Native informers humiliate their own communities by conceding defeat in advance

Evidence

I hold their writings and other utterances responsible for having helped dehumanize populations that can then be murdered—by the hundreds in Palestine, the thousands in Lebanon, the hundreds of thousands in Iraq—with total impunity. I feel pain in giving them names, for in the figure of the native informer the fictive white man presiding in their mind and soul has stolen me from me. He has owned up to robbing me from me and can now talk back to me in my own language, the language I thought I had successfully hidden from him so that I could speak freedom. I now speak, but I sound exactly like the native informer, for he sits there in and with a position of power—over me. By becoming a house Muslim he has cast me into the site of the field Muslim. I look at the native informer, at the Muslim native informer, and once again I am ashamed of me—for in him I see me subjected, defeated, humiliated, embarrassed. I fight a fight he has already conceded, she has already lost—lost so completely she does not even remember the fight. It took me a long time not to be ashamed of me—it took from Gandhi to Mandela, from Martin Luther King to Malcolm X, from Che Guevara to Frantz Fanon, from Aime Cesaire to Edward Said; and now, once again, the fictive white man uses me, abuses me, uses his native informer, Cain to my Abel—who looks and speaks exactly like me—to make me ashamed of me. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 636

Categorization

• BMF: The native informer who ‘looks and speaks exactly like me,’ a replica and carbon copy turned against its original, echoes the double in Zamyatin’s ‘We’ and the self-alienation recurs in The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s mirrored identities — a genuine cross-domain resonance about the self turned agent of the powerful.
• DEEPTHINKING: The reflexive agony of shame — seeing one’s own degraded replica, who stole one’s language — is an intensely layered account of internalized colonial position. One of the densest passages in the chapter.

Related

• Native informers embody self-hatred by personifying what they denounce (similarity 0.81)
• Native informers project white hatred onto their collective identity to survive. (similarity 0.79)
• Native informers’ writings help dehumanize populations that are then killed with impunity (similarity 0.79)
• A co-opted spokesperson’s assimilation shames rather than liberates those they claim to represent (similarity 0.79)