Letter 19 - artists and daydreams and mice on treadmills

Dear boys,                                                                                                          02/14/14

                In my last letter I was slipping out the screened heavy green metal door of Aunt Jean’s house remembering getting my stitches there. I’m writing this letter retrospectively because I wasn’t able to write it before. It was frightening and confusing. You will see why. 

I pick up with the door closing harder than I meant it to. Esther always shakes her head and says, “You have a gift.” A gift of doing things in a way that surprises me… emphasis where I meant monotone, flatness where I meant feeling, harshness where I meant to be gentle, clumsiness when I was being careful. If in these letters I call your hearts out tenderly and then I walk on them – forgive me, there are still some gifts I’m trying to give away and others I don’t even know I have.

                I used to have a visiting-Maradi ritual. I picked neem or desert date flowers, took them to the white-washed metal fence around the small grave behind Aunt Jean’s house, and left them on the concrete tombstone that read “Donald Darling.”  I identified with his sister Linda, the four-year-old who died on the Tahoua compound, whose tombstone I read when I was four myself, the week I figured out what dying means.  And I connected Donald with Peter.  I brought flowers to Donald's grave because I felt that Linda would have wanted me to bring him flowers, and because I hoped that someday someone would put flowers on Peter’s grave if I wasn’t there to do it. But this time I decide not to visit Donald’s grave without even thinking about it. It’s not a ritual I need to say goodbye to. I don’t know why I’m not going to do it. 

                The Silver Slug is gone from behind the Maradi guesthouse. The guesthouse itself is closed and empty today. The playground is still intact but the swingset is shorter than I remember Luka having to reach when he grabbed the top bar to show Will how many pullups he could do. Some of the neem trees behind the guesthouse are gone; maybe they lost their battle with the termites when there were no more MKs to scrape the termite runs off their bark. Flipflops in the silvery-yellow sand and then the red earth of the field as I make my way toward the corner of the wall. There were elephant bushes here once; I pretended that my imaginary white horse, “Rainbow Beauty,” (wow I am blushing just at that) lived inside the bushes among their seasonal pink trumpet-like flowers. Now there’s a wall that our father built. Not with his hands… with the years of immersion in another language and culture that gave him rapport and authority with the Nigerien construction team, with years of accountability to the mission that trusted him to supervise, with his innate gifts of vision and structural design. I touch the cinderblock wall that is taller even than our father and I am proud, not of the wall, but of the fact that he could build it because he had gotten through other kinds of walls. 

                And then I stop and wonder what it means that when the missionaries are gone from Maradi – as I think they probably will be, sooner than we imagined when we played in the elephant bushes and on the swingset and screamed like little demons while Kara Strong was napping – they will leave behind them a wall. I understand the need for boundaries. I saw the blood run down Lukey’s forehead before there was a wall, when one of the townspeople threw a battery and hit him in the head. I know we locked the doors and windows when the Dakoro people threatened to riot after the US invaded Afghanistan. But at the same time, the Church is an entity that germinates in loss, develops in expendability, and heartbeats hospitality. I don’t have answers. This isn’t a criticism. This is my America-softened nurse’s hand on the cinderblock wall mortared in sacrifice, asking what it means when missionaries build walls? It is a statement we make about reality, about where we live and how we perceive the world. What statement are we leaving behind?

                I follow the wall around the compound. The guards must walk there at night because a track is beaten in the sand. I used to run here desperately during my anorexic-bulimic high school years, trying to escape the overwhelming sense of powerlessness. My eating-disordered world had a wall down the middle too; I knew that I could do nothing without God’s power, but I was still convinced that if I lost thirty pounds and proved my power over instinct to myself, I would be powerful and no longer need to fear my inability to meet my own or others’ standards. I shed pounds until I shed hair and a shallow cut on my toe took two weeks instead of two days to heal. So much for becoming powerful.

                Aunt Ruth’s house is still there with a garden behind it. I am so thankful for one unchanged thing that I stop and stare for a while. (Aunt Ruth, I am sorry that I ate two of your strawberries when I was six or seven. You must have been waiting a long time for those to ripen.)

