It was Sunday, not a day but rather a gap between two other days.
It is raining hard outside, so hard that Pepe could not hear his shallow pulsating breathing. He is sitting at the right end of the couch while his dog is sleeping on the other end.
A bicycle exhibition showcase is running on the muted T.V. He is holding the remote.
A few weeks ago, Pepe and his friends made a bicycle ramp from wooden scraps and ply board.
They placed it at the vacant lot in front of Pepe’s house. They also cleared the ground, cut the grasses and made a little bicycle circuit. Every afternoon, they went there to practice their bike stunts until late night.
Now, Pepe looks outside his window, watching how the hard rain slowly destroys their ramp and their little bike circuit. He has been sitting there for days now.
That was the ramp they made for their first annual highest bike jump contest. Pepe won. And broke both legs.
Discussion:
In this story, the theory of post-colonialism is shown in a subtle, but resounding, manner. Pepe’s characters is very much distinguished with the American culture’s extreme games exhibition. The idea of doing extreme sports and extreme games like bike stunts, skateboarding, and many others is something that we have acquired from our former colonisers. Although it has been several decades since they last invaded our country, they have left so much influence on our daily lives (the same could also be said with our Spanish colonisers). Their culture has influenced ours in as many ways as you can possibly think of like our speech, the way we dress, in architecture, music, among other things. And with television and internet nowadays, it is very easy for most of us to have access to American pop culture, and it has thus infiltrated our own way of living and perceptions.
In most post-colonial works, it deals with the colonised people(s) as the subject-matter. Furthermore, it also articulates how the colonised reclaim or “[maintain] strong connections with the coloniser”. In a way, there is also this binary opposition existing between the coloniser and the colonised. One is always considered as superior, while the other is (apparently) the inferior. And with that being said, most of us would consider America as the center of culture and we always try to emulate that. It has created so much influence in that, in a few aspects, the American culture and ours seem to be quite similar.
