Can you love your coloniser?

Can you love your coloniser?

The pain inflicted by colonialism can’t really be enumerated. In many ways, it defies description. People lost lives, land, dignity, and perhaps worst of all, identity.

Whole regions were starved and millions enslaved. Entire nations and civilisations collapsed. In order to bring all this about, large swathes of humanity were subjected to humiliation, torture, and extraction on an unprecedented scale.

The world as we know it was shaped to its core by colonialism. The hierarchy that emerged from that system placed the coloniser on top, and the people of the Global South at the bottom. The world is still struggling to move past this dynamic today.

And yet, for all the atrocities, many of us in the Global South still love our colonisers. Don’t we?

Love is a complicated thing. There is obsessive love, destructive love, wildly jealous love. There is love despite cruelty, despite abuse. History, like literature, is full of attachments that are irrational, destructive, and yet deeply human.

Dido loved Aeneas, though it destroyed her. Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus destroyed them both. Othello’s love led to murder and his own downfall. Love is complicated, and we don’t always love what is good for us, or what has been good to us.

In Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and India, many of us love the English language. For some, it is the language we think in, write in, and express ourselves best in.

And of course, there is food.

The atrocities perpetrated by colonisers in the Americas brought Asia new-world fruits and vegetables. It is hard to conceive of our cuisines today without potatoes, cassava, pineapples, and above all, chillies. They changed our culinary lives — possibly even our culinary souls.

Do we not love curry puffs, kopi, and condensed milk? Kueh rose, kueh lapis, bánh mì, and lamprais? Of course, these things are ours. We took ingredients and techniques introduced through colonialism and made something new — often better. But without colonial history, they would not exist. And that is the point of colonial history.

Like Catherine in Wuthering Heights, who struggles to differentiate herself from Heathcliff — at one point even declaring, “I am Heathcliff” — we, too, struggle to differentiate ourselves from our colonisers. Some part of that history now lives within us.

The structures, flavours, systems of education, and borders imposed by colonialism are imprinted so deeply that it is often impossible to separate ourselves from them. Often, we cannot.

So sometimes — not only do we acknowledge our colonisers — it may even feel, uncomfortably, like a form of love. Because colonial history is also our history. It shaped us in ways big, small, and enormous. And if we refuse to confront that honestly, we risk refusing parts of ourselves as well.

Of course, it is hard — and perhaps dangerous — to feel any closeness to something that treated you with such disdain. Which is why the starting point must be self-regard: loving ourselves first, and then placing centuries of colonial legacy into perspective.

Colonialism is part of us. People from colonised countries still carry its imprint in our culture, language, and institutions. The task today is to move beyond it — to absorb what exists, without romanticising its violence, and to chart paths of our own.

Just as generations of aunties took pineapples brought from South America, butter and baking techniques from Europe, and fashioned the pineapple tart — an icon of Singapore and Malaysia today.

So, do we love our coloniser?

Perhaps the more honest answer is no — not in any simple or romantic sense. What we live with instead is inheritance: a history that shaped our languages, our cuisines, our institutions, and even the way we see ourselves. That inheritance is neither pure nor chosen, but it is undeniably ours.