The Distance and Whiteness of a High Ceiling

What is the weight of a trauma? How do you measure it? How do you carry it along? And what power does it endow you with? These questions – especially the latter – might seem presumptuous, coming from someone who has had the benefit of finding himself a cozy place on the scale of life-induced woundedness. This someone is me. I call myself a situation teller.

Sometimes, I use words to hide the poetical void that a solid home can create. I sink into my chair and enjoy this apathetic rapture. No need to measure the pain. A few of these words will be part of this text. They form concepts, seeking ways to explain the discomfort that lingering roots can cause. We are no trees, but when I speak of human roots, it is more than just a figure of speech. It is inspired by the work and love of my partner who holds branches of ideas and feelings underneath his skin. While I am spending a fortune on growing tropical house plants, he coexists with actualtrees inside his head. They persist in the shape of memories. I can hardly tell if that is enough of a consolation to defeat uprootedness. The shape of our roots, the way we grow them and the kind of nourishment they provide to us define our practices of residing. This text is meant to tackle that phenomenon. It seeks to invalidate the glitches I attest to myself and my biography. It is supposed to take me home. The result will be as honest as it might be confusing. I will do my best to guide you through this expedition. I allow you to colonise my thoughts. This is what I am seeking. And this is what I am ashamed of.

I don’t trust my memories. They are corrupted. They have become a currency on the market of identity-building. If I reminisce, they charge pain. And if I pay, they refuse to deliver. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always had a fixed and secure residence. I grew up in a middle-class environment with doctors as parents and a house in their possession. More than 30 years later, my apartment is much smaller. And I am grieving. My muscles are grieving. Not due to the downsizing. And not for the fact that time is passing. I am grieving about the loss of an idea. Instead of a house, I’d like to possess a story. And I know for a fact that my recollections are real, they did happen. But there is this bias towards them, the assumption that they will never be able to fertilise my roots. I can guess where that comes from. Not rarely do I move around people in diasporic contexts. My partner lives more than 4.000 miles away from the place where he was raised. I’m stuck with the belief that it should mainly be HIS perspective to be shared, his story to be told. His struggle to find a residence, to receive a permit and to settle down results in wounds that my body is mirroring. But these reflections can never be disclosed as mine. Sometimes, they might even cover up something that hides underneath. The cracks in the glass define what is seen in the mirror. If the mirror is a glass of wine, you are well aware of what is inside and what impact that will have on you. But if this mirror is my skin, its ruby-coloured veins might point to another sphere. It is almost impossible to look through. The invisible ground harbors potential conflicts. My partner and I, we discuss a lot. This is due to our different ways of handling pain and boredom. My mental health is expandable. And so is his state of residence. We are trying to find a balance between resilience and vulnerability. This is exhausting. It is hard having to justify why one is hurt. It is hard having to explain why one is not. Sometimes this can feel to me like a silent competition about who gets to tell the better story. I always lose. I backslide into my nostoryhood – a state of lacking migrations, ongoing hesitations and lonesome narrations.

I need to deal with my fear of telling stories. I am convinced that storytelling and residing are profoundly related. So let’s go home. Let’s do a body scan and browse my grieving muscles. The first thing I do after entering the place is to witness the white walls and to observe the distance of the high ceilings. That’s a lie. I don't care about them. But I am mentioning this for a particular reason. One of the main arguments my partner and I are having concerns the decoration of the walls. He wants us to hang pictures in frames with photographs of our families and ancestors. I am not so sure about this. I suppose I secretly think that hanging pictures of my family members means killing them. He told me that those images would evoke spirits who could protect the household. But that would mean that the spirit of a family member who is still alive would have to leave their body to be hung onto our walls. And wouldn’t that also be a confirmation that the ancestors who did already leave their bodies will remain untouchable forever? This is an odd way to mourn. It is also possible that I am underestimating their spiritual potential. Spirits are recollections that resurrect into invisible shapes. And I already introduced you to my tricky relationship with memories. Thus, at our house, the walls bare nothing but cracks and yellowing.

After dropping my keys and removing multiple layers of protection from my skin, I feel naked. The protective ambiance of the place is overwhelming. Not only does it offer innumerous possibilities for disrespecting it, but it also puts pressure on me and the story I am about to write. Now, something very common and at the same time brutal happens: I take my body and place it. I don’t hesitate and abuse the safety by turning it into one of the key features of my nostoryhood. I take a seat.

