This summer, new Ohio University students were given the opportunity to enter an essay contest on Cion.  Over the next few days we’ll be featuring some of the responses we liked the best.  (Congratulate these students if you know them!)

Mourning

by Keri Christerson

In the novel Cion by Zakes Mda, the dead as well as the past are considered very important and even revered. Memories of the dead tell an important story, and the people of Kilvert as well as the protagonist seem to understand this very well.  As the story progresses it is noticed that people in Kilvert, especially the Quigleys, take pride in their dead and make it a point to know their stories. But they mourn in a very different way than the protagonist. Growing up in a society where mourning is mainly internal, does how a person mourns change how meaningful the mourning is?  It is part of human nature to mourn someone’s death, and most of the time just mourning internally is not enough. We sometimes need a shoulder to cry on, and sometimes we may feel like wailing and moaning, declaring our temporary despair to the world. Because society frowns upon this we cannot.

The main character of the novel is a professional mourner by the name of Toloki. He has a very different way of mourning compared to our society. He is very expressive with his “style” of mourning, using dances, wails and moans drawn from his experiences to show his sadness. Being a professional, he only mourns the people he doesn’t know, even stating later in the book that he cannot properly mourn his past love, Noria, because “a doctor can’t heal himself”. Although he doesn’t know these people, however, he seems to draw the emotions from others and display them in a way that they all are too afraid to show. This makes him a very important part of many peoples’ lives.

In America’s society we are basically taught not to mourn in a way that people can see. We are used to the optimistic expressions such as ‘chin up’ or ‘things get better in time’. We are allowed to inwardly mourn for a short time, but then are supposed to move on or find therapy. I consider this very unhealthy.

I believe we should mourn however we please. If we must, we should be able to dance and moan while mourning. We should be able to cry openly without fear of being looked at in weird ways. Properly mourning is not sucking it up and forgetting about it, it is praising the dead for the wonderful lives they lived and showing their impact on our lives in whatever way we please. Not only should everyone have someone like Toloki in their lives, they should learn to be their own professional mourner.

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