Wake-keeping and Wailing as Praxis: Yelwata/Daudu, on my Mind

In his song "Buga," Kiss Daniel's intro includes the line "Wake up, don't sleep!" Although he was asking for alertness for a different purpose, the phrase nonetheless should represent our rallying cry and the fierce urgency of the moment in Nigeria.

For those who have read my story, my father died two years after ethnic and extremist religious crises like those going on in Yelwata/Daudu, southern Kaduna, and more places like it cost him what he had labored for more than forty years of his life. The ever-present threat of death, including avoidable ones, everywhere you turn in Nigeria resulted in my sister-mum death in an accident we were both involved in; unfortunately, she passed away days later in 2021.

Since my sister-mum passed, I have made efforts to move on, but I can't move past it. I have consulted various medical professionals, including therapists, psychologists, physiologists, and nutritionists, but I can't seem to move on. I took self-care seriously, incorporating meditation and medication, even yoga, but I still couldn’t let go.

Christina Sharpe's "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being" gave meaning to what I was going through. I was wake-keeping. In the book, among others, she examined how what she termed "asterisked histories" leave an impact in their aftermath that continues to shape present realities and how a practice of wake, which draws from the cultural tradition of wake-keeping for the dead, becomes a praxis we all need to embrace as we confront what she calls "a past that is not past." I was wake-keeping because the conditions and afterlife of a necro-political calculus stirred me in the face everywhere I turned.

Wake-keeping, as a praxis, is "sitting together in the pain and sorrow of death as a way of marking and remembering." To wake-keep means to sit, think, and fight for "those who are dying and for those living lives that are always at risk of imminent death, a life lived in the presence of death." (p.38). To wake -keep is to speak for "those who hovered on the brink between material life and death" (p. 130)

From the Judeo-Christian text, we learn of how the prophet Isaiah walked naked and barefoot for three years as a wake-up call. (Read Isaiah 20:1–4). God endorses this kind of praxis, as evidenced by his instruction to the prophet Jeremiah to call for the wailing women to mourn (Jeremiah 9:17-26).

Where are the wailing men and women? Are we only going to make performative statements and conduct condolence visits, then move on as if nothing has happened? A whole nation is sinking because of someone's political ambitions. Because they must get votes from a region and some people that endanger, erase, and remove countless lives and displace communities.

Wake-keep is a call for alertness and awakening that makes us confront, call out, and demand accountability from our government about the safety, security, and sanity of us as citizens.

I tried to shut this out of my mind, but I couldn't.