Have you ever felt this sadness? The sadness about the fact that all humans need to be seated? That sitting is an inevitable part of life. I haven’t. But for the sake of this exploration, I am trying to imagine this scenario. In a world with no chairs and no beds, with fragile grounds and thin walls, how would we choreograph exhaustion? If we remained standing, how could that influence the stories we tell each other? How could we feel at home? I lift my body from the chair and start walking through the living room. My muscles enjoy their work, they can flex, tense up and play. I stick my finger into one of the pots next to the window to see if the plant needs some water. I proceed to the shelf and remove a layer of dust from one of the books I’ve never read. I take a step back. I stumble. I fall. This awkward experiment came to an early closure. I wanted to discover my story beyond any stillness, in permanent movement, as if sitting had never been a part of my body’s repertoire. But my story is not an exercise. Apparently, I need to stop moving. I need to take a seat again.

I wanted to talk about residing. After all, the Latin word residere could loosely be translated as “to be sitting again”. So if you will, what just happened could be seen as the perfect proof of my destiny to remain a continuous resider. Driven by my privileges, my nostoryhood pushes me back into my chair over and over again. But if there is a nostoryhood, there must be a storyhood. I need to trace back the poetics of sitting – literally and metaphorically. I found a quote by the dance philosopher Kimerer L. Lamothe. She argues that “Reading and writing are forms of movement making that cultivate an ignorance of the fact that they involve any movement making at all.” [1] Assuming that reading and writing is mostly performed in a seated position, this is quite revelatory. What strikes me about this discovery is the fact that sitting is a movement in itself. The body cannot not move. But being seated can feign a certain kind of stillness that requires its own choreography. Even though I do reside (I sit), I also possess a story (I move). Or let me rephrase: Because I do reside, I am writing my story. Hence, my efforts to coin such a term as nostoryhood might become a matter of celebrating my storyhood. The fear of not being a story turns into its own story.

After writing this, I will not remove any stumbling blocks from the living room, I will not rush and hang pictures of family members onto the walls, I will not abandon my mental struggles and I will not give up on the idea of lacking a personal story. A text like this cannot banish a feeling. But maybe it might change the lens through which I look at my biography. The earliest memory I can recollect is one of a movement. From how I remember, I grabbed my hip bones and bent backward to curve my spine. Until today, I haven’t understood how that could be the very first thing I can remember from my childhood. It is literally just a movement I performed in kindergarten. One needs either a psychoanalyst or an experienced poet to detect the storyhood of this memory. That is why, in the beginning, I asked you to colonise my thoughts. I am aware of the fact that this expression is risky. I wanted to achieve to put my thoughts at your disposal. To make them yours. I was asking you to project your imagination onto my narration. Because I was hoping that the duty of storytelling remains with you. I am the situation teller. And I just came home.

This account has been written to salute and commemorate the faces and bodies that slouch or lean into the everydayness of our lives, holding and praying for us from the edge lines of picture frames or the ledges of near and distant windows, in the here and future, in service, love and deep devotion, so that we may reside fully and wholeheartedly within ourselves first and thereafter within the spaces that welcome us in their embrace.

It is confusing but not exactly alien to me anymore. The loneliness of a departure and a profound hope to anchor anew and safely. That beige and light-blue feeling of declaring goodbye to everything familiar right before you embark on a new voyage to forage and liveinplain sight with nothing but desire and a dream. The exact moment of your arrival as you walk into the entryway to what will become a constant dwelling and your eyes flirt with a long aisle that leads to the upper chambers. The moment you pass a new and possible neighbor in the stairway with bags and suitcases in your hands – just before the awkward silence broken only by an uncertain salutation makes way for something novel. A “hi” or a “hello” followed by an “I am new here” that declares a friend or a rival in the newly arrived. The loneliness that is hauled or rolled in with a single mattress that will lay on its own back until there is money enough to pay for a new bed. The moment of loading and unpacking of boxes you spend with yourself and the energies you have just entered a new space with. The moment of putting together and setting up a new room. Of wondering and asking yourself about what goes where and for what reason and where the candles for devotions and fortification will find their resting place, in these moments, loneliness strikes differently and yet somehow the same as you become subject to inquiries, or a thing that resides at the eyes-end of suspicion, as a neighbor, a stranger in the neighborhood and a tenant of white-cubes.

I always hang the picture frames first. Neatly and consequently. From earliest to latest. Not because there is nothing else to lead with. They go on the walls first because they are the last things to go into boxes before a departure. The line-up begins with a woman. My great-grandmother, Sedina Nako Née Joké. It ends with my nieces Selna and Camila. They are set up first because I want my ancestors to see and bear witness to another chapter, to another opened door. To slouch towards what will become an inner sanctum, a place of safety and serenity, a place to which a body returns to heal its scars. That is what distinguishes a home from a residence. The faces we know and trust, the glances of assurance and love they bestow, the centuries of anecdotes, and histories, known or unknown tucked and disguised in laugh lines, folded eyelids and shimmering hairends.

