Driving the streets of Los Angeles, long before Waze, I learned the best routes to take at all times of day, another plus, until the low-paying and mind-numbing job grew unbearable. Soon a hastily landed career in door-to-door political fundraising would become my mainstay.
824 ½ Maltman Avenue
Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1987, I inherited from a friend a large studio apartment in Silver Lake. Less than $500 a month and nestled at the top of a hill, the stucco 1920s apartment, with windows filled with the swooning branches of a large pepper tree, was located at Maltman Avenue and Marathon Boulevard, adjacent to the Bellevue Recreation Center and Park, where gang activity was still fairly common. For years, I convinced myself that the loud nighttime crackling sounds were fireworks. Often in summer, I would leave the front door of the cottage open, allowing the fragrant Los Angeles night air to fill the two-room apartment. It was here that I discovered my mother’s proper diagnosis. I imagine it was my brother who informed me.
That my mother’s diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia and not manic depression filled me with a sinking despair. I spent the following week, with my live-in boyfriend helpfully away in San Francisco, at the library in downtown Los Angeles acquainting myself with the illness. But there were far fewer books on the topic than there are today.
The scientific books were for me, at the time, perplexing and uninteresting, and soon I limited myself to the literature of psychoanalysis. This left me in the backyard of R.D. Laing, famous for spearheading the anti-psychiatry movement, whose work in at least some small measure linked schizophrenia with environmental factors such as poor parenting. Was his theory correct? It didn’t feel all that unreasonable to blame my mother’s parents for her troubles: a distant, work-obsessed father and a mother who had no trouble sending her fleet of daughters thousands of miles away from Zimbabwe to be schooled in England while she catered to her husband’s endless ambitions, seemed troubling to me, and definitely outside a modern conception of family, one where children are prized beyond words.
It felt suitable to blame someone. In the face of tragedy, it is compelling to attempt to root out a single social or human cause. I was not immune from scapegoating. Blaming my mother’s parents for their daughter’s mental state came easy. For years, I had already suspected that my mother’s misery was in some way a karmic debt for having participated in a colonial system that cruelly subjugated African people on their own continent. Gender inequality in her parental home as well as a host of other social prohibitions also came into the picture. After all, childrearing and housework hardly commanded my mother’s attention. The daughter of an acclaimed doctor and married to a world-class scientist, she was under an insubordinate pressure to make something of herself. This was at the root of her affliction. This was the story I told myself. Her father’s routine boasts only made things worse.
Now I could add poor parenting to my list of causes for her illness.
But then why didn’t I suffer from schizophrenia? If poor parenting were to blame, wouldn’t I also suffer from the same illness? My parents ridiculed my choices, derided my need for love, and were often too busy with their respective careers to pay close attention to me or to my brother. My mother routinely insulted me, pulled my hair, and slapped me; commonly accused me of all kinds of wild, inappropriate behaviors, most often of being a prostitute.
Why then was I not suffering from paranoid delusions like my mother? Why was I not anhedonic most of the time, with no hobbies or interests outside of work?
I became suspicious of this and just about every other psychoanalytic basis of her disease.
Hereditary aspect
The book I gleaned the most from, titled something like Everything You Wanted to Know About Schizophrenia But Were Afraid to Ask, with a self-help cover and sized like a VHS videotape, was written by a journalist, whose son had been diagnosed with this chronic illness. Thankfully this book provided me with a continuum on which to place the radical ideas of R.D. Laing. Notable for maintaining the notion that schizophrenia was “an idea and not a fact,” the vanguard psychiatrist was more willing to treat the whole person suffering from schizophrenia than other psychiatrists who were influenced primarily by genetic and biological definitions. The idea this journalist espoused after collating a long history of treatment on this disease was even more, a holistic one. In her book, she dissected and summarized the various approaches to curing or alleviating the primary symptoms of the illness. From neurobiology to nutrition to talk therapy, she deemed all approaches essential in seeking a solution, and her thesis struck me as both balanced and clarifying. She did not assign one root cause for the illness nor create a hierarchy for the types of cures, so I had faith in her approach. A mother herself, she knew better than to assign herself blame for her son’s illness. Through her experience of caring for her son, she could see how easy it was for others to blame the family; and how useless the casting of blame was in the pursuit of a cure.
Most distressing to me then was the hereditary aspect of the disease. I had not considered this consciously before, though I must have had some sense of its inevitability. As a first-degree relative, according to the literature, I would have a seventeen percent chance of inheriting the illness. In the case of my children, second-degree relatives, the chances would be as high as thirty-three percent.9 This was disturbing news, and I immediately confronted my father by telephone about the omission.
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth? Schizophrenia is hereditary. My children could have a thirty-three percent chance of inheriting this illness.”
“Try not to worry, Claire,” my scientist father advised in his typical low-key fashion. “You have my genes.”
