In Medias Res

“Go, go, go, said the bird: humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

— T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets

In ROOM’s tenth year, we find ourselves in the middle of a world at war with itself.  

“Psychoanalysis rests on the assumption that people can change; that through thought, reflection, and the painful recognition of one’s own destructiveness, something new can emerge … This moment is testing my belief in ways I never expected,” writes Nina Jamshidnejad in No Language in Times of War. “I am considered a traitor, as if refusing war makes me aligned with the regime I myself had to flee.” The new analytic setting that Darya Navidi describes in A Bag of Broken Tiles: Report from Tehran is built not on neutrality or consistency but on proximity to survival. “There (are) moments when this (feels) less like analytic work and more like standing in the middle of incompatible realities.” Separated by thousands of miles, both women are paralyzed politically and psychically between two irreconcilable positions with nothing to hold on to and no ground beneath them.

Laura Farha is also suspended in an incomprehensible reality. In On This Land she describes working with a patient whose Shia Muslim village in southern Lebanon neighbors her own Christian one. “We have both dreamt of returning, she to open a school, me to raise goats.” Now her patient’s home has been destroyed by rockets and her village has been prohibited to offer shelter to Shia Muslims seeking refuge. In return, the Israeli military promises to spare Farha’s home from utter annihilation. If her patient knows about this, neither of them speak of it. When Jamshidnejad says, “War destroys more than bodies and cities. It destroys the invisible structures that make human co-existence possible: trust, shared reality, and moral recognition,” she is also speaking for Navadi and Fahra. She is speaking for millions.   

Racism also destroys “trust, shared reality, and moral recognition.” This Black Thing tells how Jennifer Hall and her patients “are both implicated and shamed in (their) socialized attempts to navigate the color line.” Hall writes that “a clinical session may sit on top of that line but at the session’s conclusion we go back to our separate sides.” Across the world, authors in ROOM 6.26 are showing us how lines are being crossed both violently and imperceptibly.

Charmaine McCaulay and Maria Liu describe how political and racial lines that are baked into the structure of our lives crisscross inside of us. McCaulay’s The White Paint from Mr. Darcy’s Shop recalls the overt racism of England in the 1960s that “did not pretend confusion or politeness.”  She begins with the question, “Why do Black and brown people hurt each other so deeply?” and ends with the recognition that the white gaze internalized equals lateral violence. In contrast to the lack of pretense in McCaulay’s childhood, Liu’s early years were masked in confusion and cover-up. In What We Learned she exposes the scars that China’s fierce one-child policy continues to have on her psyche and body. From a bird’s-eye view, Debra Anne Neumann’s Epic Fury sweeps through an American flipbook of “burgers and bodybags” from Vietnam to Iran. “‘And that’s the way it is,’ said Walter Cronkite night after night.” This is the way it always was, Neuman tells us.

Where does humankind go when reality becomes too much to bear? Selene, Morgan, and Burnett try to show us: we dissociate, we question, we dream, we write. 

Silver Dollar describes what it was like for Wendy Selene to cross lives with a woman on death row and recognize the power (and failure) of dissociation to protect each of them from the impact of severe childhood trauma. In Good People, Jacqueline Morgan (who works in a Minneapolis bookstore), struggles to believe that people are good even if they may be cowards or ignorant. But then she wonders, “How slippery the slope between ignorance and evil … and how long will it be before a morally reprehensible person pulls a gun and shoots up the store?” Good people, for Morgan, are a leap of faith.  For Ipek Burnett, the news and the horror follow her everywhere and even her unease feels like a privilege. No matter how many protests she joins, Burnett knows she is part of the vengeance and violence by virtue of her American citizenship. Nightmares bridge the war raging outside of her to the war raging inside of her. War and the Dreamworld is a weight-bearing bridge between Burnett’s experience and our own. 

For ten years ROOM has been a weight-bearing bridge for hundreds of writers, mental health professionals, poets, artists, and community leaders from all over the world. Some are well known, but for many, it has been the first time they have been able to be heard. We Are the Light, established less than two years ago under the stewardship of Sara Mansfield Taber, now holds the work of over two dozen young women whose voices have been silenced and whose lives have been truncated. There is a special supplement in this issue honoring Taber’s contribution to ROOM while commemorating the bravery and hopes of these young women. The Silence She Broke is a heartbreakingly hopeful poem by twenty-one-year-old Shaami from Myanmar; Raising our Voices for Justice is the harrowing account of how sixteen-year-old Sama, an Afghan girl, became the leader of a protest march; and  The Hidden Hero is a fable by Hūmā, a twenty-one-year-old Afghan woman studying math and data science at a university far from her home. Also included are two pieces of Taber’s writing: What Led Me to You describes the unconscious forces at play that brought her to Afghanistan. Dear Iphigenia is an excerpt from the epic poem The Women of Oresteia, years in the making, completed two weeks before Taber’s death.   

From Aeschylus to Eliot, poets always begin in the middle of the moment and from the center of their hearts. ROOM also takes its start from the middle of where we, as a community, find ourselves. For the past ten years, each new ROOM has been a stanza, a new song in our community epic. Like Eliot’s bird, the writers, poets, and artists who have flown through ROOM’s portal have urged us to follow them as they breathe life into a broken and often terrifying world. Unlike Eliot’s bird, the authors and artists in ROOM 6.26 are not telling us to go because reality is too hard to bear; they are telling us to stay. As Darya Narvidi put it, “To live here, in this moment, is to resist the urge to force these fragments into coherence too quickly—to remain with the disjunction, their incompatibility, their refusal to settle.” There is nowhere to go. When these authors sing of the darkest things, it enjoins us to find stillness not in an Edenic illusion but in the connection we hold each to each. From this we ascend.