I have been angry at the world for the better part of my life.

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I don’t think I need to explain how inaccurate modern history lessons are. As it is said, the winner takes it all, and well, the winner also gets to write our history books. In our world, that winner has time and time again been the same groups of people who violently take over people’s homes; who kill off whole populations by starving them, passing diseases onto them, making them work themselves to death, or straight up torturing them. But that is rarely acknowledged, and when it is, it gets brushed off with a simple: ‘That was then. We are different now.’

 

But they are, in fact, still the same. 

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I’ve always been the ‘woke’ one, for lack of a better term. I remember going on and on during class discussions every time the ‘discovery’ of America came up. I’ve gone on endlessly long (probably annoyingly so) rants about how calling it a discovery is ridiculous in the first place, since there were already people (us) living on the land, and about how intelligent they were (we were), their (our) discoveries, and about how Europeans had no fucking right to have done all that they did. 

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I wasn’t always completely shrugged off, but either acknowledgement came only in small forms, or worse, people flat-out disagreed with me. 

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*

 

I’m gonna be honest: seeing the codex wasn’t as impressive as I had imagined. It looked so perfect, for a second, I even wondered if it wasn’t a copy printed on cardboard. There wasn’t a huge surge of emotion or some sort of energy hitting me all at once, like I had imagined. I was excited, but other than that, I wasn’t thinking of much at all.

 

I couldn’t tell you when it really hit me. I just remember at some point looking at it and thinking, wow, this is really something my ancestors created. They sat there, coloured with the same carefulness born out of love for art that I can today feel in my own fingertips whenever I create. They captured their worldview, their science and their people. Their story. And then someone went and robbed them of it.

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I got really angry for a moment, I remember looking around the room, seeing posters of different exhibitions, and I just wondered, were any of the pieces shown there not stolen? How dare these museums show all these items like they truly should be the ones in possession of them? Worse, how dare they hide them away?

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And, long before that, how dare – how fucking dare – the Spanish settlers slaughter and steal like the lives they were destroying weren’t also human? Whoever got the codex to England, who or what gave them the right?

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Watching the ritual with all these thoughts in mind, it’s no wonder I got so emotional so quickly. It felt like even if it was on a smaller scale, we were getting something back. They were getting something back.

 

I’m not a very religious person and I don’t really know what I believe, but at that moment I was so certain our ancestors’ spirits were looking down at us. And I know they were proud.

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* 

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The rest of the weekend was somehow a blur. I enjoyed Liverpool, I’ve always loved England, but that didn’t stop tears from randomly forming in my eyes throughout the next few days. I remember wondering how I was expected to go back to normal after all of this. How was I supposed to memorise Morisot’s biography for my exam on Monday, when I just had an experience that somehow changed my world view and my sense of self?

 

And changed I am.

 

The best way I can describe it, is that before everything, I wasn’t sure what reason I had to be part of it. Every single person in that room seemed to fit together like a puzzle, while I somehow felt like I was there out of sheer luck. While luck probably was part of it, I think my reason was hope. To give me hope, to show me that there are people out there who see the things the way I do, and who are actively working on improving the world we live in. That, despite my arm being the only one raised in history class, there is more to the world than my classmates and teachers believe. I was never alone in this. And this was never just about history.

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