by Camilla Gibb
Biscutti and her parents were desperately poor, supported only by the grandmother’s paltry income. Their house had a dirt floor; a patch of ground behind it was where they went to the bathroom. I would often find Biscutti sitting alone in the road eating dirt—a disorder called pica, often a sign of iron deficiency. But it can also be a sign of developmental issues. She was nearly three, but she hadn’t started speaking yet, she didn’t interact with other children, and open wounds on her face refused to heal.
She’d taken to spending a couple of hours with me nearly every day. I gave her crayons and filled buckets with hot water that I warmed over the fire so I could bathe her. I washed her clothes. She was a wordless holy terror, eating crayons, splashing water and tearing up my notebooks when I wasn’t looking. She would leave for home when she realized that no amount of tugging on my breast was going to yield milk.
I’d never had a relationship with a child before. I didn’t know many children, and in my rare encounters with them I had always felt awkward and inadequate. But in Ethiopia, I was in general less self-conscious and inhibited. I had no choice but to interact—my survival depended on it. And I felt liberated by the truth that in this place, no matter how much I studied the language or learned and adopted the ways of the culture, I could only ever be an aberration. I had found a place where it was appropriate, sane even, to feel like a foreigner.
I was a source of curiosity and suspicion for many, but among those close to me, more one of novelty and amusement. I made people laugh with my mistakes. My first attempt to describe a stomach ache came out as: the foreigner has a war inside the stomach. People greeted me thereafter: How is the war? And I would answer: There is peace now, Alhamdulillah, and you?
With Biscutti in particular I was free to make a fool of myself: rattling the bars of her wordless prison, trying to shake her loose. I often carried her around on my hip when I ran errands—going to the market for vegetables or qat, a leaf chewed as a stimulant. The qat sellers mocked me: Why do you go around with that filthy child? Why do you choose that one—she is just a poor nothing. I couldn’t explain that somehow we had chosen each other.
The sores on Biscutti’s face kept getting worse, and I decided to take her to Dr. Hassan. He gave me some antibiotic ointment to apply twice a day, and while I held her, he painted her face with purple anaesthetic. We stood as close as two people can be with a baby between them; too close for an unmarried man and a woman in this Muslim town.
He invited me to a bercha on the weekend—a qat party, where people recline on pillows, drink tea, talk and chew this semi-narcotic leaf with some determination until the point when they are silent and high.
The bercha at his house was a sultry affair. It was conducted in a hidden room because the company was mixed sex, young men and women, highly charged. It was conducted in the dark because Hassan had something very rare: a television and a VCR. We watched an American thriller, the name of which I forgot because all I was conscious of was Hassan, cross-legged and breathing beside me in the dark.
When the lights came on, we talked about some of the work I was doing with midwives. He offered to accompany me on visits to the Oromo midwives I had not been able to interview because I didn’t speak their language, a language he, like most Hararis, spoke.
We started to do interviews together every Saturday after that, and at the house of the last Oromo midwife I interviewed, I found myself holding my breath as Hassan stroked the foreheads of two girls who had just been infibulated. He told the two girls they were brave, and we fed them honey with a spoon.
At his bercha the next day he found my hand in the dark. His hand was large and warm. He wrote a note: I love you. I wrote back: I love you too. We couldn’t speak. In fact, we didn’t ever speak it. We were in love with things far more complicated than each other.
After all his friends had left we kissed in the dark room strewn with qat branches. And then I left with my pounding heart, pulling my veil over my head, making my way down the road home, trying not to give it all away to my “parents” with my face.
But Ekram, my sister and confidante, knew. She knew that look.
“You know he cannot marry you,” she said.
Take me with you, sponsor me, get me a visa, people started to say to me as my time in Harar was nearing its end. I tried not to make promises I wouldn’t be able to keep. Some people began to treat me as if I had already left. Biscutti, for instance, stopped coming to visit. Her mother said it was because she knew I was leaving.
