Editor’s Note: This piece contains discussions of suicidal ideations
By Zanta Nkumane
I think about dying more often than I should. I don’t think of living as much as a living thing must. That’s what the darkness does. The steadfast gall of my lungs to continue expanding and constricting daily bewilders even me. To be born, without my consent, into a world that is simply a constellation of all the unlovely things that exist to gnaw at my light, is my second sin. The original sin is some god allowing my conception.
When your life is a perpetual inquest—curving and arching like a question mark, but the most important parts of you are a dot on the other side of an empty space—dying quickly becomes your waking dream. To experience reality, where you and your body feel like a collection of incisions you can’t point out to patch, is gruesome. It’s within this rabid madness that the darkness grips me. This is how anxiety and depression wreathed into me.
I cannot map exactly in my life when the darkness arrived. It’s possible that I always had it tucked away in me, a weight I hauled in my bloodstream. Unknowingly present. Now here it sits on my chair. Now here it lies next to me in my bed. Now here it is choking my laugh. Now here it is. Always, there.
Within a Black, queer body my existence holds an assortment of stigmas that are projected onto me by the world. I carry a combination of marginal identities that hold an enduring need for self-sufficiency and suffering. When you add mental illness to these strata, it feels like just a further othering; a third marginal experience that you must now also contend with, another sheet to add to your wrongness.
Living in a society that links queerness to shame, guilt and isolation means my mental illness is only exacerbated by the consideration that my queerness contributes to it. The spurts of constant self-monitoring, the unnecessary need to excel and please others but demolish myself, the fear of being found out and fear of coming out, all create the nutritional loam for anxiety and depression to impale into your land. These are prologues of my broken spirit.
As Black people, we are descendants of a traumatised bloodline, where our ancestors’ own healing was not pursued because pain was made intrinsic to the Black experience by the diabolical order of colonization. I am Black first because I have always been surrounded by Black, so Black was home, a supposed tether to fellowship. But my queerness was my first mark of otherness.
At times the double intersection of blackness and queerness makes it more pressing for us to be carefree and resilient, since so much is ‘against us’. This does not always serve our community well. We underplay mental illness in our communities when we do not name it as such. Naming my depression has equipped me with the language to seek help.
I could not begin reparative measures unless I named my anxiety and depression because one needs to know what to repair in order for it to be effective healing. I discovered that until you call it out loud, you will flounder and meander trying to figure out what ails you. You minimise it to just “one of those days,” then those days become weeks, then months, and you still feel down. Naming my mental illness and owning it saved my life.
I understand that there are compounding factors that affect how we seek help or how we accept help when we have been cultivated for self-sufficiency from an early age. Silence and secrecy are an early currency exchanged in our Black familial affective economies under colonization, sometimes for survival. But it is important to know when silence is more detrimental to one’s personhood than speaking.
Silence around both mental illness and queerness lends itself to stigma that makes it difficult for queer people who need the help to seek it. It is our duty to bludgeon the reality of mental illness through our communities until multiple forms of therapy are accessible at affordable rates. Until we don’t have to “come out” about mental illness as well.
Mental illness involves a grander gathering of experiences: a fluency in loss, a vernacular of sorrow even. But it began for me in the secret knowledge of my otherness, which opened the door for these dilapidating monsters to infiltrate the deepest parts of my mind for years without remedy.
If you asked me how I got this far, I could never explicably say. The darkest of days feel like no tomorrow. But envisioning a future where I feel less heavy tends to comfort me. It has mainly been the hope of my friends, my ancestors that has fortified me. Hope has both been an adversary and a friend in this journey, but on the days she is my friend, she has kept me alive.
Suggested Readings:
, “The art of darkness“, Mail & Guardian, 2017
K.Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams is a text I return to often. He died by suicide in 2005. His work has had a huge impact on my life as writer but now dealing with anxiety and depression, I understand him more. The above article is about his battle with depression and the darkness that haunted him throughout his life.
Spencer Quong, “Survival as a Creative Force: An Interview with Ocean Vuong“, The Paris Review, 2019
Vuong is also another writer that has affected me in a way I never imagined. He has taught me how to think about writing as a change agent for healing too.
Eryn Allen Kane, “Fragile“, YouTube, 2019
This song was the soundtrack to most of my down episodes. Describes generational emotional inheritances, so it’s very fitting for this. Love Eryn!
Dixon Chibanda, “Why I train grandmothers to treat depression“, Ted, 2017
I was raised by my grandmother, so this Ted Talk also resonated with me.
Zanta Nkumane is a Swazi freelance writer, journalist and ex-scientist. Hisw workhas appeared on Genderlinks, OkayAfrica, This Is Africa, Mail &Guardian, HuffingtonPost SA, Kalahari Review , Johannesburg Review Of Books & New Frame. His work is focused on the black, queer experience and reviewing books. You can follow him on Twitter @Zion_SD and on Instagram @Zanta_nk