New Providence, New Jersey, 1988
No sooner than I learned the truth, my mother suffered a relapse. Perhaps she had forgotten to take her medication. Or she decided not to take it at the prompting of “an inner voice.” It was many years before she was able to embrace the full reality of her illness. It is also possible that at the time she merely accepted her doctor’s suggestion that she reduce the dose of medication she was taking. Whatever the reason, my mother was experiencing a bout of psychosis. My brother was away on school-related business, so it was my turn to intervene during a long weekend with her in New Jersey.
Her manner on the phone had been erratic, delusional. When I arrived, she was still functioning, shuffling around her dim, one-bedroom apartment, adhering to domestic duties such as laundry. She had made a bed for me from the pullout sofa.
While I had been called in to help, I found out almost immediately that I was utterly useless. As my mother stormed about, espousing her fears, I sank into a paralyzing torpor on the makeshift bed. I began to question my sense of the situation. Was she really ill? So ill that she needed to be hospitalized? Would a hospitalization even help? I couldn’t be sure, and cleaved to my spot on the sofa, watching as my mother sorted through her clothes, getting ready to confront the dank basement to do her laundry.
Periodically, she would stand hypnotically before the drawn curtains of her living room windows and repeat in a fear-struck voice, I’m the only one here. Tomorrow they are coming to demolish the place.
I was pained by these words. They seemed more symbolic than anything else. My mother had been abandoned to live alone in New Jersey, while the rest of us, in at least some small part, thrived in California. Yes, she was alone here. And yes, the experience of schizophrenia, of the inexplicable neurological disruption, must have paralleled this feeling of being alone, on the verge of being dismantled by outside forces.
Whenever my mother spoke like this I grew more despondent, more ashamed of my inability to make her life more tolerable. Only when the weekend came to a close and I returned to California, did my mother receive the care she rightly deserved. No longer willing to bear the heavy weight of her psychosis alone, she drove herself to a nearby hospital to seek out treatment. Back then, she was able to recover in a relatively short leng
th of time.
A vacation with Mom
After her recovery, I took my mother with me on a short weekend trip to Rosarito Beach in Baja, Mexico. This spot, where Hollywood stars once vacationed during Prohibition, boasted an old-fashioned Mission-style hotel with a swimming pool and a somewhat disappointing oil-streaked beach. It was picturesque if you didn’t leave the hotel, and it was what I could afford. A college friend joined us.
At twenty-four years old, I wasn’t much of a daughter, struggling with the discomfort I felt toward my mother’s obvious afflictions: the muscle rigidity, dystonia, and tardive dyskinesia (TD), all side effects of the first-generation anti-psychotic, Haldol. TD involved facial tics and involuntary twisting of her fingers, but she did not suffer from the restlessness so many patients complained about.
Haldol, the standard treatment then or “good ole vitamin H” as some called it, was one of the first medications used in the treatment of schizophrenia. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, this antipsychotic works as an inverse agonist of dopamine to rebalance “emotion and lower cognitive function in order to improve thinking, mood, and behavior.” The drug has some ability to ameliorate primary symptoms of schizophrenia such as hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thinking, but mostly fails to treat the secondary features of her illness, namely the depression, lack of affect, and poverty of feeling.
Throughout the trip I recall my former college roommate Mara and me trying to spend time on our own, in the gardens and on the sunny porches of the property, with my mother working to trail along, her purse strapped anxiously to her side. She was terrified of it being stolen or lost, and her exaggerated fear caused me great distress. With perhaps a slippery sense of reality, my mother was often worried and would announce her fears on a continual basis. Because her life had narrowed so significantly, conversation often felt difficult and forced. It would be many years before I would deign to take her with me on another vacation, and even then it was for the shortest time imaginable.
1990–2002
While my father remained distant, involved with his work and the responsibilities of a second family, my mother could find comfort only through speaking to her children. For years, it was my mother’s habit to call both my brother and me several times a day. She would leave messages on our answering machines at first and then continue to call. I rarely answered her calls, or when I did, I would lie and tell her I was headed out, and could speak for just a moment. I afforded her little of my time or energy. Not a day would pass without considering how I had abandoned my mother to an unthinkable loneliness. Ashamed at not making a place for her in my life, I felt routinely submerged in despair. I could not fathom how to help her make a new life for herself. She could not afford to live in California with the rest of us and found it hard to make friends. Sometimes Mom spoke of a woman down the hall with whom she would occasionally have tea, though I could hardly imagine my driven, no-nonsense mother deriving much pleasure from idle chitchat.
Annoyed perhaps that he had to provide my mother with an income, whenever I spoke to my father on the topic of her wellbeing, he would invariably respond that she get a job. For whatever reason, he could not comprehend how difficult it was for her to perform the simplest tasks. She struggled with driving, with the adroit use of her hands, and worried ceaselessly over the tiniest of decisions. Bagging groceries at the local supermarket? Working as a clerk at the local library? I could never envision what it would be, this job that he suggested she get.
9 Today, while the chance for inheriting this disease is the same for a first-degree relative, in the case of a second-degree relative, the chance has been lowered to five percent.
5
zinza
Filial duties
On July 12, 1985, at seventy-three years old, Grandpa Mike died of heart failure while performing his rounds at the Harare Central Hospital. He had known for some time that he was dying. After my mother had been committed at UCLA, he had come to realize that her illness was a chronic one and that she would always be in need of care. Addressing John over the phone, he openly counseled my fifteen-year-old brother on his filial duties.