“But how can she know?”
“Because you took her photograph,” Nunu said. “Don’t leave her. Take her to England with you.”
When I told Nunu that I couldn’t take her daughter from her, she responded with an accusation: “You don’t really love her.”
“She’s being realistic,” Hassan later said. “She wants a better life for her child. And you could give her that.”
Realistic? The only way I could imagine this happening was if he and I married and adopted Biscutti together. That fantasy took hold of my imagination. When I got to Addis I would ask the Canadian embassy about adopting a baby. Perhaps Hassan and I would find ourselves making a life together in Baltimore or Boston when he got his scholarship to study in the States.
But we never spoke about the future. I didn’t really even speak about my parallel present: the life I’d left behind in England, my boyfriend, Ted. When it came time for me to return to England, by way of Addis Ababa, he said that he would take me to the airport in Dire Dawa, about an hour away from Harar. We had to travel separately. Ekram saw me into a taxi and disappeared into the bustle of the market. When the taxi arrived in Dire Dawa, Hassan was waiting in the square.
We spent two nights together outside the walls, then we took a taxi to the airport. Still we said nothing about the future. We said nothing other than goodbye.
5
In that brief journey between the walls of an Ethiopian city and those of an English swamp, I was alone in a way I had not been for a year—an invitation to evil spirits. You cannot adopt a baby who has parents, a staffer at the embassy in Addis had told me. And there was the very likely possibility that I would never see Hassan again. Who could I even tell of Hassan’s existence? How would I reconcile these two lives; who in England would ever forgive me? In addition to my boyfriend, there was my supervisor and the rest of my department, all of us bound by the cardinal rule of fieldwork: do not sleep with the natives.
I’d seen my supervisor in Addis a few months before, when she was on her way to southwestern Ethiopia. I had flown to the capital to meet her in the lobby of the Ghion Hotel.
I adored this awkward and deeply intellectual woman. She was a student of the great colonial father of British social anthropology, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, and she had taught at the University of Khartoum when she was my age. Now, nearly sixty, she was headed for a remote place called Bonga and she was very proudly telling me about her new tent.
As we were sitting in the hotel lobby, a noisy parade of women in glittering veils approached. Relatives of the family with whom I lived in Harar had come to meet me with baskets and pots of food to take back to their families. I remember the look of amazement on my supervisor’s face, and her comment that I really seemed to have ingratiated myself within this community. I thought this was a compliment. But then later that evening, she asked me why I was living with a family, why I didn’t have my own space apart, some privacy. I was shocked by the question. How could you learn about people, their culture, their language, if you didn’t live among them? In hindsight I wondered if she had perhaps been cautioning me in her very English way: there can be such a thing as too much immersion.
My life in Ethiopia had felt real and happy. The only problem was—it wasn’t my life.
I got drunk on the plane, trying to blur the passage, swallow it all down, gripped by fear of the crushing, familiar grey that is Oxford, that was home. I didn’t want to be the person I had left behind.
I didn’t want to return to the dark.
Ekram and Hassan had thrown me a goodbye party. They’d bought a goat, which had been ritually slaughtered in a neighbour’s courtyard, blood drained from the neck, and they’d roasted it over an open fire. I had recited a poem I had written in Harari. Ekram gave me six hand-sewn pillowcases so I could set up my own Harari home.
My first morning back in Oxford I walked into Tesco’s and burst into tears at the sight of the chickens—pasty poultry suffocated under plastic—frozen vegetables, foul-mouthed toddlers and fluorescent lights. I carried my bags full of pathetic vegetables down the street from Tesco’s, passing door after closed door. Life here was all weak light behind shutters, the faint smell of cooking oil, graffiti and broken car windows and the footsteps of men making their way to the damp pub at the bottom of the hill.
