These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  Hope starts to speak. She greets her mum, calling by her pet name. She asks her how she is doing, wondering if she is well taken care of. Then she starts to talk about the events that led to her rehabilitation—the pentazocine addiction, the stolen jewelry, losing her. Before long, thick oleaginous trails of many tears wet Hope’s face, like raindrops off the windshield of a moving car. I have never seen Hope cry before. Even when she narrated her previous ordeals, she always felt in control of her emotions. But as she falls apart before us, in libations of grief, I can’t help but feel that Hope is coming home from exile in this moment of jubilee—and that the rickety chair in front of her has something to do with it.

  Hope’s crying is so fierce that it feels like she is possessed by Kali—or another member of the pantheon of shadows—and seeks to exorcise her otherworldly visitor through her mouth. She is leaking springs deeper than a single lifetime can allow. Much more than several lifetimes, in fact. Were it not for the professional oath of heady distance I have taken—the cross-legged, slow-blinking, fingers-interlocked, hmm-hmm-ing stance of therapeutic expertise that preaches empathy, not sympathy—I would be by her side, not trying to hold back my own tears.

  I can understand the concerns of the early-twentieth-century psychologists who marshalled their literary prowess to invent the word to counteract the notion of sympathy as thinly veiled pity and patriarchal condescension. But in Africa, empathy is not calm and collected. She is not reasonable. She has flowing garbs, and her first instinct is to sweep the dusty floors with it when she meets you birthing pain. At my father’s burial, there were people my father didn’t know—and many who didn’t know my father. But hearing of his death, and at the first sight of the convoy of cars slowly arriving his village, women in black ran to the car where his body rested. They hit their head and tore their clothes and yelled his name—and then some of them took the money they were paid for their service of mourning and went to their homes.

  A professor of mine would later tell me a story of how a woman in his own village lost her only son in a motorbike accident and the ensuing intricate, bone-deep community wisdoms that came into play to break the news to her. It’s a long story, but it is better told with his own words:

  In July 1980, a very painful death occurred in a village in Igboland, an ethnic area in Nigeria, West Africa. A fifteen-year-old boy, Anayo, the only child of a widow, died in a motorcycle accident. Being a learner and yet speeding on the motorcycle, Anayo was unable to locate the brake. Unable to stop, he collided with a mosque, his head hitting the wall. He died on the spot. When the news got to Anayo’s employer (until his death he was serving as an apprentice in timber merchandise), he sent word around to a network of his fellow male villagers in the city, informing them of the incident. Each, on hearing the news, reported to Anayo’s master’s house. When they all came they were sad, but quickly went into a crisis meeting aimed at deciding how to send the distressing news home. They divided themselves into two groups.

  One group was to stay back and arrange for hospital preservation of the body until after everything had been set for taking it back home to his village and mother. The second group (composed of three villagers) was sent to take the news home in advance of the body. They did not go straight to Anayo’s mother. Rather, they went to Anayo’s uncle, who fortunately was at home when they arrived. They shared the news with him and then planned with him how to go about breaking the news to Anayo’s mother, who was on the farm. They planned how to bring her home first, since the news could not be announced to her on the farm where she was working. They decided to send somebody she trusted to go and bring her back. This person went with the message that Anayo had just reported home on his way to Ibadan (western Nigeria) and would like to see her before leaving again. Not suspecting anything in the message, she quickly left her work to follow the messenger.

  By the time they reached her home it was already late evening, a time considered conducive to the breaking of bad news or for holding serious discussions. When Anayo’s mother could not find him at home as she had expected, she began to be disturbed. At that vital moment, Anayo’s uncle and the three gentlemen from the city poured into the compound, as if from nowhere. Anayo’s mother had scarcely finished welcoming them before they requested that she sit down for a while. Anayo’s uncle took up the task of breaking the news to her in the presence of the others. She was told the true story: that Anayo had a motorcycle accident, colliding with the mosque, hitting his head on the wall, and dying on the spot. She was told that his body was already on its way home for the burial. Before she could hear all these details she had broken down in uncontrollable wailing, attracting the attention of neighbors and passers-by, who came and joined her, crying in solidarity. And from that day, until some days after the burial, Anayo’s family home was understood to be a house of death and wailing.1

  There was no fixing. It was an unctuous immersion into the necessary alchemy of grief. A curdling so stern and gripping that the dark matrix that led to it was never entered alone. A ritual of many hands and many feet and dusty bodies.

  Inspired by his studies in indigenous spaces of bereavement, I would later investigate how cultures like the Yoruba understood, accommodated, and treated “psychological disorders.” Aize Obayan, a professor of counseling with focus on multicultural issues (who was the “important person” and mentor your mother and I would later visit when she found the two hushes), would keep writing of “extensive” families, disturbing the dichotomized categories of families as either “nuclear” or “extended”—the point being that Africans live collectively, through many bodies, and that the atomization of shared livelihoods into the Americanized industrial model of a father, mother, and two blond (and freckled) children does not leave room for the many fluent means by which we fashion kinship with others and the planet.