“When I die, it will be your responsibility to take care of your mother.”
More than a little stunned, John assented to his distant grandfather’s instruction and ministered to my mother’s copious legal and medical needs, almost exhaustively, for the next twenty-eight years.
More dreams
Despite not being able to fully understand my mother’s illness, I was determined not to lose sight of her heritage. At twenty-three and while living in Los Angeles, I started dreaming of my deceased grandfather. In my dream, he inexplicably became a close family member to the Steinberg daughters, three dark-haired Jewish sisters with whom I mildly associated while taking Body Weather Laboratory Workshop classes from avant-garde dancers Melinda Ring and Roxanne Steinberg at LACE,10 located near the L.A. river in a converted brick warehouse. During these three-hour intensives I became familiar with the rigors of Japanese Butoh, which Ring and Steinberg learned while training with Min Tanaka in Japan on his Body Workshop butoh farm. The three-hour classes were both highly demanding and deeply revelatory—from the hour of mind/body exercises (MB) followed by deep partner stretches, to the improvisational and sensory work.
In my dream, I would approach my grandfather hoping to connect, only to discover he had no idea who I was. The Steinbergs were clearly stand-ins for my mother and her sisters. It occurred to me then that I knew very little about my mother’s family. I had rejected offers to visit my grandparents as a child, and my mother had no interest in returning to her birth country. An outsider to my own family in the dream, I decided I needed to visit Zimbabwe and my grandmother, who lived on her own in Harare in what had been my mother’s childhood home until she was sent to boarding school in England. I wrote to my grandmother and asked her to send me a ticket. A round trip ticket to Zimbabwe in 1990 was about as costly then as it is now: $2,000. I made enough money to pay for these Saturday workshops and not much more.
No one in my family seemed eager for me to make this trip. Despite that, I deemed my grandfather’s overt dismissal of me in favor of the Steinbergs, however metaphorical, too much to bear. Only when I made the arrangements did the dreams of familial estrangement end.
1988–1989
After Zimbabwe gained independence, in order to prevent a tragic, economic collapse of the new state, the predominately white citizens who had benefited from the gross inequities of colonialism were forbidden from taking their money out of the country. As I had little money of my own, my grandmother and I would exchange letters for several months before she was able to secure the funds for me to buy the costly ticket via relatives in South Africa.
My grandmother’s letters were written on the same self-sealing blue airmail paper that she had used for as long as I could remember when writing to her three daughters living in the U.S. These international letters, filled with breezy accounts of daily life, were so superficial that my mother had stopped opening them long ago, leaving them to pile up throughout the house. After reading a few, I could understand why. Rote and unemotional, they seemed more like diary entries than heartfelt communication from mother to daughter.
Harare, Zimbabwe
Except for the furniture, everything in my grandmother’s thatched-roof stucco house had been a gift. On my first evening in the capital city of Zimbabwe, I was shown through the modest one-story 1920s home, and made privy to the history behind each object hanging on the walls or propped up on shelves. Impressive African landscape paintings; African sculptures of various sizes and shapes, the most notable being the Shona soapstone works—curved abstractions in green or black; the traditional ritualistic objects of the Shona religious culture such as the mbiria, drums, the woven baskets, and the divining bones of the witch doctor—the hakata. In my grandfather’s small study with metal case windows looking onto overgrown waxy green plants, were rows and rows
of books. These included mostly medical books, a few classic British and South African novels, and dozens of copies of the thirty-two books he had authored.
Early in his career he wrote a book called The Sick African, which dispensed useful information on the treatment of tropical diseases from a clinical medical point of view, emphasizing the difference between Bantu and Western attitudes toward disease. As it was described by Negley Farson of the Oxford Academic in 1946:
It is that kind of book; a handbook destined to be upon the table of doctors, nuns, priests, medical-missionaries, colonial administrators, in fact, every white man and woman working in Equatorial Africa, who has to treat the sick African. And it is a book that would be of great value to the average Britisher, if you could only get people at home to read it; it might shock them out of their dangerous indifference about the obligations of the British Empire.11
Farson goes on to note the shocking nature of the photographs in particular: “These sores, distortions, and gruesome disfigurements of the human body speak of agonies never meant for man to bear.” The concerns my grandfather expressed in this book took note of the fact that Africans suffered more profoundly from tropical diseases than their white or European counterparts, who were less susceptible. As Africans performed all of the “heavy work,” this was of particular concern. Most emphatically, in the chapter titled “The Life and Outlook of the Native,” the mistrust of native people toward white Western medicine was explored. While medical observation makes up the bulk of this work—for example, the interpretation of symptoms that are seemingly unrelated to systemic tropical diseases—some of the work was criticized and in subsequent editions revised. The colonial interpretation of African rituals and traditions was troubling, including sections about the medical practices of the witch doctor. This is evidenced by the title, which today appears nothing short of pejorative.
A Room with a Darker View Page 8