Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 4 - March 16, 2024
WILLOW WEEP for ME
How does her imigrant status and skin color affect her psychological development?
Although depression in general was scantily acknowledged at that point, depression among people of color was a topic almost entirely untouched, and depression among Black women was forbidden territory.
The intersection of mental health and identity politics is not well explored.
Black women, as Nana-Ama points out, inhabit a culture that expects them to wrestle with their own minds without bothering anyone else, and to be strong above all.
She had to battle her own personality to triumph over one of its core characteristics.
Her book addresses, in startling and awful detail, the pain of a precocious sexuality that led to repeated violations of her trust.
Motherhood seems to have been both the fact that saved Nana-Ama and the burden that overwhelmed her.
But sometimes love matters as much as identity.
The willow may weep for Nana-Ama Danquah, but I cheer for her. This introduction is only a sliver of my applause.
THERE ARE ALWAYS fresh flowers and plants in my house. When they begin to die it is a sure sign that I, too, am beginning to wither.
Once you learn to wake up in the morning, life will be a breeze.
I am often working-class broke. I am also a single mother. Life, for me, has hardly been “a breeze.”
Music eases my depressed mood.
There was a time when at any given moment I would abandon my bed, my lover, my apartment, to literally drive away the depression.
But being a mother has changed the ways in which I mother myself.
Sleep plays a major role in my efforts to maintain a balanced mood. I have found that too much is as disruptive as not enough.
And when depression reaches clinical proportions, it is truly an illness, not a character flaw or an insignificant bout with the blues that an individual can “snap out of” at will.
Our reality often comes to us in fragments.
Black women are supposed to be strong–caretakers, nurturers, healers of other people—any of the twelve dozen variations of Mammy. Emotional hardship is supposed to be built into the structure of our lives.
One of the reasons why she did not consider herself to be depressed.
It seemed that suffering, for a black woman, was part of the package.
Stereotypes and clichés about menstal illness are as pervasive as those about race.
Intersectionality
When a black woman suffers from a mental disorder, the overwhelming opinion is that she is weak. And weakness in black women is intolerable.
I assured myself that my mind and the behaviors it provoked were well within my control.
Depression is a very “me” disease. There is an enormous amount of self-criticism, self-loathing, and low self-esteem. Everything revolves around the perception of self. Most depressives find themselves—as much to their own disgust as to everybody else’s—annoyingly and negatively self-obsessed.
It was a tremendous display of love for them, to take leave from their lives, at my request, to share the occasion with me.
They even talked to each other in Twi, a language I can’t speak and have trouble understanding. I felt shut out.
These remarks were generally jokes made by my mother about my inability to cook or clean house properly and my flair for melodrama—all faults I had supposedly acquired because I was too Americanized.
Is her depression another Americanization then?
I have always felt torn between the rigid mores of Ghanaian culture and the overly permissive attitudes of Americans.
When I first started therapy, I found myself unable to talk about my parents or admit that I felt a tremendous amount of rage toward them. I imagine that it was because in African as well as African-American cultures, talking about one’s parents is frowned upon; only an ingrate would do such a thing.
Culture and therapy journey
Whenever I went to my prenatal appointments, I shared my feelings of depression with Dr. Woods, my obstetrician. “Aaah, those hormones,” he would say. I still find it surprising that he never suggested I see a psychiatrist or get into some other form of counseling.
Maybe it could have even given us some insight as to why I eventually developed pre-eclampsia (also known as toxemia), a pregnancy-related illness usually brought on by stress or hypertension.
How stress and depression manifested physical consequences in her pregnacy
His only contribution to our survival was his presence, in all its uselessness and unpredictability.
When would Korama and I—when would any black people—ever be able to find peace or happiness in this world?
Everything is blurry, out of focus, fading like a photograph; people seem incapable of change; living feels like a waste of time and effort, like a mad dash to nowhere.
Even under the best of circumstances it can be disheartening for an adult to live under her parent’s roof no matter how kind or well-intentioned the parent or the “child.”
I was beyond bothered by Eugene’s insinuation that I hadn’t “come out on the other side” of the difficult situations I had just faced. Considering the circumstances—a high-risk pregnancy, poverty, domestic violence, single motherhood—I thought I was doing pretty well. After all, I wasn’t on welfare, I wasn’t smoking crack or abusing my child.
“Black women are masters in emotional sleight of hand. The closer you get, the less you can see.”
It never occurred to me how drastically one’s housing can affect one’s mood.
All I knew was that I had to be someone other than who I was.”
Immigrant, skin color, depression --> masking persona
Many names and skins have been shed in order for me to evolve into the person I now am.
The child that would become Mildred in the United States was called Nana-Ama. It was the name my friends and family used, the name that my grandmother who cared for me while Mum was away whispered into my six-year-old ears to comfort me as the plane carried us to America, to my mother.
It hung strangely on my bones, but it was what was given to me so I took it and absorbed all that it was until even my flesh became redolent of its ugliness.
Sometimes I could hear screaming, crashing, banging and breaking. Always breaking. The breaking of glass, the breaking of wood, the breaking of hearts.
This is the first clear memory I have of feeling overwhelmingly sad for a lengthy period of time, of hating myself so much that I wanted to die.
Her grieving was systematic.
The kingdom of night was mine, and inside of it I discovered ways to reinvent myself.
Under the roof of the same home, there was a child crying like a grown woman in one room, a mother whimpering like a child in the other.
The thought of changing my last name, Brobby, never occurred to me, but that conversation was significant because it made me realize that a person could rid themselves of an unwanted name.
But I was afraid to let go of it, afraid to wish for my own death, even if it was only in metaphor.
that the need for separation cannot automatically be interpreted as rejection.