Oxford rained its way into the next day, when I had an appointment at the hospital with a psychiatrist. Three days away from Ethiopia and I was resuming a weekly ritual from which I had been spared for a year. The psychiatrist excused himself shortly after I was seated, returning with two other doctors. I tried to explain to them that I was not crying because I was crazy. Anthropologists have a term for the post-fieldwork propensity to burst into tears in supermarkets: reverse culture shock. But there is no entry for this in the DSM.
Does it look bleak? Does it look hopeless? they asked.
“Honestly? Yes it does.” It looked impossibly sad, bereft of any colour.
I was telling the truth, saying things that an anthropologist, a traveller, a dreamer, a refugee, an immigrant might understand. But these were doctors, not travellers. This was psychiatry, not poetry. I was mentally ill, not heartbroken and disoriented.
Just a week before I had been a bridesmaid at my friend Nimute’s wedding. In desperation, I showed the doctors the henna on my hands, as if to prove that I had not just been to this faraway place in my imagination. I had snuck off during the third day of the wedding celebrations to spend some time with a man I wondered about marrying and raising a child with. A doctor. He never thought I was crazy.
These doctors didn’t even allow me to return home.
That evening, I was squatting in a white hallway waiting for my medication when a Glaswegian woman behind me in line said, “Gah. How’d you burn yer hands?”
All the experiences of the past year were completely incompatible with where I found myself.
I had no visitors this time; I made no friends. I took my pills and waited out the weeks until I was free to go. I didn’t know where I belonged, but I knew it wasn’t there.
6
I knew what lay ahead. I had a thesis to write—an academic treatise, not a love story. My supervisor suggested a provisional structure, a way, at least, to get the tread-mill started. I stepped on, dutifully plodding, each step taking me farther and farther away from an experiential sense of the place I was writing about, from the familiarity and comfort of having lived among its people, from Biscutti and Hassan, from the over-awareness of inhabiting a body.
Just a couple of months back in Oxford was all it took for me to lose sensation of my feet, my legs—they were doing the work for me, moving things along, maintaining the appearance of human functioning, of progress, while I was crumbling into dust. My body had become white particulate matter, floating in the air around people’s heads. They’d breathe me in, breathe me out, unaware. I had no shape, no mass.
You can survive in this disembodied state for a time, provided you don’t have to interact much with people. Graduate work at Oxford didn’t require much in the way of interaction if you wanted to avoid it; there was no formal coursework, and writing a thesis is necessarily a solitary act. It doesn’t really require a body beyond the occasional public appearance.
I gathered the dust into some kind of shape, like a cardboard cut-out, a single dimension, in order to give a post-fieldwork presentation in a graduate seminar on Northeast Africa. I knew I was confused, during the preparation of it, about where the emphasis of what I had to say lay. When I opened my mouth to begin, all that came out was confusion. I took another run at it, starting with something else. And then a third. And then I stopped and went silent.
My supervisor generously prompted me with a question.
I hung my head and said: I can’t.
I had never experienced a moment of failure in my academic life. Ever since that turning point with David, I had been stubborn, goal-oriented, determined. But here I found myself confused and mute in front of my colleagues. Whatever was left of my cardboard exterior was burning. My face was on fire, tears cascading down over hot coals.
I pushed back my chair, excused myself. I stepped out into the grey of the Oxford winter and thought: I can never go back inside that building. It was mid-afternoon but the sky felt black. I could almost feel it resting on my shoulders. I began to walk in the direction of a park I had never felt safe walking through. I walked through that park with the sky pressing down on my back.
Ted and I usually went to the pub before having dinner at home. I can only assume that is what we did that night. Later, as he was downstairs watching TV, I was upstairs writing a note. I felt absolutely calm. I took all of my pills and some of his, and then I lay down to sleep.
I became conscious of a stream of light speeding through the dark, Ted furious, gripping the steering wheel. I woke up sometime later heaving charcoal over the side of a metal bed on wheels. This happened repeatedly throughout the night. I wept in disbelief that I was still here.
