‘Don’t Let It Bury You’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
‘Don’t Let It Bury You’ is a moving, brilliantly crafted essay by Eloghosa Osunde that explores the author’s bridging of trauma and dance as a means of healing. In less than 3,000 words the reader is offered a dense but clear emotional arc. Starting with a childhood scene where the author witnesses her mother fire a maid for stealing, Osunde drops a perfect heel-turn when she reveals that the maid had molested her for two years. What follows is a beautiful meditation on dance as somatic self-therapy, as protection, as healing. “Dance was second flesh, a vicious mask, my whole disguise,” she writes later on. Also: “Sometimes it took hours, other times it took days, but dance and the ache that lay in its wake reminded my body that it was still alive, that the illness was the lie, that I was and I am—aren’t I, despite everything—still alive.”