Clinical Conflict I: No Life Given to the Dead
The Zombie in the Metropole
She was someone who was typically very apologetic but tonight, when she arrived eight minutes late, she said nothing. After a brief silence she explained that she was stressed. That she had become quite involved in a situation involving her friend’s mother that was growing increasingly worrisome. The friend, also Haitian, had reached out almost a week prior because her mother, a “paranoid schizophrenic,” had gone missing. A day or so after the friend had last heard from her mother, the American embassy in Paris had phoned. The embassy was in possession of her mother’s passport and hoped to return it. The passport had been found by a worker at the hotel where her mother was staying, but they were unable to locate her. The friend then called the hotel in Paris and came to understand that her mother had been “acting strangely” and had left not only her passport but all of her belongings in the room. This was all several days after she was due to check out of the hotel, around which time she had been seen by the concierge lying in the middle of the road, halting oncoming traffic. Now the mother was in Paris alone, deeply psychotic and with nothing to identify her.
I imagined the woman roaming the streets, sounds of honking, screeching tires, shouts. French colonialism would now have to deal with a zombie in Paris. The term comes from the voudo (voodoo) practices born during slavery in Haiti. Many enslaved people believed that through death they could return to lan Guinea (a metonym for Africa), leading to thousands of deaths by suicide, which presented a problem for the slave owners.
Fortunately for those owners, voodoo contained within it a deterrent: the belief that if the slave disappointed a particular voodoo deity they would not make passage back to Africa and would instead become a walking dead person, forced to remain enslaved under the service of a master. Those who entered this state were called zombies. One way to disappoint the deity would be through suicide. Slave drivers, who were enslaved themselves, and were sometimes voodoo priests, utilized this idea to discourage suicide as an exit from slavery. French rule in Haiti may have left a lineage of living dead who remain unable to return to the humanity of their birthplace. To a world where they were human.
If I’m honest, the silence that followed was because I didn’t know what to say. Anything I could think to say was self-serving and mostly helped me to manage my own anxieties surrounding her story. As she continued, she detailed the efforts she had been taking with the friend to find the mother, and concluded with her fear, and expectation, that the mother was dead. I found myself unable to accept the ambiguity, the absurdity of a person’s disappearance in plain sight.
When I found my way back to her she was talking about how her engagement with social media was related to her sense of being “not normal.” Or that she felt she was seeking out social media because she was not normal. She tried to put words to this but struggled to communicate what she was thinking. She kept saying “I’m sorry I’m not making any sense” and “I don’t think I’m saying it right.” I’m not sure if she was saying it right but what I began to understand, in these few moments since my psychic return, was that what she was searching for on social media were normal people to help guide her to the normal world. She would find mothers who could help her manage her anger with her own daughter. These mothers would help explain to her the benefits of meditation and counting when you want to scream at your child for their irrationality or tantrums. She would try to find therapist influencers who would tell her how to not be depressed or anxious. How working on your perspective could shift your orientation to your experience and usher you into a world of bliss. None of these people could address her blackness, her Caribbean heritage and experience as an immigrant and single mother, or her history of physical abuse. And they didn’t intend to. Normativity does not desire to address these excesses but rather desires their pruning. And so, in a sort of masochistic struggle, she would open Pinterest or Instagram, shears in hand, and begin cutting back the growths she so desperately hoped to be rid of.
She explained to me that she has folders on her phone that she labels with titles like “mental health,” “diet,” “motherhood.” In the folders she places images, quotes, and stories that she finds on social media that fit her goals in these areas. I wondered with her what sort of person would take shape if we could actualize these folders. What kind of ideal would be born if she could simply enact all of this advice. After a thoughtful pause she simply said, “A Stepford wife.”
I envisioned her bursting out of a cocoon, white skin glistening. Fanon’s words came crashing through me: “As long as the black man remains on his home territory . . . She will not have to experience his being for others” and “a black is not a man.”
I began to think of the Stepford wife as an invitation into the world. Into existence. In Black Skin, White Masks’ well-known Chapter 5, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” Fanon seems to find this battle for existence. Eventually losing. He battles with the white French bourgeoisie for recognition. “Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known.” This recognition seems something to be fought for as it appears to be a requirement for subjecthood. To be is to be recognized by the white world. But the white subject is one that requires both the existence and exclusion of the black subject. “For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.” The fantasy of a pathway toward whiteness is a way of becoming normal. Or human.
“I thought of the pain of wanting to be seen by people you hate.”
But the words that first came to me are around the black man’s home territory. I remembered that when the patient was young, maybe eight or nine, she moved from an almost exclusively black neighborhood to an almost entirely white one. There she remembers encountering her blackness for the first time, outside of her home territory. Her raciality had not been made conscious to her until she fell under the white gaze. Though gaze implies sight and viewing rather than something more akin to a cloud or haze. She was suddenly engulfed in a white haze, in which her dark skin grew darker in contrast. She remembered this as being the time when she began to think of herself as “not normal,” a diagnosis that would later lead to a passion for self-help books and social media pages.
I offered her some words from Fanon and wondered if they would connect. I hoped that Fanon could convey to her something that I found too painful to say in my own voice. That we want to be human and we will never be human. That this hunger for recognition is something that makes me want to scream in humiliation. I thought of my psychoanalytic cohort who stood by as members told me structural racism didn’t exist at our Institution. Who watched me fight to have my voice heard and felt that my voice became too loud. I thought of being told I was reacting too strongly to hearing a white instructor read the word Nigger aloud in front of me. I thought of my Park Slope neighbor jokingly asking for ID when retrieving my package that had been delivered to his door, without ever reaching a punchline. I thought of the pain of wanting to be seen by people you hate. The pain of wanting to be white. I wanted her to know I felt this pain too but I couldn’t. Fanon’s words needed to do the work for me.
And I knew they had when her eyes began to tear. She spoke of the folders on her phone and said, “When will I not need to do this, when will it stop?” as the tears became too heavy and rolled down her cheeks. I could feel her fatigue. I breathed out deeply and she followed. For a moment, I imagined we could both feel the unending nature of this need. The impossibility of it all. I straightened myself remembering that Fanon went on to write Wretched of the Earth, which could be seen as a call to arms. And it was comforting to imagine that my anger had a place in this after all.
We ended the session and as I sat in her absence I was reminded of the mother. Lying down in the streets of Paris. She had become an obstacle. A black body forcing recognition. I remembered that, in recounting the story to me, she explained that the hotel said the reason that the police hadn’t been called on the mother: they assumed she was on drugs. My heart sank and I realized there was no recognition to come. No human to take shape. No life to be given to the dead.