                Aunt Beng Quan’s house is still there, on the other side of the warehouse that is much smaller than I remembered, with the porch where we used to crack moon-rocks open so we could smear the powder on our faces and pretend we were Indians. We later used that porch as a base for our Stick War forts. The knight trees are still there, and the flamboyant saplings that Ishaya used to water in front of the O’Kelleys’ house are now towering giants. The flamboyant trees are not in season yet, but the knight seeds lie scattered across the field behind Aunt Beng Quan’s house. I guess nobody gathers them now. 

                My hands feel bare so I find a millet stalk in the tilled field, trim off its dry leaves, and sling it gun-like over my shoulder. I march a little like that, and I shoot a few wild animals… for you, Matt. I can’t bring them back because I’d never get them through customs, so you’ll have to take my word for it. 

                The gao tree is still there, strong and tall, but the wooden platform and grips that Will and Uncle John put up are starting to rot off it.  Funny. It almost feels like a tribute to Africa. The ageless rope ladder is there too. I think about climbing it, but I am wearing a skirt and I’m not as foolhardy as I was ten years ago. I stand at the base of the gao and look up at the branch where I sat when the hawk landed beside Will and I.  I was convinced, back then, that I would marry Will someday and live in Africa forever. I didn’t have a crush on him, it just made perfect sense. I was perfectly convinced of the sense of many unreal things. But most of the time we daydream about what we know, so maybe they were somehow realer than I’ll ever figure out now that I know “more.” 

                Knowing and not knowing. Real and not real. One life and another. Running like a rat caged in a treadmill to escape futility and powerlessness. Rituals you always keep until it’s the final time. Where is the in between? Is it a wall, too? “We speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen…”

                Remember the gutter below the gao tree? I find it full of sheaths of copier paper. They are rolled together, about 10 pages at a time, and tied up in cassette tape film. Someone on the other side of the wall has pushed them through the gutter grating. School kids used to do that. I sit down on the side of the gutter, pick up a sheath, and slide the papers out of the film tie. They unroll, revealing an infinity of scribbles. Someone has taken a pencil and made swirlies with it in perfectly straight horizontal lines across the page, intervaled like the type of a paper or letter. Just painstakingly perfect graphite swirls like the infinity sign, going on and on for pages and pages, interrupted unpredictably by a set of brackets containing the word “silence.” And then more connecting infinities. A couple of the pages are different – they are strange, brilliant pictures. The artist has drawn recognizable zoo animals together – then drawn a picture of a school classroom over them – then superimposed objects I don’t recognize. There are arrows pointing to objects with words attached – some descriptive, others random. The handwriting reminds me of a young child – imprecise but heavy-handed, and oddly in contrast with the light lines of his drawings. One picture is outstanding – the dominant scene is a computer classroom where each person has a face, each with a different expression, all of them bored. I am fascinated and intrigued by the brilliance of this artist. The connections he creates – intentional or not – and his observance of and insight about things around him – are phenomenal. I want to meet him, to know who he is and how he sees and why he sees that way. I take the best drawing and a sheath of the papers with me and find Aunt Ruth unlocking her front door with the pot of trailing mint still there beside it.

                “Oh yes,” says Aunt Ruth, “those must be from the schizophrenic fellow that comes around from time to time. Tragic story, really. I hear he was a smart young man with a good job who wanted to go to America. He put in an application, saved up all the money, finally got his visa. Then something happened – someone stole the money – and it just broke him. He thinks the compound is an American embassy and he brings by these papers he believes are his application to America and tries to get the guards to accept them. I guess when they turn him away he’s found another way to submit his application.”

