The man died.
There is a lot of negativity going on. Our access to the latest news makes it such that we are inundated with a deluge of bad news. As much as we need to be updated on the latest happenings, and we need to lend our voices to cries for justice, we must also protect our sanity. Last week, I felt the strain of recent events. I have since taken steps to protect myself. You can learn some protective measures from this article. Work for me involves writing and planning, and it takes a lot of brain power. I like to unwind from work by surfing the net and watching funny videos and skits. However, the past week was filled with death, outrage and pain.I have silently eyed the death toll of Covid-19 in the past week, watching it rise slowly, with an average of almost 10 lives lost every day. There is something damning about statistics, and as a public health enthusiast, I fight to keep a proper perspective about statistics. They have a paradoxical value, they tell us the immensity of the damage, while taking away the individuality and in essence, the humanity of our loss. When taken at face value, statistics make the identities of those lost just a number.
This article published by the New York Times was quite harrowing. In it, the names of 1,000 of the nearly 100,000 people who have died from Covid-19 in the US are published. Not just their names, but glimpses of the lives they led, and the people they were. Here is a snippet.
Cornelia Ann Hunt, 87, Virginia Beach, her last words were “thank you” • Rita Paas, 88, Comstock Park, Mich., never missed “Wheel of Fortune,” “Jeopardy” or “Lawrence Welk” • Lila A. Fenwick, 87, New York City, first black woman to graduate from Harvard Law School • Alice Coopersmith Furst, 87, Kentfield, Calif., in the first class of girls admitted to the Bronx High School of Science.People are dying, and the world is going on anyway.
The Thing Around Your Neck
The past week felt like an intense bleeding of sorts. As people’s lungs gave way and vital organs shutdown due to a viral pandemic whose impact could have been lessened, somewhere in the world, a man knelt on the neck of an obviously non-violent man for about 9 minutes until he died. George Floyd’s kept saying, “I cannot breathe”, but his skin color made his voice nothing but a silent whisper. George Floyd called for his mother, and I wonder if she heard his cries. If in her death-sleep, she felt her baby’s pain. Did she cry? Did her neck hurt too, as George’s neck did? Thankfully, his voice became the silent whisper that woke up sleeping hearts. We must remember George, not just as a symbol, but also as a man. He lived, he laughed, and he loved.
What does it mean when a man falls from the sky?
We are Homo sapiens, all 7 billion plus of us that walk this earth, and the amount of melanin in our skin cells, width of our nostrils, and the thickness of our lips, do not change the weight of our hearts or the worth of our souls. We were made to fly, but we are weighed down every day, by hate, discrimination, and anger. This week the world burnt, perhaps not the entire world, but all over, every human being that has been told by the term, ‘black’, that their skin had too much melanin, their nose was a bit too flat, lips too thick, and hair too coarse (Based on flawed and skewed standards by the way. I wonder who decided what was standard size or color, and what was not?) felt the weight of Chauvin’s knees pressed into their necks. We all felt the paradox of a man who wanted to live, trapped in a body being whose life-force was taken forcefully. We felt the pain and betrayal of trying to draw breath with everything in us, while a human like us held onto the oxygen in the room and knelt maniacally in his abundance and power till our breath became air. We felt it, and we raged on the internet. In the United States, they raged on the streets, and fire burnt, in human hearts and in buildings.
And the man died
Again.
Back home, there were cries of a massacre in Southern Kaduna, and wails because a power drunk policeman had killed again. This time, it was not a clash of skin color, but the reinforcement of a certain belief that one man was superior to another. A trigger happy policeman took the life of 16 year old Tina, he shot her, and though she fought to hold on, she could not. The force of his bullet was too great, the destruction too final.
I wonder why the outrage about local events does not match that about international ones. I think it is because, when you are born in Nigeria, you quickly learn how little regard is held for human lives, and thanks to the media machine, Western societies are upheld as the ideal, the ones where fairness and justice have a fighting chance, and the life of every man is deemed equal; at least on paper. So, the outrage we feel emanates not only from the pain of the death, but from the betrayal and helplessness we feel. We wonder, “Where is truly safe?” Disregarded at home and disregarded abroad: a place that seemed like the foreshadowing, no matter how faint, of the world we desire.
Things fall apart
When we clamor for a gluing together of the brokenness of our humanity, without trying to avoid a repeat of the mistakes that led us here, without seeking for true and wholesome healing. A painful truth that is difficult to accept is the reality that most of us hardly heal well from trauma. Healing from the hurt inflicted by evil deeds is extremely difficult, repressing it, or suffering in silence can sometimes seem like an easier way. Sometimes, it is the only way; we are hard-pressed by the constraints of a society that harms us and seeks to quell our voices. However, whenever we can, we should exorcise our demons, not only bind them in the chains of silent suffering. Because when we do so, they remain, pacing around us, wrecking an insidious but inaudible havoc in us, growing stronger with every passing moment.
Animal Farm
No man is superior to another.
We cannot continue to live in this Orwellian dystopia. To carry the flags of a push for freedom, without seeking to completely revolt against every vestige of oppression is to continue in this lie. Truth be told, oppression has different forms, and like the blind men and the elephant, we will always see it differently. We will always pick different battles; we will always fight different wars. I know now that no war is greater or better than the other in our march towards a more wholesome world. Different movements must learn to respect the difference of their battles, and acknowledge the oneness of their purpose. We must be humble enough to not only accept, but also remove the strains of oppression that spring up within us and threaten the new world we seek to establish before its birth.
We must pay heed, lest we become pigs, and declare that;
All animals are equal, but some are more equal than the others.
All pain is valid, and like I have learnt, every pain has its time and place for expression. Today we mourn George, we mourn the victims of the Southern Kaduna massacre, we mourn the 373,991 people that have died from Covid-19 globally, and the 287 we have lost in Nigeria. We also demand #JusticeforTina and for Uwa, who was raped and left for dead by yet to be identified men.
There are conversations that must be had, to ensure that justice and fairness prevail.
Else:
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
