January 12th 2026
“(De)colonial Travel Diary” is an experiment in travel blogging with a deliberate goal: to take the decolonial method I was trained in outside academic writing and bring it into the exposed, imperfect terrain of personal narrative.
I am a historian, and the language I have learned to master is a specialist one. I created this blog precisely to write in public without the armour of academic prose and so-called “scientific” journals, consciously accepting the risks this entails.
This writing project is grounded in a simple conviction: all knowledge is situated, and for this reason decolonisation is neither a universal nor a replicable process. It shifts according to bodies, their historical trajectories, and the position from which we look at the world.
For someone like me — white, European, educated, and yet precarious — thinking decolonially is therefore first and foremost an exercise in white consciousness: an attempt to move through places and memories without claiming innocence, and without confusing critique with absolution.
I write in open solidarity with all those whom colonial modernity condemns to structural, inherited, and essentialised precarity.
Not to speak on behalf of, but to interrogate the place from which I speak.
(written in Italian, translated in English with ChatGpt)
Friday
I had come to Bordeaux to rest my mind.
I was hoping to distance myself, at least for a few days, from the exhausting fight against the windmills of the academic world — which I keep crashing into, because of triggers usually so trivial that they leave me bewildered as much as wounded.
The latest act of this drama, which has been unfolding for nearly ten years now (the length of my precarity), took place within the decolonial school of thought, a framework I had deeply believed in.
Recent events, however, have persuaded me that this school tends to reproduce the very same hierarchical, dichotomous, and egotistical modes characteristic of white thought — the modes it claims to critique.
In other words, the very same “master’s tools” it professes to have abandoned.
But how could it be otherwise, when accessing the academic elite — and remaining within it — requires excelling precisely in the mastery of those tools?
It feels like a dead end, and “how do we get out?” had become the recurring intrusive thought I was trying to escape through this trip.
I chose Bordeaux somewhat by chance. I had a family matter to attend to in Paris and was looking for another French city for my escape; moreover, an old flatmate of mine lives in the Aquitaine capital and had strongly recommended it.
I had also noticed that in a small village not too far away — at least on the map — Henri Toulouse-Lautrec is buried, the figure who gave rise to my short-story series Bitter spirits.
It seemed like a good place for a light pilgrimage — a gesture of gratitude, a few exploratory outings to lift the spirit. Nothing more.
Then I discovered that no public transport reaches the village where Henri is buried.
No buses, no trains, and of course no affordable taxis.
The only option was a cruise on the Garonne, including a visit to the château that once served as the Toulouse-Lautrec family’s summer residence — but Henri’s relationship with the opulence of his noble origins was far from harmonious, and I was not at all sure that showing up as a tourist in his mansion would be a welcome tribute.
So I declared the pilgrimage over before it had even begun, and did what I do when I don’t know where to go: I wandered.
I began without a plan, and above all without any intention of finding myself inside world history.
And yet world history — which I had hoped to dodge with the grace of a cat avoiding puddles — met me at the first bend of the river, like a faithful dog I never adopted and that keeps following me anyway.
Saturday
I had decided to get my bearings in the city, and as I often do when I arrive somewhere new, I signed up for a walking tour in English — a free, or rather tip-based, kind of tour, that relies on gratuities and has become increasingly common in more tourist-heavy cities.
These tours are a low-budget version of walks led by certified tour guides, and they are strongly opposed by the latter, since they are sometimes used to avoid paying taxes or to circumvent the limits imposed by professional licensing regulations.
In tip-based tours, guides are often students, apprentices, or simply people who have decided to try to get by or reinvent themselves. I chose one not only to save money, but also to observe a mode of work I have occasionally considered adopting myself, during the periods of unemployment that punctuated my life between one research fellowship and the next.
Back to Bordeaux: the improvised guide was a young American woman, extremely well prepared, who had been living there for less than two years.
One of those people who study a city with the voracity of someone trying to put their life back in order: everything in sequence, from the Roman foundations to triangular trade, from Eleanor of Aquitaine to the Nazi occupation. She spoke with contagious enthusiasm, with an almost excessive passion for the city’s colonial history.
Because Bordeaux is an overtly colonial city, deeply marked by its close relationship with the land the French called Saint-Domingue, which later named itself Haiti.
As we walked along the Garonne, under a winter sun so bright it felt like spring, the young American began to recount the history of the slave trade with near-impeccable precision: the routes of sugar and rum flows, the names of the families who grew rich, the direct connection with Saint-Domingue. At one point, with a confidence bordering on emphasis, she stated that Bordeaux had been “the main port of the French slave trade.”
