THIS IS MY [NATIONAL] BODY
The sun looks down on us with its fiery gaze. We have to get away from its passionate heat so we don’t melt from exhaustion. Instead of taking the road, we see a shortcut to shade on its side. We barely notice the strange area demarcated by stones with its elevated platform painted in our nation’s colors and its flag raised high. Our eyes are focused on the shade beyond it, thinking “if we could just pass this place, we would get relief from this heat". Scarcely had we stepped into this box shaped area before a couple of soldiers standing guard call us from seemingly nowhere. In their usual soldierly aggression, they herd us out of the box, told to sit on the ground. We had no idea we trespassed a sacred spot, we think to ourselves “What did we do now?”.
The account above is a stylized version of something I experienced in my NYSC camp (To join the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) is a mandatory thing here, we get posted to different part of the country for a year to live and work as a sort of “nation building” exercise, and it’s paramilitary, hence the soldiers and the training camp). I experienced for the first time how seriously soldiers take their country.
It’s almost religious, or I’d say, it IS religious. We had passed a demarcated section of the camp, with an elevated platform that had a flag pole. I can’t remember whether they raised the flag periodically or permanently, but the point here is that the area was treated more or less like a “holy place”. The platform itself was not to be ascended except at specific times, and when it was ascended, there was a brief marching type exercise with a bugle playing a particular tune. I realized then the religious nature of nationality, and the particularly religious pull of the modern nation-state. What I saw happening on that platform was a liturgy, paying homage to the “spirit” or principle of the nation, embodied or incarnated in its leaders. The modern nation-state is particularly ferocious in its demand for allegiance. It is almost an atomized version of the Roman system. The (usually democratic) nations espouse freedom of religion except when it threatens their sovereignty. The state is the highest power the citizens appeal to, regardless of religion, just like Caesar is to be worshiped, above or alongside the gods, he holds the empire together, he is lord.