I hang picture frames and then I pour libation.

It alters the dynamics of space and smoothes out the distance and whiteness of a high ceiling. It introduces new accents and hues to a room in the same way a tree or grass introduces itself to land, unexpectedly. Other things are introduced to the space too. The faces of people in distant and near places. And of those who have gone away from us, the scars that defied time, the stares that persevered to question, to hold responsible. New windows and portals present themselves through picture frames and bodies and trajectories from another dimension lean in to reside and make a home where there is none, transiently.

A home is a body and a place. The women and children understand this fact before everyone else. They feel it in their bones.

When I talk about residency to my grandmother, Mary Mojoko, who lives in Bimbia, Cameroon, she diverts the conversation to something else because she can read the frustration in my voice. She points towards stories, remedies, cradlesongs, or anything that soothes the soul. In her recollections of the lands she has roomed and spent her life on, trees, graveyards, open fireplaces or flat caraboat and cement houses show up. She calls them sure things. She points to things she believes are certain. Not because they are eternal but because they to her are markers of citizenship. Things that tell stories of who or what has passed through what lands and for what reasons. Of who has put seeds into the ground and watched them sprout, of who mourns what did not germinate or live above the earth’s surface.

After a soothing balm has been applied, she picks up the topic again and then queries. She asks if residency is the same thing as living on limited time. She wants to know if the resident gets to live. And if they possess a mouth or ears, only. If they are granted the privilege or right to sit at the table to break bread or if the slices of bread they hold in their hands were broken and handed to them without question. Can a resident say no? Can they enter and exit at will, can they eat without the worry of repercussions, are they the help?

I tell her nothing that feels significant or certain enough to go on.

Words refuse to come. They elude me.

I tell her about displaced bodies that live in galleries, or coat closets labeled merely with numerals, collection tags and places of their provenience. I tell her cunningly about a particular kind of death by contracts and letters from establishments. I tell her about post boxes that fill up with payment requests and bank accounts with revolving doors. I tell her that when I think about the ways I have resided in the places I am given permission and time to reside within, my skin turns – it looks sideways from my body – it looks like it wants to throw itself off a cliff. I tell her my body immediately singles out the fact that the kind of life I live in these spaces is not one that truly guarantees living, at all. I tell her about what happens in the wake of things because as a Black Queer person navigating life in the West, I must live in the wake – that is, with vigilance, with a deep understanding of history, with the knowledge that no state or nation will protect me. And that even when that protection comes, it comes at a cost.

To be a resident is to be arched-crooked to the point of breaking. It is to be coiled inward and outward at the same time. It is to curve away from yourself towards something that wanders away from you, perpetually.

It is confusing to be a resident but not a citizen. To do, to make life, to live and love, to reside, to work, to pay taxes but to not be able to vote or have a voice in the things that matter. It is confusing to create work that challenges and shifts paradigms, a work that lives and engages with civil society in museums, galleries, and public spaces, and yet to not be eligible to vote within those spaces your voice helps shape or carry a passport that protects and gives back in the same way you have and continue to in your commitment to place and people. Imean on most days, I feel arched. I feel erased.

hn. lyonga is a Black, Queer, interdisciplinary writer, poet, and was Neighbour in Residence 2023 at Gropius Bau. “I live and work in Berlin. I have lived in other places – and they are still present in my body, my writings, and in my life in the diaspora. I have not come or arrived here on my own. I have arrived on the shoulders of others. My work focuses on writing, storytelling, community, ways of being and existing in space, and migrational inquiries pertinent to historically colonized and marginalized communities. Among other things, I am a neighbor, a (livelong) student, a member of the curatorial board of BARAZANI.berlin - Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand, and a member of the Field Narratives Collective, working on ideas of rural biographies, transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling.”

Markus Posse is a performance artist and researcher. After graduating from Performance Studies, he worked as a dramaturg and artistic collaborator at spaces such as Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Theater Dortmund, and Mousonturm Frankfurt. In addition, Markus is currently finishing his training to become a Drama Therapist. “My work centers around the body as an agent of (micro)violence. I am seeking to develop modes of artistic reflection that enable us to experience and subvert the physical archives within our subconscious. The gestures that matter – to me – are the ones that we are not yet calling a gesture. This paradox informs my practice. Other than that, I am interested in neurodiversity and the coverage of different kinds of perception within the artistic sector.” 

1 LaMothe, Kimerer L. Why we dance: A philosophy of bodily becoming. p. 70. Columbia University Press, 2015

Further sources

Gyasi, Yaa. Homegoing: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved: a novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1994.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.