By Francisca Sinjae
There is a particular way an African woman carries herself at a funeral. Back straight. Voice steady. Tending to others while her own chest is caving in. Receiving condolences with a practised composure that the world reads as strength, and she has learned to read as duty. She will cry, perhaps, but briefly, and usually alone, in a bathroom, or very late at night when the house has finally emptied and there is no one left who needs her to be fine.
She learned this the way all powerful, invisible lessons are learned: By watching her mother do the same thing at her grandmother’s funeral. By watching her grandmother do it before that. By absorbing, without a single word being spoken on the subject, the cultural grammar that says: a strong woman holds it together. That grief is something to be moved through quickly, stoically, and without too much noise. That weeping too long, grieving too openly, leaning too heavily on others is a kind of weakness, or worse, a kind of selfishness.
This is not unique to any one African culture or country. It travels across the continent and across the diaspora with remarkable consistency. In Nigeria, in Ghana, in Kenya, in South Africa, in London and Houston and Toronto, the same performance of composed strength repeats itself. Different languages. Same silencing.
In psychology, there is a concept called disenfranchised grief, grief that is not socially acknowledged, mourned publicly, or supported by community ritual. It is the grief of losses the world does not fully recognise as losses: the end of a relationship that was never official, the death of an estranged parent, the miscarriage that “happened early,” the career that was abandoned, and the version of yourself you had to give up in order to survive.
For African women, disenfranchised grief goes further. It encompasses the grief that was acknowledged, the death of a parent, the end of a marriage, the loss of a child, but was never truly processed, because there was no space made for it. Because within days of the funeral, there were children to feed and elders to care for and jobs to return to and church to attend with a pressed dress and a composed face. Because somewhere in the architecture of what it means to be a Black woman, the “Strong Black Woman” schema, as psychologists term it, emotional containment became confused with emotional health.
Dr. Arline Geronimus, a public health researcher at the University of Michigan, coined the term “weathering” in 1992 to describe the physical deterioration caused by the chronic stress of living in a racially hostile society. But weathering applies just as powerfully to the internal experience of constant emotional self-suppression. When you spend decades holding grief in the body, compressing it, rerouting it, covering it with service and activity and spiritual performance the body remembers. It stores what the mind has been taught to dismiss.
“Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a process to be moved through and for that movement to happen, space must be made. Not just once. Over and over again.” – Dr. Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, 2005
here is the quiet irony: the cultures that taught us to suppress our grief are the same ones that, in their oldest forms, knew exactly how to hold it.
Before colonisation rewrote the emotional grammar of African communities, introducing the idea that stoicism was civilised and emotional expression was primitive, African traditions had sophisticated, communal containers for grief. They understood what the body needed. They understood what the community needed. And they built rituals accordingly.
What changed? Colonisation brought with it a theology of suffering as virtue, an economics of labour that could not afford women’s grief, and a social architecture in which emotional expression, particularly Black women’s emotional expression was either pathologised or ignored. The communal containers for grief were disrupted. What remained was the grief, without the container.
And so a generation of women improvised. They moved the grief inward. They put it in the body. They put it in food. They put it in relentless work and relentless service and the kind of love that looks like giving and giving until there is nothing left to give.
Coping keeps you functional. Healing makes you whole. And wholeness requires grief to be acknowledged, expressed, moved through the body, and witnessed by another, and eventually, over time integrated. Not resolved. Not finished. But carried differently. Carried lightly enough to breathe.
“You cannot selectively numb emotion. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb joy, gratitude, and happiness.” — Dr. Brené Brown.
It does not look like a breakdown. It does not look like weakness or falling apart. It looks, in practice, like a series of small deliberate acts, acts of permission, of presence, of tenderness toward yourself.
You are not the sum of what you survived without breaking.
You are also everything you felt along the way
and were too strong, too needed, too trained
to let anyone see.
This is permission.
Grieve. Be whole. Come home to yourself.