                Classic story of schizophrenia. During my mental health rotation in nursing school I learned that the highest incidence of the psychosis is in highly-educated, highly-intelligent, high-performing, affluent 20-some-year-old males. Nobody knows why. Sometimes there is a known trigger and sometimes there isn’t. But something snaps them. They begin to live between reality and an alternate perception of events, blurring the line that separates them. They hallucinate, entertain delusions, suffer from depression, become paranoid and entertain magical thinking about their own abilities or supernatural attacks upon them (Jilek, 2001). They lose the things they love in real life because they can’t differentiate what is actual from what is not.  It’s a disease of perception. They still have concepts of truth and lie, but they don’t apply them correctly. Maybe they just can’t.  

There are two kinds of schizophrenia, acute and chronic. Chronic schizophrenic psychosis develops gradually over time. Acute schizophrenic psychosis happens suddenly and can also resolve, although sometimes it progresses to chronic schizophrenia (Jilek, 2001). Modern behavioral psychology studies the neurochemical and genetic links in schizophrenia. There does appear to be a genetic link – schizophrenia is far more common in people with a family history of it, and if your twin has it you are at a significantly higher risk for developing it. Brain studies show different brain chemistry and development in schizophrenics. 

But not everyone at risk for schizophrenia develops it. There is an environmental/social switch involved. Sociocultural psychologists argue that traumatic life events and transitions can flip the switch (Jilek, 2001; Abed & Abbas, 2011). Changes in cortisol (stress hormone) regulation and hippocampus size (a part of the brain that forms, stores, and organizes memory) are known indicators of schizophrenia (Reser, 2006). Psychologists cite the increased incidence of chronic schizophrenia in developed nations as proof of a sociocultural factor in schizophrenia. So-called “developed” countries (e.g. Britain, the US) tend to be more urbanized and individualistic rather than collectivistic. Third-world or developing countries have a similar incidence of acute psychosis to developed countries, but in less-developed countries the individual is more likely to recover, instead of progressing to chronic schizophrenia. In cultures with stronger interpersonal relationships, the individual receives more social support along with greater social pressure to recognize what is commonly acknowledged about truth and reality (Jilek, 2001). Consequently, they are more likely to recover from their stress-induced disease of perception. Other psychologists point to the shifts in normativity and basic assumptions that accompany cultural change. Robbed of the foundational assumptions that helped them interpret life, people become confused. They don’t know how to perceive or interpret events. One sociocultural psychologist suggests that acute schizophrenic psychosis is the brain’s last-chance way of communicating to others, “Help, I am overwhelmed beyond my ability to process stress and I don’t know what is true anymore. I need you to reaffirm reality and how I am related to you” (Jilek, 2001).

“by reacting with an acute psychotic episode to emotionally traumatizing experiences and to severe social stress, the individual signals a state of emergency to which the human environment responds with sympathy, support, and traditional therapeutic resources, and not with rejection and isolation, as long as the extended kinship network is still operational in a tradition-directed non-Western society” (Jilek, 2001).

I am chilled by her story. I imagine the Artist painstakingly tying up his “application” and the proof of his abilities and pushing it through the grating where the woman who is trying to navigate her own confusing realities will find it. I worry about what it means for my own sanity that I love his drawings. I take the sheaf of papers and wander through the twilight, trailing my millet-stalk gun behind me. 

When I was 17 I spent a summer at Galmi interpreting for expatriot short-term missionaries. I had spent the past two years of my adolescence purposely assimilating to Nigerien culture. I was so confused by the short-term singles. They seemed to treat each other like they were all dating. They laughed freely, talked deeply, and sometimes – oh my goodness – even hugged each other. Sometimes they seemed to act very rudely, pointing at things in the market with their index fingers, not attempting to bargain for items they wanted, eating food with their left hands. The girls tucked in their shirts and didn’t cover all of their hair when they left the compound, communicating promiscuity. I didn’t pay as much attention to the guys; I tried to maintain a respectful distance to not seem flirtatious, and I avoided one of them because I liked him and didn’t want him to guess.  But I felt confused that these people were missionaries and yet what they seemed to communicate was not consistent with what I believed about Christian behavior. One time at Sunday evening worship I offered my chair to one of the short-term guys and couldn’t understand why he seemed shocked – in Niger, women gave up their seats for men to show respect to them. Another time I felt guilty because I walked to the market alone with the boy I liked, communicating in Nigerien terms to all the Galmi Hausa villagers that I wanted to be his significant other – even though I wasn’t sure what I really wanted and knew I shouldn’t communicate interest if he wasn’t already showing it. 

