Hey bluelighters!
I'm one of the few remnants of the first homo sapiens to stroll the big beach all the way from Mama Afrika to Ultima Thule and environs. Mostly extinct as a discrete phylum of the [pseudo-]sapiens mainstream, repeated waves of whom arriving, as always from the Eastern vastnesses of the Eurasian continent, tried to conquer, subdue, and genetically cleanse the autochtones from their homes, who, though not springing from the ground, were the first modern hominids to walk the beaches of the Western fringes of Europe from the Iberian peninsular to the Atlantic archipelago.
Old School to the bone and DNA, one might say.
Like many colonized and oppressed aboriginal peoples, we were pushed into the least hospitable, most unproductive, and topographically easier to defend regions: the high moors, mountains, boglands, and off-shore islands. Like N.American First Nations, the historical weight of colonialism, of being stripped of land, of cultural and actual murderous genocide with males executed, castrated, enslaved, of the mass-rape that has always accompanied wars, have left my people with deep psychosocial scars. Like other, minor Indo-European ethnic groups, we have found ourselves a small, despised minority; our tell-tale accent and syntax influences our speach when speaking the colonists' language is often derided. As is our love of oratory, rhetorical flourish, and lyrical flights of fancy, all foreign to the newcomers more terse, utilitarian usage. Our love of language and poetry predates the newcomers arrival and as even our 'lower orders' relish extravagant wit, apothegms, and the telling of tales in which the truth never gets in the way of a good story, a story that will vary from tavern to tavern, gradually getting more and more of polish that adds to its effect on the local hearer who gnows [sic] the telling's the thing, the 'truth' secondary. All of which distinguishes us from our colonists, a more sober and restrained group often find our use of their language risibly alien. And that is what we are gnown as, we few survivors who survived the Germanic hordes that now rule, we, the indigenes are [g]nown as the 'foreigners' in the Earlier versions of our colonists [we remain unconquered, signed no treaties] bastard tongue. In our own language our country is gnown as 'land of the comrades', and each of us is a 'comrade'.
But with our language and culture deliberately crushed and belittled, working as serfs on the colons domains before the Industrial Revolution, and as wage slaves in the extremely dangerous work that ravaged the country of its mineral wealth, and left it a steep, barren windblown backwater. With postcolonial self-contempt, class ressentiment, and massive unemployment, and an ancient, historically ingrained taste for fermented beverages, and many other psychotropic agents in pagan days. Like the N.American First Nations, like the Australian aborigines, we inigenes crammed into the least valuable, harshest lands, turned inward for escape. If the outside world was stacked against us, our inner world was our own. And we have embraced psychoptropics with a fierce, self-destructive joy in self-annihilation, a Canadian psychologist said we reminded her natives in her country, trapped on 'reserves', and like us, anaesthetizing themselves from hard realities by a near pandemic, ferocious consumption of chemical comforts....
Now, bored enough, or want more?
€>~
