lobotomy

"How Could this Happen?"

I wasn't going to review this book, but the issues that it brought to mind by its conclusion were more than enough to inspire me to write about it.

I could have called this review My Lobotomy, which is the title of the book and which I know is eye catching. But for me, the question that is asked of the author after a groundbreaking NPR story was done on him gets to the heart of why the book is so important and why I am writing this review. "How could this happen?" This is, sadly, a question that can be asked of many aspects of our society and which is too rarely asked.

I was browsing at my local library and saw the title My Lobotomy. When you see a title like that it's like when you hear the screech of brakes and the sound of metal hitting metal. You know there is a car wreck and you know there's something you probably shouldn't want to gawk at but you just can't help yourself. The title of the book is like that. I had no idea what the book was, but I felt compelled to check it out.

It sat around awhile until I had finished a few other books I was working on, but then I picked it up. It is largely the memoirs of Howard Dully who was, at age 12, given a "transorbital lobotomy" by none other than Dr. Walter Freeman, the man who made transoribital lobotomies chic. This is the third memoir I have recently read where it is clear that the author has such a literal mind that you know what you are reading is the solid truth as the author sees it. The first such memoir I read was Grief of my Heart (which I reviewed here), the memoirs of a Chechen physician who lived through the two Chechen wars. The Chechen/Russia conflict has so many twists and turns and distortions that when you read anything about it you have to look for the bias of the author. Yet this book rang true. My wife's comment on this book was that she felt the author was not very imaginative and that he was telling the brutal truth about what he lived through. I felt the same. The power of the story was enhanced by the fact the author seemed so literal. The second memoir I recently read that had that same literal, unvarnished truth feel to it was A Long Way Gone, the memoirs of a child soldier from Sierra Leone who now lives in New York. This is a book I have been meaning to review for months now but haven't gotten up the emotional energy to do so.

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Words to live by

These new-found tensions which are present at all stages in the real nature of colonialism have their repercussions on the cultural plane. In literature, for example, there is relative over-production. From being a reply on a minor scale to the dominating power, the literature produced by natives becomes differentiated and makes itself into a will to particularism. The intelligentsia, which during the period of repression was essentially a consuming public, now themselves become producers. This literature at first chooses to confine itself to the tragic and poetic style; but later on novels, short stories and essays are attempted. It is as if a kind of internal organisation or law of expression existed which wills that poetic expression become less frequent in proportion as the objectives and the methods of the struggle for liberation become more precise. Themes are completely altered; in fact, we find less and less of bitter, hopeless recrimination and less also of that violent, resounding, florid writing which on the whole serves to reassure the occupying power. The colonialists have in former times encouraged these modes of expression and made their existence possible. Stinging denunciations, the exposing of distressing conditions and passions which find their outlet in expression are in fact assimilated by the occupying power in a cathartic process. To aid such processes is in a certain sense to avoid their dramatisation and to clear the atmosphere. But such a situation can only be transitory. In fact, the progress of national consciousness among the people modifies and gives precision to the literary utterances of the native intellectual. The continued cohesion of the people constitutes for the intellectual an invitation to go farther than his cry of protest. The lament first makes the indictment; then it makes an appeal. In the period that follows, the words of command are heard. The crystallisation of the national consciousness will both disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new public. While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing him through ethnical or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people.