YOU ARE NOT ALONE
Mishka Hoosen gets into the mind of a traumatised woman, writes Bongani Kona
Mishka Hoosen's debut novel, call It A Difficult Night, gives a human voice to trauma
TRAUMA, it is often said, widens the gap between language and experience. Those who have lived through trauma sometimes cannot find the words to speak about it. In their collaborative study, Narrating Our Healing, psychologist Pumla GobodoMadikizela and literary scholar Chris van der Merwe write: “Recovery . . . begins with the finding of words and of a story about what happened; ‘translating’ trauma into the structure of a language and a narrative is a way of bringing order and coherence into the chaotic experience.”
Mishka Hoosen’s searing debut novel, Call it a Difficult Night, is an attempt at exactly that. Moving between places, time zones, and modes of writing — fiction, essay, memoir, poetry — the book chronicles a young woman’s struggle with mental health. “I tried to kill myself in the garden under the quince tree,” the unnamed narrator says to a nurse at a psychiatric hospital. “They say that was the fruit in the Garden of Eden.”
Born in Johannesburg, Hoosen completed high school at the Interlochen Centre for the Arts in Michigan, US, and did aMaster of Arts in creative writing at Rhodes University.
“I’d started off at Rhodes as an undergrad and that didn’t work at all so I dropped out and waitressed for a while, and they let me in to do the MA because of my writing portfolio . . . the teachers there helped me reach my own voice.”
Hoosen says the book emerged from experiences, “some witnessed, some experienced first-hand”, that shook her to the core.
“[They] demanded to be talked about, somehow, despite the inadequacy of language and the profoundness of those experiences. These things just kept coming up in my MA coursework and soon became a collection of shorter sections that eventually became my MA thesis and then the book.”
The dehumanising violence of psychiatry and psychiatric institutions is a strong theme in the brilliant, fragmentary novel. The violence happens out of sight — behind high walls and accesscontrolled gates. The narrator is shunted from one psychiatric institution to the next and plied with an anti-psychotic drug.
“I think wherever people are reduced to names, to labels, diagnoses, numbers, beds, there is violence done,” Hoosen says. “We do it to each other all the time, but there is something especially brutal when you deny the validity of someone’s psychological autonomy and experience.”
In one section of the book, when the narrator and two of her “sisters” go on their scheduled afternoon walk, Hoosen writes: “Gwen hands out the smokes and her light goes out as some arsehole speeds past yelling: ‘Hey bitches, I like ’em crazy!’ and some schoolboys walking home laugh and suddenly our white bracelets feel very bright. So I say fuck it and take out my phone and blast Amy Winehouse, and the three of us, we march down the street, belting out Rehab , giving the finger to every passing car, bright, bright, with hibiscus in our hair and no more fucks to give.”
Hoosen says she wrote Call it a Difficult Night as a way of “eulogising a set of experiences and people”. She adds: “I hope that people who have been through these kinds of experiences feel at least a little like they’re not alone.”