I had had enough experience of the mental health system by this point to know what and what not to say when a doctor came to do an assessment in the morning. I was not going into the psychiatric hospital again. I told the doctor that I hadn’t wanted to die. That I’d just had a fight with a boyfriend.
“There are other ways of dealing with your problems,” said the doctor with all the sarcastic weight he could. I was just another one of those self-absorbed borderline girls wasting everyone’s time and resources. I was free to go. He gave me a prescription for a new mood stabilizer: valproic acid.
A week later I went to visit a Canadian friend who was spending her sabbatical in Oxford. I had avoided her since returning from Ethiopia. She had had her own struggles with mental health. She took one look at me and told me to get the fuck out of Oxford. “It’s a swamp,” she said. “It will swallow you whole. Go back to Canada and get some help.”
I couldn’t imagine a more humiliating defeat.
“You can finish your thesis in Toronto,” Linda said, and gave me the name and number of her psychiatrist.
“You’ll never finish,” my supervisor said. “No one who leaves ever does.”
That was all the encouragement I needed. I would finish it. Assuming I lived to do so.
7
Within a minute of meeting Linda’s psychiatrist in Toronto, he asked me what was wrong with my face. I burst into tears. I hadn’t realized anything was wrong with my face—it wouldn’t be diagnosed as Melasma, a pigmentation change produced by estrogen and sun, until a few years later—but were we really there to talk about my face?
I asked him if he could refer me to a female psychiatrist.
“Suit yourself,” he said, flipping through his Rolodex and handing me a piece of a paper.
His female colleague said nothing about my face. She asked me why I was there. I immediately told her that I didn’t think I was bipolar. That I thought the psychiatrists in Oxford had been overzealous in their diagnosis because suicide was bad PR for the university.
But she wasn’t prepared to question the diagnosis. She presumed the psychiatrists in Oxford knew what they were doing. She was kind enough not to say what she might have been thinking: you seem kind of crazy to me. She suggested, instead, that I find a psychotherapist if I wanted to talk about this. While she would continue to manage my medication, a therapist could help me sort out my feelings. She wrote me a prescription for Prozac and a new mood stabilizer—carbamaze
pine—in addition to the valproic acid I was already taking, and told me to come back in two weeks.
I made an appointment to see a therapist, a psychoanalyst, as it turned out. Freud, ids and egos, totems and taboos, these were my only associations. I sat before a tiny perfect woman and described myself as white particulate matter in the air floating around people’s heads. I had no substance; I was simply being inhaled and expelled by others a thousand times in the course of every day. I had no story about how I came to be like this; just a scattering of moments. I didn’t know that connecting these moments, linking them to past events, bringing forth a story would be the work of therapy. I knew just that I had tried drugs, I wasn’t convinced by the diagnosis of bipolar disorder and that nothing relieved me of the wish to die.
“So why don’t you stop taking the drugs?” Dr. P said.
No one had ever suggested such a thing—a steady stream of psychiatrists in England and now one in Canada had just changed my medications, upped dosages and supplemented them with even more medications. It sounded like a wild and irresponsible suggestion.
“Because,” I stammered, “maybe they’re the only thing I have left to hold on to.”
“Why don’t you hold on to me instead?”
That knocked me right in the sternum. Who has the confidence to say that? To insert oneself into the dust? To assume that kind of responsibility for anyone, particularly for a damaged stranger?
This was psychoanalysis. And it was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
I saw Dr. P three times a week. I rode my bike to her office, crossing the Bloor Viaduct: a bridge plenty high enough. Sometimes I got off my bike in the middle of the bridge on my way home. I looked down and tried to determine the best place to land. There was the Don River, but it was so shallow. There were old railway tracks, but that would be too messy. There was the multi-lane highway—too unfair to drivers. The asphalt bicycle path seemed like the best option. Presuming you fell at night, you would be unlikely to ruin any cyclist’s day. But you’d need a windless night.