I haven’t been a stranger to the big D…. Depression. For those of you thinking about the other “Big D,” I appreciate your perverted mind 🙂
For the past year, I have been a witness to how Ghanaian’s deal with trauma, loss, disappointment and depression. For the most part, they don’t deal with it at all because acknowledging the above almost seems to be a form of weakness in spirit. When someone passes away, often it seems they passed away from an illness that could have easily been prevented elsewhere in the world or even worse from a gruesome accident caused by bad roadways or reckless Trotro drivers, you are expected to say “Sorry, may God watch over you.” Now while this seems quite harmless, imagine hearing this over and over as your heart rips apart because a loved one is unable to share the same space as you in a split second.
At first, I thought people were just saying the same things because that was what they were always taught to say. Even during our funeral processes, there are things that you are expected to say at certain moments. I assumed people were unknowingly heartless during moments of despair and then I began to see the tears. The tears that formed in the eyes of grown men as they folded their arms tight and quickly wiped their eyes and noses with handkerchiefs before they were seen by the prying eyes of others whom were disguising their own sorrows. The women are a bit more open with their tears but quick to dismiss their grief as being part of life.
Suicide in the motherland is often looked as something the colonizers brought here. It isn’t part of our culture and it is a weakness of the soul that no one seems to fathom because despite the troubles you are going through, there is always someone who has it worse that you and you don’t see them trying to kill themselves. It’s something the kids are learning on the internet because our forefathers have suffered more than these kids and survived to live another day.
I can’t speak for the causes of mental health in the motherland, I am just a witness and at times a survivor of depression. All I can say is life and death here feel an awful lot closer than anywhere else I have ever lived. The six degrees of separation feels like 2 degrees. Disappointment is a part of my daily life and it is hard especially when you need a win. I know it is easy to say, the homeless guy down the street has it worse than me, and of course he does in the physical world. But chances are he may just be more at peace with his world than I am with mine or you are with yours. I will never be able to speak about the demons people fight in their minds on a daily basis, but I think it is important that we recognize that they are fighting them. And some days, we win and are able to push those vicious thoughts aside and proceed to smile, but other days we crawl into a ball under a blanket and pray for the beginning of a new day. If we are lucky, we see that new day and get to fight the good fight all over again.
1 thought on “Motherland Blues!”
I will be transparent. When I was in Ghana it seemed that for a month, every other day, there was a report on the news about suicide. I was taught that suicide was a white person’s problem! So when I was in Ghana it became real to me that Black people commit suicide. Even at 27, I was still acknowledging that suicide was only a white people problem.