£5.00
175 in stock
By Zekria Ibrahimi
ISBN: 978-1-84991-894-7
Published: 2013
Pages: 317
Key Themes: Mental Health, Novel, Community Treatment Order, Psychiatry
Description
This tragic novel is about Jane Morris- a woman subjected to a Community Treatment Order. Medication is forced upon her even outside the psychiatric hospital.
She feels that she is so small, so insignificant, compared to the vast evil of the Mental Health ‘Services’. These ‘Services’ are the core of the Satanic System that will not allow her to be herself, to be free, but incapacitates her in a cage of risperidone- the punishment drug, forever inserted into her through regular depot injections.
The story contains, in italics, alternative biographies- of mental health staff such as the smug Doctor Barwood, her prying consultant, and the vicious Ward Manager, Alex Tregarron, and also of other patients, including her friend and ally, Abdullah Khan.
Here is a deliberately fragmented narrative, an intentionally twisted plot.
It is a portrait of schizophrenia.
The aim is to depict so- called ‘sanity’ as an oppressor.
The Community Treatment Order is a new legal device that eliminates the rights of patients, and makes them like insects to be permanently trodden on by psychiatrists.
Jane Morris’ wish that her mind may dance for God is crushed by her CTO.
She is fragile, lovely, and doomed…
About the Author
Zekria Ibrahimi (born in 1959) is defined by his schizophrenia. It first hit him long ago, in his late teens. He is fifty four years old now, grey and frail, almost a pensioner, with all the aches and injuries of age, incontinent and impotent, lame and with constant tinnitus, and he does not always want to remember how, as an adolescent in the late 1970’s, he suddenly became afraid of everything surrounding him, and, worst of all, of himself. He would run around the countryside and knock at the doors of strangers because he feared the apocalypse was pursuing him … He would pick up rubbish outside in alleys and streets and hoard it in his not very palatial lodgings … He was always wandering away from home, searching for … what would never be found again … the straight route, the level way … He was a tramp, freezing during the nights in public toilets where he had various unsavoury insects as company on the cold concrete …
There were years of pain when his schizophrenia became almost his only companion- albeit a sadistic one, punishing him even as he hugged it. Perhaps, to echo both R. D. Laing and Emily Dickinson, it is the entire globe, it is general society, that is truly insane. Schizophrenics simply burrow all too deeply under the surface. They reach the very core of the savage reality in us all. Most varnish over the anarchic truth within through the superficial sham paraded as ‘civilization’. Schizophrenics prefer to be uncomfortably honest barbarians.
Eventually, after much psychotic shouting on Hammersmith Broadway, the hapless Zekria was confined at the Charing Cross unit in the West London Mental Health Trust. Following the unsafe unstable freedom of his schizophrenia, came the restrictions of Section 3. He would not have survived without the multi- racial compassion of the individual doctors and nurses in Charing Cross. Yet the overall SYSTEM remains an ogre of rules and restraints, and the INSTITUTION of psychiatry can be as cold and vicious as in the days of lobotomy and insulin shock.
He is an extreme liberal socialist, despairing of the tendencies towards cruel inequality and vicious intolerance across this planet.
Zekria is all too elderly, but still he muses about being locked up, drugged up, about how, with schizophrenia, the treatment can be worse than the disease…
Book Extract
Paula was there. She said nothing as she saw the two of us embrace, but there was a flicker in her eyes that asserted: ‘You’re a trouble- maker, Jane, and so is Delroy. Don’t get too close to one another. THE SYSTEM, OUR SYSTEM, knows how to punish you both…’
‘Are…are you a Rastafarian?’ I asked, after we sat down. We were chewing through something that was meant to be beef, but it was stringy and tough; it was just as indigestible as the rules of the Ward, which we were forced to swallow down however unpalatable they were. Ours was a diet of restrictions without mercy. I chewed miserably at some wet cabbage that was like green excrement, and waited for Delroy’s reply.
‘I no a proper Rasta. But I knew someone who was on this ward who was a Rasta, and he gave me this hat,’ he pointed at the hat,’ and also the scarf,’ his finger proceeded in the direction of his neck. ‘His name was Marcus, after Marcus Garvey, who was the black prophet preaching about the need to have Africa as the centre of the cosmos, yeah.’
‘I’m scared of politics, but I do have religion… I dance for God…’ I then abruptly started a harangue against those who describe themselves as ‘statesmen’ and who can be found lying regularly in the House of Commons. ‘I don’t understand politics, and I don’t want to understand politics. Members of Parliament and Ministers, they’re all parasites and predators, gorging themselves on the poor. They all look so respectable, in their ties and suits, but they are barbaric vultures in reality.’ I gulped down a portion of limp boiled carrot, which tasted like nondescript vomit. ‘Politics in England is the same as this food- disgusting.’
‘England is Babylon,’ he stated.
‘What happened to Marcus?’ I asked.
‘Marcus was sent to Broadmoor, for knifing a nurse,’ Delroy bubbled and grinned, obviously intoxicated about his association with Marcus. Marcus was the sort of gangster type with whom Delroy would be proud to associate. ‘Marcus was no going to compromise with Babylon, yeah.’
I gulped.
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