Have You Broken The Dawn
Some parts of Igboland have an interesting way of welcoming people into a new day. We ask, “I boola chi”, which means “Have you broken the dawn”. It is a beautiful phrase which works both literally and metaphorically. To break the dawn (or daybreak) means to break the darkness. According to this fascinating thread, break is used in a rare form here, meaning to burst forth or explode onto the scene. It always reminds me that though darkness shrinks from the light, the mere appearance of light is not necessarily enough to disperse darkness; sometimes, we must choose to embrace the light.
It is a choice that appears on a daily basis: the beckoning of an unfamiliar light and contention with a present darkness. I know what it’s like, to be born into this. To have your identity defined for you before identity itself was even defined. It is often something that is given to us, rarely chosen and ours is formed in our early years, as children. For all our differences, we are similar in that as Nigerian children, we share an uncanny, sometimes scary, familiarity in respective our upbringings. Our humanity was often defined by adults that believed they knew better than they actually did, that they cared more than they actually did and they could show us a love that they hardly possessed.
Sometimes in an attempt to encode this forced identity, many times, children are viciously beaten, often gleefully. Some are almost beaten to death; many ARE beaten to death. Children are assaulted on a daily basis with twin bludgeons of misogyny and patriarchy, hyper-materialism and classism, ethnic bigotry and religious hatred, a convenient morality and a host of others. This assault on the mind leaves deep wounds, left to feed on the mind, growing and spreading like a cancer. An assault of this nature would be impossible without the assistance of the collective: This society.
We know that society plays the preeminent role in the formation of the people of that society and if we accept this fact then any claims that the society we live in is broken must then lead us to question our own natures. It is no coincidence that we are the way we are. The torment of this society ensures that the child (the human) not only remains forever pliant to the ideals of the system, it also torments the mind of the child and robs them of the ability to access the tools (curiosity and critical thinking) that might allow them to escape this wretched prison.
This torture, because that is what it is, makes us both victims and perpetrators of oppression in this same society. Society constricts and restricts us with demands and duties and so we constrict and restrict others. In a bid to find ourselves beneath the darkness, it gives us “permission” to resort to our darkest selves. We beat our partners, crush the souls of our children and we call it love. We withhold touch, ignore commitments, demand respect and we claim affection. We laugh with evil and call it banter. We look away from injustice and call it friendship.
Here, at Mensplainr, we have tried to explain the nature of the plight of women in society and how, as men, we are the primary contributors to that. We think their time and their bodies are ours to define as we deem fit, we hate them and claim not to, our religions who claim righteousness are anything but, we think they are sexual objects mainly for our pleasure and we wouldn’t even trade places with them even though we claim not to be a part of the problem. Men’s role as the oppressor is evident and without question. Yet this “power” the patriarchy bestows extracts a heavy toll. In doing this, in being a central part of the idea and the execution of patriarchy, the humanity we attempt to deny women is stripped from us.
We have bought into an idea of ourselves that is unsubstantiated. Our ideas of self, our roles and purpose are rarely defined by us. “We” as presently constituted are ghosts, unfamiliar to ourselves, hidden from our true natures. How could we know who we are if we have never given ourselves the chance to find out, if we have never been given the chance to find out. Our society has shaped us, it is the only thing that has shaped us and unfortunately, it has also caged us. Our fathers and mothers, our aunts and uncles. Teachers and pastors. Our entertainers and educators. Our role models. They are just as flawed, just as broken.
Yet, though it is evident that these curators of the patriarchy are themselves broken, we are loathe to question this idea of ourselves. We take pride in the supposed nature of man. “Men do not do this, nor do they do that”. The identity of manliness is built on centuries of conventional wisdom, of culture, of religion; ideas of self and expression long held that have been debunked and destroyed. Yet, we hold on tightly. For if we lose this idea of ourselves, this very finely woven thread of what it means to be a man, what are we? who are we? Does the thought not frighten you?
It would be a lie to claim that there is no fear in self-introspection. To confront oneself is to contend with our true nature, with experiences that have long been buried, fears that we think have been reasonably contained. There is nothing natural about how we understand ourselves to be, about how we treat women and even children; about how we treat ourselves. Our ideas about sex, sexuality, gender, roles, identity, religion, faith. The oppression that is often expressed in these ideas are so enshrined in our society that they seem like our true natures. They are not.
We must reach within and ask ourselves those probing questions. Why are we so comfortable being close to and enabling abusers. Why are we slow to extract justice for victims. Why are we comfortable with jokes that are based on lies and hatred? Why are we quick to embrace ideas that dehumanize? Why are we uncomfortable with change or even the questioning of the norm? What are the experiences that have formed us? Why do we act the way we do? These questions, and many like them, allow us not just to see ourselves as we are, not as we pretend to be, but this awareness of ourselves is important for transformation. By transforming ourselves, we not only become acutely aware of our responsibility to ourselves, to grow and evolve, but to our society as well.
Oppressors are not born, they are made, and just like the systems of oppression were defined and moulded, they can be destroyed. We must also do the same. We might claim that our environment might not afford us the time to be patient with ourselves but until we do so, we will remain bound by the very forces that tear at our soul. We are broken and because we have walked our current path for so long, change seems so treacherous. Our society might have beaten us into conformity, bent us to its will so thoroughly but hope abounds.
When a society has failed its children as profoundly as ours has, those within it have the authority and indeed a responsibility to work towards the reformation of that society. Yet to reform society without reforming ourselves is to make the mistakes of the past, perhaps worse because we know better and yet we did nothing.
Even though idea of rediscovering ourselves seems a path that we are loathe to take but it is certainly one worth taking. I know that there is hurt beneath that facade of strength and deep, immeasurable pain beneath that desire for power, to protect ourselves from the demons that torment. But I would like us to know that there is a space for us to confront those very demons, to escape from the darkness. Self-introspection is not a muscle we have flexed throughout our lives and because of this it is often when we are faced with an existential crisis of some sort (an accident, a painful loss) that we pause to truly reckon with the people we have become and in this darkness, some are are reborn.
The end of the patriarchy will be far from easy, it has laced itself into every aspect of ourselves and unlearning will not be easy but ours is a broken society. This task of the destruction of the patriarchy is one that men must undertake — deliberately, consciously. Injustice exists because we allow it do so and though we may not bear responsibility for the society we are born into and indeed, we have not even consented to be born into this corrupt world, we are here. And thus, if we claim to hate injustice and to see it removed from our society then we must break through the darkness and embrace the light.
