On the one year anniversary of my first return back home to Nigeria in over a decade, I reminisced on feelings of what could have been.
I looked through pictures of family, food, and landscapes where I imagined myself reunited with at this point in the summer. In lieu of the familiarity of my family homes, I read and worked in the house I have lived in for the past decade.
This past month, I took a deep dive into solidifying my relationship with my research project and goals. In the past few weeks, I have a couple of books that I considered fundamental to defining my project. These texts include one that I have seen regarded as critical to Black studies and critical psychology studies, Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. My engagement with the book was nothing less than a journey. On one hand, I had not personally discovered major critiques of the text, but encountered difficulty reading what I regarded as dated methods of examining the black (read black femme) psyche. I let myself discover and form my opinions of the book on my one, a practice I don’t normally employ, and learned a great deal that I feel applies to my Africa House research. One of my main take-aways was Fanon’s explanation/exploration of trauma as an overwhelming experience in the bodymind relationship.
Beyond reading and noting sources, my post would be an incomplete summary of my month without mentioning the difficulties I have come across in coordinating conversations with sources. I have had some trouble initiating contact with the demographic of academics and practitioners I had planned to speak to, as I discovered a critical fact of conducting research with Nigerians: it’s hard. As a person who left the country at a young age, I’ve forgotten common practices to have when speaking to adults and academics. This made some of my conversations start rocky but eventually round up well. In the next month, I am looking to continue to solidify my thesis and check-in with members of the Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology hub in South Africa on my project thus far.