It did not occur to me, while standing on the dust eaten roads of my childhood village, that the frightening spectacle of dancing masquerades at the market was actually a performance of indigenous art. As the highlight of our family’s trips to the east, my sister and I were always escorted to these masquerade viewings by aunts and older cousins. But the outings usually ended in tears. I felt, at the time, that I was in some kind of horror story, my heart would ram against my chest hoping that the masked gaze of these creatures would not look my way; that they would not charge in a feat of ancestral rage towards my tiny viewing corner. If they turned around or swirled in my direction, if they raised their canes at another unfortunate viewer, I would scream, and then feel my tears as they rolled down my cheeks. Yet, the very next time I was in the village, I wanted to go see them again—it was a hopelessly tortured cycle riding on hysteria and entertainment.
I am entering the new year thinking about what it means to move forward by looking behind. It’s a small contradiction because the past is something I have always thought must be left in the past. I remember a conversation about dreams that I once had with my mother—I had revisited an old home on more than one occasion, in my dream, and my mother had promptly announced that it was a sign of retrogression. In a few ways, I have inherited my mother’s hyper spiritual gaze at the world, and I use the phrase hyper-spiritual because I’m resistant to alternative labels. Still, it seems to me that it is bad luck to go back to a place that you have left behind, almost akin to inheriting the fate of Lot’s wife, to be frozen in time, a pillar of cemented regrets. Yet, here I am thinking about all my yesterdays—without the language for resolutions or vision boarding; my 2023 feels a lot like a signpost and all it says is to look back.
In the village, I was told that these masquerades we saw were spirits—disembodied beings who had come to instruct and discipline poorly behaved villagers. So, I was shocked when during one of such trips, I met a distant cousin whom I learned performed as a masquerade as some kind of side hustle. Somehow, I had been very literal in my interpretations of these stories. Since my uncle swore that the masquerades were spirits, then they were spirits. But now, with the retrospect of adulthood, I have a more expansive vocabulary for thinking about what I had seen again and again. On one hand, there is the masquerade as a venerated being. As a god, a creature of the waters or the child of ala. But there is also the mask in masquerade, where the mask stands as metaphor, masking as the practice of memory, masking as a kind of literary inscription, as though in the absence of letters, costume becomes language. This is what I know: even the things we cannot explain terribly seek to be understood. As I write, I am thinking about Ijele masquerades. Ijele is considered to be regal, the king of all masquerades; so complex that it takes a hundred men over a year to set up her costume. They say that Ijele is the largest masking system to enter the history of world masking traditions [1] and that UNESCO has also listed it as one of the cultural traditions in Africa that needs to be safeguarded. [2] I am reading these things and wonder to myself why I did not look closer to what was right in front of me?
Sometime last month, I resumed activity on social media. It was a small wonder to see what I had always known, that the world does not need my gaze to forge ahead, and so while I was stewarding my solitude, close acquaintances had wedded and had whole babies. People had died. Moved countries. Some had persistently sent messages, ignoring the fact that each previous one was neither read nor replied. More interestingly, less than a week after I resumed, I wanted to leave again. This time close accounts for good, burn it all to the ground. But I stayed. I am staying. Just like I knew when to take off, I have the peculiar sense that the season demands my staying, as a way of looking. There is a place for everything, even our culturally performative spectacle. There is a time to avert the gaze and a time to be in community. But in order to stay well, it seems like I, too, need a mask. I don’t necessarily mean a mask as a covering of an authentic subjectivity, but a mask as a sheath with which to move around these spaces. The mask as metaphor, as boundary, as a way to maintain solitude in public life. But also the mask as memory. A way to remember and reclaim myself in the midst of our hyper mediated spectacle of social life.
As I’ve been thinking about Igbo cosmology, I’ve also been thinking about the debate surrounding the repatriation of African artifacts by western museums. To be honest, I share the general anxiety, however reductive, that returning these artworks without robust cultural archival institutions is maybe a good plan with bad timing. But mostly, my impatience on the subject matter derives from the limits of the language that surround the conversation. What exactly is reparation? What does it mean to return artifacts to indigenous African communities who are increasingly losing a sense of their cultural identification? Who gets to return or reclaim cultural memory? And how do we quantify time and history that have slowly dissipated in the span of more than a century? How do we move forward to truly reclaim if we don’t look behind at what we have lost?
The past must be dealt if we are to create room for the new. How was it that Jesus put it? “You do not put new wine in old wine skin.” But this work of shedding old wineskin is terrible, full of mining and aching. For me particularly, the future feels buried in the past. In the echo of old promises. In futures that seem to have missed their timeline. 2023 feels much like remembering the hopes of 2018, and 2021, and 2014. But these hopes can sometimes mean remembering the failures. Remembering what didn’t work. What was taken. What was lost. Still, if the reading in my heart is right, the new year feels like a culmination of answers to old questions. Like a return of lost things. It is hard to dream when you have failed repeatedly. And so maybe the point is not for a new goal, but for an old one. Maybe we can go back and dig up and dust off and declare—yes, yes, our dead things will live again.
[1] Wikipedia
Great read! Indeed, the past shapes the present and the future; hence, a visit to the past helps guide the future.
Have a prosperous 2023, Tochi.