I had no idea how deeply immersed in Nigerien culture I had become until Amy asked me to explain how strangely I was acting. Although I defended myself, I eventually realized how blinded I was by the cultural limitations of my perspective. I had become too immersed in my perceptions of one side of my reality and now I was tangled in both.

Sometimes at night I went to the airstrip or soccer field when a dust storm was coming in, so that I could shut my eyes against the gritty air and pretend I didn’t live in my life at all. I lived somewhere else where everything was clear, where I wasn’t accidentally offending people or being offended by the differences in perspective we didn’t know we had, where there was one clear way to act and communicate and we all knew what it was.  A life where I wasn’t acting like a helplessly offensive idiot around the first boy I really liked that way, in which I knew what to do when you liked a boy, in which maybe he even could like me too. This reality was completely different from sitting on the same branch in the gao tree with Will, watching hawks land and dodging flying batteries, and complacently believing in my imaginary future life. At the end of the summer I began to realize that this was the beginning of the end – not just the end of translating at Galmi, or of my first crush. It was the end of living in black-and-white cultural norms and not having to question that my message was received as it was intended in any of my intersecting realities. 

I remember the “event” where I knew things were going crazy. The boy I liked drove away and we were left cleaning up his duplex – Joe, Anna, and I.  I trusted Joe. He had figured out my way of interacting and he often talked to me. I froze a spider in ice and put it in his water. He was like a big brother that summer. I think he understood why I was confused even though I didn’t. He tried to lighten the mood by joking that he would bake bread with spiders in it.  When I started laughing, I broke down crying. Joe held out his arms and I walked straight into them and cried on his shoulder – breaking all Nigerien cultural norms, and for the first time, not ashamed. I needed him to hold me. That’s when I knew everything had changed. 

And then we lived in the US, and while everyone was finding themselves in college, I was just plain confused. How do you navigate the culturally-expected transition between childhood and adulthood when the norms you knew for either one don’t apply anymore? When you can’t even speak English in a way that people take seriously? You have no accent, but people struggle to understand. People laugh at the meaning you don’t recognize in what you said and think you are attention-seeking or mocking them when you ask them to explain why it was funny. But you need them, you really need them. You need them to tell you what is real until you learn how to live again. 

My MK experience isn’t far from being schizophrenic. Thanks to transition and cultural change, I live between two realities that don’t see each other, except in me. Sometimes it turns out that I am living between multiple truths or lies to which I am blind. I am frequently depressive, frequently delusional, and sometimes I suspect that I hallucinate – especially the nights when I have woken suddenly sweating and gasping and fighting the dark figure that was reaching for me or pressing down on my chest.  I fluctuate between egocentric, narcissistic mantras about my own superiority (intellectual, emotional, background, lifestyle, religious) and a desperate sense of my powerlessness and confusion. I believe in the activity of the supernatural and that there is no excluded middle (thanks Dad for the term; one more thing I’ve gained from you) – that the other realm and this one have constant direct interaction, whether or not I recognize it when I see it. I do understand my perception of reality is skewed and flawed. The realization may be the difference between insanity and sanity – but it is also the fear that drives me nearly crazy. 

Where is the line between crazy and sane? There is no cinderblock wall to help me pick a set of cultural truths to live in. We could go religious from here, yes, but religion doesn’t solve an impaired ability to socially understand or be understood. What if I never actually perceive things the way they are? What if I am living my whole life in lies I don’t understand? What if everything I ever do to be powerful is just another round on the rodent wheel? What if I get blinder whenever I think I figure it out? What if I never figure it out? Never find the wall between? Never learn what the truth about the wall is?