It was not, in fact: it was the third, after Nantes and La Rochelle. As I would later discover, the ostentatious wealth of eighteenth-century Bordeaux was tied more to the exploitation of enslaved labour on Caribbean plantations than to the slave trade itself.
This is a distinction still debated today, because it is easily instrumentalised by those who wish to defend Bordeaux’s reputation as an urban product of the “success of the [Enlightenment] philosophers, who wanted to make cities a crucible of humanism, universality, and culture,” as the UNESCO website puts it — the same UNESCO that, in 2007, designated the historic centre a World Heritage Site.
At the time of the tour, however, historical accuracy was less interesting to me than the fact that this foreign girl — white, blonde, blue-eyed — was the one telling the story.
In two hours of walking, the guide had named words and histories the city itself had not yet offered me: I had seen no prominent plaques, no imposing monuments, no substantial weight of public memory.
Had she not spoken of it, I might not have noticed this history at all.
As some critical voices have already pointed out, Bordeaux is reluctant to endanger the narrative that portrays it as a prosperous and enlightened mercantile city, even if the city is slowly beginning to reckon with the shadows of its past — and, to a lesser extent, of its present.
It took the foreign gaze of this competent, slightly emphatic young woman for me to notice the faces of African women carved alongside those of bearded old European men on the façade of the Palais de la Bourse; for me to begin seeing blind spots, filling in gaps, stitching geography back together with history.
It struck me — though it did not entirely surprise me — that the first voice to speak to me about slavery in Bordeaux was American. As if this memory, in order to surface, required a foreign accent.
So I decided, over the following days, to follow this woman’s suggestions and go in search of other traces of the city’s colonial history, beginning with a visit to the Musée d’Aquitaine and its much-debated gallery dedicated to the triangular trade.
Sunday
On Sunday morning I entered the galleries of the Musée d’Aquitaine with the intention of following a linear path: to go in, see prehistory, pass through Rome, drift into the Middle Ages, and finally arrive at the room devoted to slavery that had generated so much discussion.
I did not imagine that the first jolt would come precisely from prehistory, the part of the museum that is supposed to offer a conceptual truce — an innocent territory, still outside politics.
Crossing its threshold, I was reminded that prehistory in European museums is often presented as a promise of innocence. Not only a “before” history, but a “before” politics. A blank page on which the present can write whatever it wants, without having to reckon with cracks and fractures.
Aquitaine, the museum tells us, was densely inhabited by different hominin species from very ancient times; some of the most splendid cave paintings preserved in Europe are found here, of which a few reproductions are displayed in the museum.
The most famous of these sites are the caves of Lascaux; discovered by chance by four boys in 1940, they were opened to the public in 1948, only to be closed again fifteen years later.
The constant human presence had caused moulds that threatened to destroy masterpieces over 17,000 years old.
Masterpieces that most likely were not painted to be seen by the human eye; many of the paintings are executed on walls so close to one another that it is impossible to grasp them as a whole — a detail I found incredibly fascinating and deeply alien, in an age in which beauty has become synonymous with hyper-exposure.
Further on, moving along the historical itinerary laid out by the museum helped remind me of the layers through which Europe colonised itself, before turning this voracity toward the rest of the world.
Aquitaine — and Bordeaux in particular — is exemplary in this sense, because it survived numerous colonial operations before exporting that experience to Haiti, this time as an aggressor.
__________________
The first colonisation of Aquitaine is easy to identify: it is Rome.
It was a lieutenant of Caesar who conquered Burdigala, founded by a Gallic people in the third century BCE, thus initiating the process of Romanisation.
This does not mean that it was the first invasion the territory experienced; on the contrary, the coexistence of Neanderthal and modern human (so-called Sapiens) sites shows that Aquitaine had been a site of conflict since very ancient times.
Colonisation, however, is something else: it implies a process of cultural disciplining as well as territorial conquest, with the aim of radically transforming a territory that already had its own cultures, elites, and languages, in favour of those of the conqueror.
Rome, in this sense, constitutes the first paradigmatic case of a colonial project in the West, which later came to form — with its imperial eagle — the symbolic foundation of the invasive modernity of Europeans and Americans.
After more than four centuries of Roman rule, Aquitaine experienced successive invasions by Vandals, Visigoths, and Franks, eventually gaining a rich autonomy — albeit as a vassal of the French king — during the feudal conflicts of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
The high point of this period was reached with William the Troubadour, who gave rise to one of the most culturally vibrant states of the time, whose wealth surpassed that of the king of France himself.
The Troubadour dynasty, however, was short-lived, as it soon ran out of male heirs.
The last duchess — the famous Eleanor — met the fate common to many European aristocratic women: seeing her body transformed into a vehicle for territorial transfer.
