Holding On to Ourselves

The Kingdom of Benin, a pre-colonial nation in southern Nigeria which is distinct from the country Benin, was a powerhouse of trade, knowledge, and political might in West Africa until its annexation by the UK in 1897. It was famous for their brilliant and beautiful ivory masks, and for the massive walls in their capital, Edo, re-named “Benin City” by the colonizers. Creative. These huge fantastical structures, which were said to be four times longer than the Great Wall of China, and took an estimated 150 million work hours and hundreds of years to build. For transparency and context, Great Wall wasn’t completed until 1878, and once completed it was longer than the walls of Edo at over 21,000 km compared to Benin’s impressive 16k. Imagine that. The walls around one city in this kingdom were only 5,000km short of the longest and largest structure in the world, and they did it in far less than half the time, taking roughly 600 years against China’s 2500 years of building the Great Wall. They’re gone now. Most of what’s left of them is being scavenged by locals for building materials or torn down for real estate developments.  

Hello. My name is Joseph. You may not be aware of this, but I’m a first generation American. My parents came here in the mid and late 80s from Cameroon, which shares a northern border with modern-day Nigeria. Cameroon was colonized by the Germans around the same time that Benin was ending, going on to be taken over by France and the UK after WWII, all of this after being initially colonized and mined for slaves and resources by the Portuguese in the 1400s. She didn’t gain independence until 8 years before my mother’s birth in 1960. I don’t know what was there before the Europeans. I don’t know who we were pre-colonization. I don’t know what cultures or kingdoms existed there before they were gone.  

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I find myself more and more aware of how finite everything is. I was thinking about my favorite queer cinema recently, formative films from my youth such as Children of God, The Graffiti Artist, Beautiful Thing, Parting Glances, and Were the World Mine. All fantastic films I would totally recommend you seeing. None of them are available to stream in the US except for on Amazon, and Amazon isn’t exactly recommending them to new audiences. For a long of young queer people out there today, these movies are just... gone. Vanished. They were so accessible to me as a child. I didn’t even really look for them, I stumbled into these precious gems, these triumphs of identity on film almost by accident when I was younger. Now they’re inaccessible, virtually gone in many ways. 

I’m afraid of loss. Not of losing something, or even of lacking something. Not even of death really. I could lose my ability to walk, my voice, my life, a loved one. It would be hard, but I know I’d deal with it, I know I could move past it to whatever’s next. I could handle it, weather it out, survive. I’m not scared of that, per se. What scares me is not suddenly losing something. It’s waking up on some normal day, and going about my business, and at some inconsequential moment – perhaps starting my car, or brushing my teeth, or as I turn the knob of the door – I realize that something I hadn’t even thought to miss is gone; inaccessible, destroyed, absent, and worst of all, remote. And suddenly the only thing I have of it is its absence. I don’t remember what it was like to have it around. Its loss is forever more real to me than its presence ever was.  

When someone asks me who I am, it’s a weird question. I know who I am. I feel me, I live me, I experience myself, and exclusively myself, constantly. I am comfortable in me, I love me. And suddenly I have to explain or justify aspects of myself to a stranger, things I haven’t questioned in years. When I’m asked “why do you dress like that?” or “why do you think that way?” or “why do you believe that?” I’m dumbstruck; how do I even begin to explain myself? How can you explain color to one who can’t see it, sound to those who can’t hear, or the air to a fish? I must become not myself as I am, or through my eyes, but through theirs. What don’t they know? What can’t they see? What must I teach them?  

When I look in the mirror today, I mostly see someone I like – someone attractive and desirable, someone interesting, someone competent. I didn’t always. I used to hate my face, my body, my personality. I almost remember that person, who didn’t love themselves, didn’t like what they saw. I can see parts of them in my mirror, in old pictures, in a video from long ago. I remember hating those things, and the person I saw in them. Now I look at them, and I love them. I love that child who was trying so hard, going through so much, who didn’t see or appreciate themselves like I do. And they never did. They’re gone now. And they’ll never know that I ended up loving them as much as they desperately wished they could love themselves. But they’re gone, and I didn’t even see them going. They’ll never know. 

The Kingdom of Benin and its walls were destroyed by the British Empire, and their masks were stolen, pillaged by the invaders and sold to pay for the pillaging. The British were so arrogant in their destruction that they marveled that African could make masks so intricate, so beautiful, they didn’t believe that the things they stole truly belonged to the ones they stole it from in the first place. The masks were stuck in boxes in the basement of the British museum for sixty years before being taken out and flaunted, a trophy of British imperialism. Their fantastic walls, their legacy all gone. They’re still gone for Nigerians, still sitting in the British museum. Their walls have vanished, been rubbed off the face of the earth. What must it have been like to stand atop them, or sleep safe behind them, or take them in from without as you approached the beautiful capital of one of West Africa’s greatest kingdoms? We’ll never know. The opportunity to see it ended over a century ago, and now it’s gone. We’ll never see them, and our only memory of it is its absence, our first encounter with it is its loss.  

Last year, my mother found out that her family is from the Bassa tribe. When I looked up some more info on them, I found a Wikipedia page on them that was only six paragraphs long. It described them as staunch and continual anti-colonialists, fighting German occupation and leading the decolonization of Cameroon after the war for independence, ultimately losing out for being too radical. Many Bassa people still believe in a thing called “nka kunde,” a national liberation that has yet to come. Under notable figures, there are two names – a pro basketball player and Werewere Liking, a theatre artist, researcher, critic, and writer who is now my personal idol. The header above their names lets me know that this section was empty until March of 2013.  

I feel all sorts of pride when I think of my ancestors, a group of revolutionaries who started a political party of Marxist identitarians. But I don’t know their names, or how or even if my family participated in that culture. They’re gone to me. My first time meeting them and they were already gone. 

I hate to end things on a sad note, but this piece makes me sad. I cried while writing this, and I cry about the subject matter a lot. I cry about the decline of VHS tapes, I cry over museum and art theft and the destruction of precious pieces of our history, I cry about website domains expiring and us losing all record of the things someone cared about enough to jot down and share with the world. I cry over the loss of indigenous culture, of the theft of their languages and their children and their homelands. All of this isn’t me crying over things; I cry for the loss of our culture, for the loss of ourselves. It is so easy for trillions of people’s lives to be erased, lost, forgotten. Not just from death, but from the erasure of the culture and writing and art that they made. Lost like pocket change or keys or a scrap of paper. That is us. That is all of us. So many items waiting to be lost, scattered across a table for anyone to sweep off into the abyss, to nothingness, into the trash.  

Sometimes I think that heaven is a wide, soft, clean cloth spread around the table, waiting to catch us and gather us up once we’ve fallen. Maybe God in Her infinite wisdom likes to arrange and sort us, or makes special places for us to be kept and displayed and handled with love and care once we’ve been caught up. Maybe everything we’ve lost is waiting for us somewhere else. I know that it is, honestly. I get that it’s cool for us to pretend we’re all secular, and that we don’t believe in anything really, but I really believe in that. But it’s not quite good enough for me. I don’t want to wait for some heaven in the future where our lives aren’t lost, where we are treated well, where we’re found. I want to find us right here, right now, today. So I’m buying every queer film I loved and keeping them on my shelf. I got some VHS tapes from the thrift store and a VCR and I’m watching a new one every day. I look in the mirror and I always, intentionally, find something, or everything, to love. I listen to stories, I watch movies and plays, I read books, I live and I hold everything I can where I can. I put my life before the table’s edge and I stop every single thing I can, for as long as I can, even if it’s just a little bit longer. I want to set a beautiful table here. I want Heaven today.