The Black Passion of Sleeping Lions:
The Hüzün of the Colonised People’s Descendants
When I first arrived in Paris I noticed immediately how many black people there were; how many Africans; how many dark faces to match my own, how they moved around and in relation to me and against me. And I wasn’t sure why I felt such an awareness of them, I wasn’t sure why it was always as if I took a small breath whenever I encountered another African in Europe – and I was self-conscious of this, and somewhere for some reason I was ashamed, too. There’s something we have together, I’ve realised, that makes it this way – and I think it’s not just me. I feel their awareness of me, as well – the people of my origin (“Black Africa”), their eyes and minds sliding on me when I walk down the street, when I enter the metro, when I sit on a bench alone on the street.
I’ve been trying for a while now to know what it is.
It is, I believe, that is the thing which creates this awareness; it is the idea that this awareness must exist. That we must feel each other. It is, I believe, both imposed on us (by a ‘shared’ history, by the confining paradigms of race, by the thought that if a group of black people stand together it is very likely that a white person might imagine they are related) and it is also subscribed to by us. It is, I believe, the collective black passion we share; our attachment to our history; our common existence as the living mix of life and ruin and pain and wealth and empire.
It is, I believe, our hüzün as the colonised people’s descendants.
It was from Orhan Pamuk that I first learnt hüzün, from his heavy, unashamed, and loving description of the grief of his beloved city, Istanbul. Born of life amidst ruins and the knowledge of being less than the great Ottoman Empire that came before, the hüzün of Istanbullus is “not as the melancholy of a solitary person but the black mood shared by millions of people together” (92). So particular and devoted are his words, and yet I believe that he gifts us with a way of understanding, a process of knowing and feeling, that cannot resist being extended to other realms as important and affecting. And so I claim hüzün too; I claim it because I feel it – it is so close to tangible though it does not exert itself, but rather lies on and in our lives. I feel it in the black nannies with their two white wards; I feel it in the men and women in their traditional cloth sitting quietly on the train; I feel it in chic young dark girls with their hair weaves and edgy cuts; I feel it in the young black boys on their way into the banlieus; I feel it in the smart young professionals and the resigned faces of older men.
Except in our case it is not that we are living among ruins, we are not faced daily with the “…detritus of empire” (101) – but that we are the living product of a history affected, afflicted and distorted. A history that casts its remains on the present life, not in the physical form of the dilapidated limbs of a city, but rather in a lived and embodied reality – with all the colonised people’s descendants carrying it around with them. Although I cannot say that we carry our hüzün by choice, I do agree that hüzün here is also not “an illness for which there is no cure” nor “an unbidden pain from which we need to be delivered” (103). It is the inevitable and appropriated state of being; as Pamuk says of his hüzün “ ... it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating” (91).
And with the burden and weight of our hüzün we must also acknowledge the complicated honour that is present in it, in “… the hüzün we absorb with pride and share as a community” (94). Just as with the Sufi hüzün of holy anguish, our suffering brings us a certain dignity; we are still proud peoples; we had and have magnificent cultures; we have endured and we have survived the destructive force of empire; we are making our lives even as we carry and live this suffering which we cannot forget because it is in our flesh.
I am often wondering how the others feel it. The other young black Africans. Do they think of it? As I do? Do they feel the weight in their skin and in their thoughts and in what privilege they may have – as I do? We all have suffering, and we all have suffered, but we have not the same history and not the same present. So when I am spoken to of revolution I am at a loss as to how to respond – how do we enact such change when we are infused with the history? When we are living with these threads in us that inform even our happiness, when we have already and continuously factored in the pain and shame and loss? When we don’t even know these things, when we didn’t experience these things, not really, but have to build our lives with what has been left to us and what we are yet to do?