Rather than simply becoming her dowry, Aquitaine was absorbed into another kingdom through her.
History, however, is anything but linear: her first husband — Louis VII of France — repudiated her for failing to produce male heirs; her second — Henry II of England, to whom she would bear five sons — kept her imprisoned for over a decade, fearing her political manoeuvring.
As a result of this personal and collective drama, Aquitaine became English territory for three centuries, giving rise to the long series of conflicts known as the Hundred Years’ War.
This — very briefly — is the contested history that preceded Bordeaux’s transformation into an integral part of the French nation-state, and into the modern port city whose opulent beauty was built on the slave trade and the colonial exploitation of Haiti.
After this crescendo, the entrance into the slavery room is distinctly perceptible.
It is not marked by an explicit break. There is no door or special passageway, no sign announcing a change of register.
And yet one understands it immediately, even before reading or seeing anything, because the light drops.
Not that the room is dark; rather, it is dimly lit — a subtle but deliberate semi-darkness — as if to mark a visual parenthesis within the historical progression constructed in the previous rooms, and resumed, without major discontinuities, in those that follow.
Slavery thus appears, within this linear narrative, as a dark parenthesis.
As if the museum were ashamed of it. As if it were something it would rather not illuminate but must, and which at least — so the half-light seems to tell us — lasted for a limited time and now belongs to the past.
The typical question Europeans and Americans ask in the face of claims coming from racialised minorities and the Global South seemed to hover in the room: “Why this anger towards the West, when slavery is over, and colonialism is over?”
The problem is that the very core of decolonial critique of so-called “white thought” lies precisely here: colonialism has never ended, because the political, social, economic, and cultural imbalances it established still exist, and have living, profound consequences in the bodies and minds of all of us.
The special relationship between Bordeaux and Haiti is exemplary in this sense, because the former is still today a rich and elegant city, while the latter is still today “the least developed country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world” (Wikipedia dixit).
Awareness of this tight link between past and present seems entirely absent from the curatorial approach of the Musée d’Aquitaine’s slavery room.
As I walked from one informational panel to the next, something else caught my eye: the broad and unselfconscious use of the word “nègre”, without quotation marks or other forms of distancing, and of its derivative négrier, to refer to the trade or commerce in enslaved Africans.
The issue is not merely visual.
An informational video is projected in the room, illustrating excerpts from the diary of a Bordeaux slave trader (a négrier, precisely), read aloud by a male voice that gives the word the rhythm of a ledger of horror:
“I bought x ‘ne*roes’ in such-and-such port.”
“x of them died during the voyage.”
“x remain upon arrival, which I sold for such-and-such sum.”
Numbers. Losses. Waste.
The word repeated with the same neutrality used to record goods purchased, sold, damaged.
This continuous repetition disturbed me, if only for the estranging effect it had relative to the intellectual horizon I am accustomed to. In Anglophone critical race theory, including its South African strand, the use of the “N-word” is an absolute taboo.
A taboo that forces one to devise creative solutions every time one translates or cites a source from contexts in which the term was once common usage, such as the diary quoted in the video.
I found myself suspended between two opposing feelings, both difficult to ignore.
On the one hand, a half-relief, animated by an instinctive aversion to any form of censorship.
I am in fact convinced that sanitising the language of the past is, for white people, an elegant way of seeking absolution from guilt rather than a solution to present problems — hiding the political responsibilities of the present under the carpet of linguistic correctness.
As I believe Joseph Conrad knew very well when he insisted on publishing The Nigger of the “Narcissus” under that title, in an 1897 that already found it objectionable: leaving the word as it is, naked and in the foreground, forces us whites to confront the dirt of our memory, which we are all too eager to remove or sanitise.
On the other hand, I felt a deep discomfort.
Because that same insistent usage — whose effect is “only” disturbing for a white person like me — can become a form of reactivation of violence for those who have had that word inflicted on their bodies, or who still endure it today. An additional, unchosen exposure, and a constant strain.
I left the room carrying these profoundly ambivalent feelings with me.
Without a clear position to claim, or a conclusion to offer. Only with the sense that that dark parenthesis was not closed at all.
I left those thoughts there, suspended. I decided not to force them into an immediate response, but to sleep on them and take them up again later — perhaps on the other side of the river, in front of the monument dedicated to the memory of Toussaint Louverture and the victims of the slave trade.
Monday
After the ritual pain au chocolat for breakfast, I took a break from Bordeaux’s colonial past and devoted Monday morning to the Bassins des Lumières, an exhibition space housed inside a former submarine base built by the Germans during the Nazi occupation.
A colossal reinforced-concrete structure, looming over the harbour district like a fossil of war that has never been fully metabolised.
