Decolonizing the Self

Translated from the Georgian

I talked to my friend today:

He peed with Salman Rushdie and got to know him in the toilet.

It has made his day—to pee with the classic of post-post-post colonial literature.

They exchanged a few words while peeing:

Discussed Puccini at the Metropolitan Opera, Mayor Bloomberg’s presidential aspirations,

Wall Street and Morgan Stanley, and having an all-vegetable diet.

My friend was so happy that I was happy for him.

I could sum it up like this:

Ever since 1989, whole generations grew up in Georgia

Dreaming to pee with Salman Rushdie.

And write at least one scandalous work

With commercial success.

America the land of the dream

And Europe was a paradise ...

We were colonized by our own dreams.

We have colonized ourselves

And helped to colonize others.

We came out of the former Soviet Union and

We have declared:

Liberal Democracy is great!

Without knowing anything about it.

We have screamed:

Capitalism is the only way to go!

Without knowing anything about Capitalism!

We were a sick post-Soviet generation

Of McDonald’s diet and Coca-Cola dreams,

Of Freud’s materialism!

We have legalized Washington Consensus,

And we are the war criminals of the 21st century:

We justify the deaths of twenty-two thousand kids every day

Because we said that equality and socialism are impossible.

Our main crime was that we were

Credible.

We have made it possible to bring

The dictatorship of materialist dreams.

We are the first generation of Google,

We are the first generation of Microsoft,

We are the first generation of Skype,

And we are the first generation of unapologetic criminals of consumerism!

And now, twenty years since that moment

For the first time ever, it occurred to us

Maybe it was not completely right

To justify murder for nothing.

My young friend wrote his scandalous story

And I published it;

It sold record numbers back in my country,

And I still doubt it made us very happy.

Maybe having an all-veggie diet is good.

Maybe that helps us to decolonize ourselves.

I guess most of us did not see

The fifth column inside ourselves.

The one that took us for constantly shopping,

For unfulfilled dreams of lucid ambitions.

Notes:

This poem was first published in Interventions (Stanford University, 2014) and is part of the folio “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets,” curated by Laura Kraftowitz and Edward Salem. Read the rest of the folio in the July/August 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2026)