, maps drawn, territories seized, and resources extracted. But rarely do we question how colonial influence seeps into the intimate spaces of our lives: the behaviours we learn to perform, the cultural norms encoded across generations, the professional standards we strive toward, and the ways in which we measure belonging and worth. Colonial power does not disappear when empires disintegrate or fade away; it shape-shifts and controls how we relate to one another.
In this Uncharitable paper, I explore how colonial imprints and legacies extend beyond territory and shape our cultural norms, practices, and relationships. I invite us to confront the coloniser within: not just as moral indictment, but in recognition of our attachment to colonial systems and the need to uproot how we are tethered to extractive economies, institutional harm, and planetary destruction. To decolonise, we must oscillate inward and re-root ourselves in care, relation, and possibility.
Beyond Cartographies of Control
Our bodies, much like land, too are disciplined, measured, and named. Marked long before we understand how power flows: who is seen as worthy of dignity, whose knowledge counts as legitimate, whose presence is deemed illegal or threatening, and whose movements are criminalised.
Colonial hierarchies do not persist through domination alone; they survive by becoming mundane and ordinary.
Over time, control ceases to look like conquest and begins to feel like instinct. It calibrates our nervous systems toward deference or vigilance. It shapes posture and tone in an attempt to appear more palatable. It teaches us to comply without question and assimilate within dominant structures.
What begins as subjugation inevitably becomes culture; extraction becomes a pattern of relationship and a way of being. One that is replicated across institutions, workplaces, and movements. The border, understood as a wound erupting from colonial violence, migrates inward and the map becomes routine like muscle memory.
To move beyond cartographies of control is not to forget the realities of dispossession, ecological rupture, and land theft, but to contend with how the logics shaping these colonial patterns continue to be (re)produced in our everyday practices and relationships.
How Colonial Power Lingers
Once colonial power settles into the body, where does it travel next?
Once it conditions our nervous system, where does it coagulate?
If colonialism mapped lands and disciplined bodies, it also constrained our imaginations to fit within its borders. You can feel it in the breath, hesitating before it claims space. In the voice, tightening just enough to sound acceptable. In the gaze that drops, averts, and learns not to meet power too directly. This is what happens when imagination becomes not only contested terrain but also disciplined and sanctioned.
A colonised imagination rarely feels imposed on. It feels familiar and responsible. It sounds like maturity and wisdom. It persuades us that belonging depends on legibility, credibility requires moderation, and safety lies in restraint. Even in spaces committed to social change, this discipline often masquerades as professionalism and shows up as strategy. Convinced that impact requires us to be measured. In order to be fundable, we must speak the language of frameworks and metrics. To build credibility, we need to dilute our convictions and translate urgency into how we build and organise together.
Colonial power lingers here: not only in policy or structure, but in the gradual trimming of possibility. In how we shrink our own hope before it upsets the status quo. In the reflex to distort our visions so they will not unsettle power too deeply. What if the borders we inhabit are no longer spatial but also imaginative? What if we inherited not only dismembrance but also diminished horizons?
To meaningfully confront colonial afterlives, we need to notice where our imagination has learned to behave and tame itself. To question who benefits from our captivities and keeping the horizon of possibilities contained. And, to gently listen for the futures seeping through the cracks, insisting on being felt and nurtured.
Learning to Be (il)Legible
We are taught to be legible in order to access an illusion of safety, to gain entry into rooms where decisions are made. We are offered reassurance that our presence depends on our ability to be understood, to remain properly formatted. But legibility always has an audience. It is conditional, rooted in compliance and conformity. Requiring us to translate ourselves into terms that power recognises. To be read through lenses, not of our own making, that categorise and frame us. To render our grief into data points and to silence our rage into policy. We must ask ourselves what is lost in that translation.
There is a kind of survival in learning to be legible but also a deep erosion. To resist legibility almost feels dangerous, as it risks exclusion and misunderstanding. Being outcast as too radical. Exposing yourself to consequence and punishment. And yet, illegibility can also be a form of protection, a way to resist. To keep parts of ourselves and our visions from being absorbed into systems where they are co-opted and diluted.
Colonial power depends on classification and visibility, on categorising, measuring, and naming bodies as a form of domination. It renders people and possibilities legible in order to control and manipulate them. To remain illegible, in care-full and deliberate ways, is to interrupt these cycles of harm. To insist that not everything about us exists for institutional consumption.
As we seek to confront the coloniser within, we also need to reckon with how we have internalised its demand to be legible, its desire to be affirmed and validated. What would it take to live in ways the coloniser within could no longer survive?
Tending to the Coloniser Within
There is often a temptation to point out the violence of colonial systems “out there”, to locate it elsewhere. In history books, in governments and institutions, in borders and maps. And yet, if colonial power produced hierarchies, disciplined our bodies, and constrained our imaginations, it also shaped parts of us.
The coloniser within is not a demon waiting to be exorcised. It lives in our attachment to legitimacy. In the belief that dignity requires us to prove our worth. In the subtle desire to strive for proximity to power rather than uprooting it. In the quiet satisfaction of being recognised by those in power. In the comfort we find within the familiarity of dominant hierarchies despite critiquing them.
Tending to the coloniser within is an invitation: not to collapse into defensiveness or guilt, but to notice the patterns we reproduce, the desires we hold, and the standards we strive for. What hierarchies are you still rehearsing? What scripts are you still performing?
This practice of tending requires humility. To recognise that liberation cannot only be demanded externally; it must also be cultivated relationally. Imperfectly. Together.
The Worlds We Make Possible, Together
What if belonging no longer depends on legibility to dominant systems, but our accountability to one another?
The worlds we make possible together will not be born from purity or perfection. They will emerge from embodying and rehearsing freedom: to speak and take up space unapologetically, to protect what cannot be easily translated, to honour ways of being and knowing that resist categorisation.
Perhaps the work now is not only to redraw the map but to widen the scope of what we dare to imagine.
In community.
Toward liberation.