Getting there was already an experience.
To reach the entrance I had to walk all the way around the building, becoming fully aware of its actual dimensions: a massive, opaque, hostile bulk, which took me over twenty minutes to circumnavigate.
It is hard not to feel a sense of anguish in the presence of this concrete behemoth, an unease that deepens when one reads its history.
This immense base was built in just nineteen months by largely conscripted labour — a third of the workers were Spanish prisoners of war. Inaugurated in September 1941, it was bombed repeatedly by Allied forces, who unsuccessfully tried to destroy it, managing to inflict only minor damage to the roof.
For years after the war, the building remained there as a monster of memory: too large to ignore, too heavy with meaning to be easily reabsorbed.
It was later reclaimed by local artists, and eventually transformed into the exhibition space it is today.
Entering it feels like crossing a portal into another world.
Inside, the dark mass of concrete is completely flooded with light: monumental projections cover the entire surface of the walls and are reflected in the water of the basins; colours shatter across the three dimensions of the space like artificial tides.
The light show on display at the time of my visit was devoted to the ocean, and it was an immersive, enveloping experience of almost hypnotic beauty, in which I stayed as long as I could.
Walking slowly through the darkness, amid that profusion of light, I thought about its symbolic force: that structure had been built to dominate the sea, to control it, to turn it into a theatre of war.
Now that same structure was celebrating it, multiplying it into images, returning it as a sensory and poetic experience. The concrete of occupation had been quite literally bombarded with light.
It was as I was leaving, walking again along the Garonne toward the memorial dedicated to Toussaint Louverture, that this transformation came back to me with a note of melancholy.
Bordeaux has reclaimed a colossus built by a foreign occupier — Nazi Germany — saturating its interior with shared beauty (albeit at a price). Here, the wound of occupation has been traversed, exposed, reshaped until it became light.
And yet, when it comes to shedding light on its own past as an occupier, as in the slavery room of the Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux has chosen to keep that memory in semi-darkness.
I am not suggesting this was a conscious choice.
Rather a coincidence — one that nevertheless says a great deal, I think, about how a community manages the different pasts that inhabit it.
About how much easier it is to illuminate what was inflicted upon us, compared to what we inflicted ourselves.
With this thought weighing on me, I continued walking along the river, toward the other bank of the Garonne.
I had to walk back and forth a couple of times before realising that the memorial was all there was.
It is strange how expectations can deceive both sight and body: I was looking for something more imposing, more visible, something that would interrupt the landscape.
Instead, I kept walking past it without seeing it, because the Bordeaux slavery memorial is hidden in plain sight; discreetly placed in the park that runs along the rive droite of the Garonne.
To commemorate the roughly one hundred and fifty thousand people who were traded as enslaved through the port of Bordeaux, there are a few bronze plaques set into the ground, alternating with arrows pointing in different directions — Africa, from which they departed, and the Caribbean, to which they were deported.
Completing the memorial is a half-bust of Toussaint Louverture.
The whole ensemble is aesthetically pleasing.
Measured.
Polite.
Placed in a well-kept, quiet park, far from the historic centre I had walked through in the previous days.
I sat down on a bench and thought, without too many words or any pretence of theoretical elegance: what a cop-out.
I thought it with anger, but also with fatigue.
Because yes, of course, we can do better memorials: more visible, more disturbing, more radical.
We can debate endlessly what the right way to remember is, which words to use, how much light or shadow to give the past.
But as I sat there, in that pleasant park, the thought that kept imposing itself on my mind was always the same: Bordeaux is still today a beautiful, rich, luminous city. Haiti is still today one of the poorest countries in the world.
And this is not a problem of memory; it is a problem of justice.
I then thought that perhaps the blind spot of the decolonial method — at least as I have seen it practiced in recent years — lies precisely in this silent shift: from a tool to interrogate and correct material, historical, and economic imbalances, to an increasingly refined — and sometimes censorious — discussion about the right words, symbolic devices, and acceptable forms of remembrance.
Yet colonialism has never ended precisely because it has never been repaired.
And as long as decolonisation remains a matter for museums and academic debates — however well intentioned — we will keep quarrelling over a past that does not pass, with no hope of transforming the present.
I stayed there a little longer, unsure of what to do with that thought.
Then I stood up and approached the bust of Toussaint Louverture once more, to offer him a silent prayer.
Not to Toussaint as an icon, as a pacified symbol, but as a reminder of a revolution that does not ask to be remembered better, but to be taken seriously and brought to completion.
With this prayer in my heart, I resumed walking.
The river behind me, the city ahead, and the feeling — not entirely unpleasant — that the escape, this time too, had not worked.
One Response