I used to climb the flight of metal stairs on the outside of the car workshop. Sometimes I was scared to go up there because we saw the owl sitting on the workshop roof, and I superstitiously believed the owl brought death. I am still unnerved by owls, even in jewelry. But I climbed it anyways because it was my daydreaming place. The stairs are creakier than I remember, and shorter too. Now I am on the second-story platform, leaning against the metal fence with the neem tree brushing its branches against me. I always climbed up here when the dust storms came. I would stare out at the clouds rolling toward the compound, shut my eyes against the gritty wind, and imagine that I was anywhere but here. Sometimes I was a part of the storm. Sometimes I was an old woman in a storm with an exciting life behind me reminiscing about my girlhood in the African dust storms. Sometimes I was a wilderness adventurer. Anywhere but here, anywhere but now. 

I don’t want to be anywhere but right here, right now.

I shut my eyes into the descending night anyways. If there had been a storm I would have taken the papers, torn them to shreds, and thrown them into the wind as plea to the reality-god: Take the message of the Artist and the opened hands of the Dreamer and show us which of the realities that live in us is the one we ourselves can live in. But there is no dust storm, so finally I envision my daydreams written in the infinity lines of the papers, roll the papers tightly, bind them with the cassette film, and stick them between the bars of the second-story porch fence. They will either be found and tossed, or they will fly away when the dust storms come this spring. I hope it’s the second. 

(Yes, it was me, Aunt Ruth. In case the guards are wondering how the crazy person got onto the compound – it was me. Maybe I’m a little better at playing the unrecognized outsider than my brother the Artist.) 

                He is my brother in the same battles. I don’t think I’m being delusional about this. We are all warriors in the great fight for truth. We fight it in religious terms so often that we forget that it is also about eating and drinking and sleeping. Our lives are dependent on it. Nobody breathes water – nobody that continues to live, that is.  

                We are more than warriors. Sometimes we also need to be fortresses and bodyguards. When we can’t see through the smoke or the blood, when the other side looks just like us – or turns out to be us – we need each other to know that we are in distress, that we have lost what or who we were fighting and why we were trying at all. Being left completely alone is known to drive people insane. If insanity is a loss of reality and credence in a lie, and if people in individualistic societies are more likely to develop chronic insanity, then the implication is that we really need one another to keep us all sane. Maternal disengagement and experiencing out-group segregation contribute to the development of schizophrenia (Abed & Abbas, 2011; Reser, 2006). What else is that than losing reality because you lose caring relationships? 

                I waited a while to write this letter to you because it was hard to put it all together, and even harder to be honest about it. I said I was writing letters to you boys to include you on my trip. But you know what? Actually, yes, you already do know. I was lying. I thought I wanted to give you something. But actually I wanted you to give me something… I wanted to bring you along with me because I didn’t think I could handle this by myself. When I was a child I lived in a daydream world that I completely controlled, and then when I lost the daydream world I lived in a world where I felt halfway powerless and functioned through delusions of attaining power, and then when I lost the halfway powerful world I ended up here –pretending I wanted to write you letters only so that you could see your childhood home. And actually I guess I’ve always needed the same things… to be present with and thankful for what I am given, to believe that there are final absolute truths even when norms fail, and to know that you love me – even though I already know that. 

                So when I write to you after this, it’s not just me trying to share the journey. It’s me reminding myself of the relationships I have with you, the relationships that may be the only reasons I believe myself halfway crazy instead of completely bonkers. And me saying thank you for what you give me, for how you help me understand reality, for the fact that when I call him my brother the Artist, “brother” means something good.

                Sai enjima,

                Tabitha

And just fyi... :)

Abed,  R.T., & Abbas, M.J. (2011). A reformulation of the social brain theory for schizophrenia: the case for out-group intolerance. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 54 (2), pp. 132-151.

Jilek, W. (2001). Cultural factors in psychiatric disorders. Retrieved from  http://www.mentalhealth.com/mag1/wolfgang.html

Reser, J.E. (2006). Schizophrenia and phenotypic plasticity: schizophrenia may represent a predictive, adaptive response to severe environmental adversity that allows both biogenetic thrift and defensive behavioral strategy. Medical Hypotheses, 69, 383-394.