  Hope is now done. She is leaving the room after we have spoken about how she experienced the exercise. She says she feels like a heavy burden has been lifted off her chest. She feels free. Since she likes writing, I encourage her to write to her mum (an advice I find I can recommend to myself). My colleagues rub my back, and leave the office along with her. Am I coming, they ask. No, I’d like a few moments alone please, I reply. The office door clicks shut, and I turn around to face the large window that opens out to persistent suffering, the catatonic zombie-kind of suffering that makes sadness a sign of recovery. The wild grass grows unperturbed behind the perforated brick walls of the wards. The sky is turning gray. I lower my head and cry a little.

  There’s a promise in the Book of Revelation—that when the Christ returns he will do so with an epic roar befitting his status as the long-awaited one, and then he will defeat Death itself. Anytime I walked past the inconsolable suffering of the inhabitants of that hospital, I would imagine that I—along with others—was moving slowly but surely to some utopian singularity, a day of reckoning, when suffering would be no more. I might have stopped imagining this day of recompense in terms of messianic arrivals by that time, but the activating questions pressed even closer: what do we do with pain? Why can’t we just be happy? Was there some metaphysical protocol to be observed to bring a person closer to their “and they lived happily ever after”?

  I decided to conduct a grounded-theory qualitative research into the suffering of some of my clients. I taped long interviews, allowing them to speak freely about the traumatic events that had brought them to us, the prevalent social conditions they were immersed in, the presence of social support, and the ways they made sense of their own experiences. By this time, a slow doubt started to fester in my mind: I was slowly losing my conviction that Western mental health care could rigorously address the lively issues the “patients” reported to us. I had been in one too many ward rounds and sat in psychiatric meetings where diagnoses were unilaterally assigned to “that patient,” “oh, that woman?,” and “yes, yes, that poor child.” I had experienced the surge of vile power within me when a client begged me to
tell her what was wrong with her, insisting that I was the expert and knew about her better than she knew about herself.

  I had heard a fully grown Igbo man, with a big belly, a gruff physicality, and hustling quality to his face, tell of the time he refused to lie on a couch because it was a young female psychologist telling him to. He had told her, “Sorry. I have your ‘type’ at home,” which was just his way of saying “others like you give me respect … I cannot do what you ask of me.” Of course, even in conventional psychotherapy, many clients-to-be refuse to work with some therapists, and are eventually referred to someone they can be comfortable with. Yet, I suspected a deeper dynamic was at work, and longed to look past the colors of the capsule to the fine powdery substance enclosed within. Was it possible that one could think of mental health care, recovery, and well-being in radically different ways?

  My grounded theory exposition allowed me to work with the narratives of my clients, generating a multiaxial story that suggested the avoidance of pain was at the heart of (my clients’) suffering. This was the one theme that seemingly encompassed and paraphrased the tears, the stiffness, the dull vacant looks, and the occasional spark of life from within leathery eyes. My participants didn’t think of healing and recovery as something that came as a result of pills and injections. Their limbs may have been cold, hanging loose from their torsos like rejected transplants, but their hopes for a better life reminded me of their humanity.

  However, my grounded theory of pain avoidance felt half-spoken. It wasn’t something I wanted to stand on a raised platform and share with everyone else—even though I eventually did share it before a committee of indifferent professors who were more concerned that I didn’t employ statistical methods in a qualitative study—and also, to be fair to them, that I prefaced my work with a scathing polemic denouncing an entire generation of researchers who had used quantitative research.

  Something was missing, and the clues of it became apparent when I walked the streets of Enugu, that anxious city like Babel where the ground is chastisement, and the sky, reward. You see, dear, one of the claims of modernity and those who advocate a developmental agenda for “primitive people” is that the modern world has made things easier for us. I cannot speak of your time, but in this time we are yet enveloped by the notion of distance, and protected by unwritten laws of anonymity. We—the consumers of modern tinkering—expect things to work for us, and become furious when they don’t. We are like the poor shoemaker in the fable of the Brothers Grimm, who goes to bed and wakes up in the morning to find that the cut leather and nails of the night before have become shoes of great workmanship ready for the sale. We could care less if there were actual elves flying our planes, bearing signals with their mouths from computer to computer, or ensuring that trains arrive on time.

  Divorced from the wilds, from the heart-racing immediacy of the world at large,2 and cradled in the fantasy of our centrality, we have largely become a species of convenience—expecting things to work for us neat and tidy. Luxury seems to be the meta/physics of the least expended effort: technology brings things closer without us having to move so much. I have used the metaphor of adjusting focal length with the camera and thus “moving” while being immobile as a figure of the modern tendency to permanence: with a phone I can hurl my voice at great distances without … well, doing that. And with a camera-phone, I have the benefit of hurling my voice and taking a picture. From all this, I suppose an idea gains a body over time, in trickling sedimentations, perhaps an unintended effect of fixating too much on the human figure: the idea that we are meant to be well. That it is our right, and we must have it now. That wellness can be produced unilaterally, and that even if we arrived at remedies and cures at great expense—or had a way to hold the sun in the sky indefinitely, that would be a good and useful thing.

