Daily Inspiration Quote by Jessica Hagedorn

Hagedorn puts her finger on a psychic hangover of empire: the way colonialism doesn’t just redraw borders or loot resources, it rewires the inner life. The phrase “so-called post-colonial” is the tell. It’s a quiet accusation that “post” is often a bureaucratic fantasy - the flag changes, the hierarchy of taste and value doesn’t. What lingers is an audition culture, where entire communities are made to feel they must constantly prove they belong, to history, to the nation, even to themselves.

Her pairing of “legitimate” and “pure enough” is doing double duty. “Legitimate” invokes legal status and lineage - who counts, who gets recognized, whose story is official. “Pure enough” exposes the trap underneath: legitimacy is policed through myths of purity that colonial regimes invented and local elites often inherit. Purity becomes a moving target: too Western and you’re a sellout; too local and you’re provincial; too mixed and you’re suspect. The result is a chronic self-surveillance that masquerades as identity.

Coming from a playwright, the line also reads as a backstage note about performance. Post-colonial identity isn’t simply lived; it’s staged under harsh lighting, judged by multiple audiences - former colonizers, national gatekeepers, diasporic peers. Hagedorn’s intent isn’t to mourn hybridity but to indict the system that turns hybridity into an alibi, forcing people to apologize for the very complexity history imposed on them.