Melancholy as a Praxis of Resistance. Part 1

There are so many registers of resistance in the world, but the one Nigerians practice the most is joy and resilience, even amid pain and reality. Within the context of Queer African studies, Green-Simms calls it “critical resilience.” This practice of pleasure and sociality in precarious situations has earned Nigerians the title of the "Happiest people on Earth." In his charming pedestrianism, Abami Eda, the Great Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, calls it “shuffering and smiling.” Across the Atlantic, our black cousins in quotidian colloquialism call it “laugh to keep from crying.”

Nigerians seem to engage in this method of resistance so much that if someone is dying, it seems, and another announces something that excites us, we forget our sorrow and aim for joy rather than allow ourselves to sink into Melancholy and reap its benefits. My concern with this approach to reality is that joy can sometimes anesthetize our reality but doesn’t make it go away. The fun and frolicking that characterize our response can be both coping and defense mechanisms, but in my reading, they can also be veneers that cloak our unwillingness to demand change.

However, another praxis of resistance that seems missing is melancholy. We saw this at the rivers of Babylon in the Judeo-Christain text when captives were asked to sing the song of Zion in a very unpleasant circumstance. They asked, “How could we sing the song of God in a land of captivity?” It is a refusal to make merry when a situation demands sobriety. (Psalm 137)

I took a class with Professor Jill Casid in Art History. They had an installation and article titled “Melancholy as Medium” about the importance of Melancholy in the aftermath of COVID-19. My reflections in this post draw mainly from their work. I will cite Professor Casid and invert it for our Nigerian realities.

What is melancholy, you may ask. It is when “rather than circumscribe our mourning as a means to return to the regime of things as they were, melancholy practiced as a medium holds open the aperture for change, calling on us to confront” our realities. It is the “work of reckoning” with issues that have shaped our past and those that people who dominate us wish we should forget. It is the practice of "carrying our dead with us into the battles we must still wage in their names, in our names, in all the many names that claim us. Melancholy weaponizes rage-grief" for resistance.

With everything happening with Dele Farotimi, the reported filing against him at the Federal High Court in Ekiti and others like him.

My prayer is that may we not mourn and move on but activate our Melancholy to insist that the rule of law must be followed.

May we engage the militancy of mourning(read as resistance) to insist that our institutions should not intimidate those they were created to serve

Kindly email me at oyin2010@gmail.com for photo credit.