  The particular estrangements produced by modernity blind us from noticing that the dark we try to push away is not only part of life but necessary to it, and that nothing shows up except partially. To preclude suffering and pain, we turn inward. Modernity, in spite of its expansiveness and rhetoric of reaching for the stars, of endless covetousness and an eternally widening circle, is a collective turning inward. I might even say that curiosity as much as anxiety dwells at the tip of the shovel with which we open up more and more ground: we are hoping to cement our permanence deep enough so that nothing conceivable threatens our centrality.

  We close up the orifices of our collective breathing, and stamp on the soft places where we once yielded to the loamy congress of becoming-things. Crowfoot, the nineteenth-century chief of the Siksika First Nation in what is now known as Canada, wrote: “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” This attention to fleeting things, this utter temporariness and impermanence of things, this romance between wintertime and buffalo, shadow and grass and sunset, speaks of a world that is fragile—and is indifferent to our ambling quests and adolescent insistence on emotional gratification.

  Walking the streets of Enugu, up and down Chime Avenue in New Haven, branching off into streets the names of which I need not remember nor burden you with if I could, brought me to wonder about the modern conditions that constitute us. The covering up, the asphalt, the rationalization of social being, the frenzy of catching up with time, the denial of competing agencies and their constitutive claims on human personhood, the metaphysics of completeness and wholly separate others, the myth of individuality, the circumcision of life’s sensuousness, and the exclusivity of light and shadow. We often speak about getting lost in the dark, but it is also possible to get lost in the light. In fact, a consequence of high definition visuals is that it cuts away the generativity and creativity of an image; once things are so fixed, we become blind to their inexhaustibility. Name the color, blind the eye.

  In Enugu, I imagined there might have been a time when women still gathered at the doorsteps, when women rolled in the dust and clutched their breasts and collective wombs, when practices of massaging the bodies with many hands mothered new mothers—a time perhaps before the Eastern Line and newfound coal and colonial Nigeria. Now is a different time. We are sophisticated, and we no longer have many places to grieve.

  Since we are on about darkness, can I briefly revisit the playfulness of light, dear? I know I tend to sound like a broken record, what with all this talk about double slits and particles and complementarity and all that. But I keep returning here because the material world really does show that just because a thing is commonsensical doesn’t mean it is “true.” Well, I also keep returning here because—according to your jealous mum, who is now side-eyeing me—I also want you to see me as smart!

  Consider this. In the shadow of a perfectly round object, you will find a rebellious glimmer of light—a bright spot in the middle. I’m not being metaphorical here. I really mean to queer the essential and disturb its eminence. What better way to do it in this case than to point to light at the heart of darkness, and vice versa.

  Again, this phenomenon points to “diffraction,” which literally means “breaking up.” I like to think of it as porosity—that there is such a primal mutuality between “things” that nothing “becomes” unless it “becomes-with.”

  When the inventor of the word diffraction, seventeenth-century physicist and Jesuit priest Francesco Grimaldi, directed a focused ray of sunlight into a dark room, managing the ray so that it struck a thin rod and produced a shadow on a screen, he found that “the boundary of the shadow [was] not sharply defined and that a series of colored bands [lay] near the shadow of the rod.” Up till then, the general views established that light waves interacted with surfaces by reflection and refraction. Reflection is when waves hit a surface and bounce back toward to source—which is how you are able to observe yourself in a mirror. Refraction works when waves penetrate a surface, displacing some angles away from the general direction of t
he waves. For instance, when you dip your hand into a pool or a bucket of water, your hand might seem cut off from the rest of your arm, or just plain funny. When Grimaldi performed his experiment, it showed light behaving in unexpected ways. It was as if the light bent around the edges of things to form fuzzy edges and colored bands:

  Replacing the thin rod with a rectangular blade he observes diffraction fringes—bands of light inside the edge of the shadow. Bands of light appear inside the shadow region—the region of would-be total darkness; and bands of darkness appear outside the shadow region.3

  Grimaldi’s work would later inspire Thomas Young in the nineteenth century to assemble his double-slit apparatus. However, Grimaldi’s work was already showing that “there is no sharp boundary separating the light from the darkness: light appears within the darkness within the light within.” In fact, “darkness is not mere absence.… [It] is not light’s expelled other, for it haunts its own interior.”4

  This is true for everything physical. Nothing is complete; everything undergoes a “breaking up” in its co-emergence with “other things.” Look closely at light, and it is haunted by shadows—then observe shadows, and you’ll see traces of light. Light and dark are not opposites or estranged cosmic forces that one side must defeat—for there are no “sides.”

  Gloria Anzaldua writes:

  There is darkness and there is darkness. Though darkness was “present” before the world and all things were created, it is equated with matter, the maternal, the germinal, the potential. The dualism of light/darkness did not arise as a symbolic formula for morality until primordial darkness had been split into light and dark. Now Darkness, my night, is identified with the negative, base, and evil forces—the masculine order casting its dual shadow—and all these are identified with dark skinned people.5