Print Editions

In Kara Walker’s words, “history is the oft-repeated fable; power is the oft-repeated script.” From Walker’s art in The High and Soft Laughter of the Nigger Wenches at Night, In the Colorless Light of Day, to Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin’s conversation in Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine, ROOM 10.24 is a testament to our collective heartbreak and resilience. Exactly one week after the 2016 US election, we created ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. We knew that to “live out,” in Sartre’s words, “that unbearable, heart-rending situation known as the human condition in a candid unvarnished way,” we needed to do it together. For the last eight years, ROOM’s worldwide community has engaged in a collective struggle for recognition and authenticity across generations, culture, and political pressure. Now, just one week after the re-election of Donald Trump, ROOM 10.24 could not be more prescient. Aicha Bint Yusif’s poem, Bread and Salt, which opens this issue, harkens back to the place in Dante’s journey where his ancestral grandfather forewarns the pilgrim that in exile he will come to know the bitter salt of another’s bread, and the hardship of climbing another’s stairs. …

“Think what it would be like,” Italo Calvino wrote, “to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language… ” Of course we know that no person and no theory can ever escape the limited perspective of Calvino’s “individual ego.” Taken together, however, the authors and artists in ROOM 6.24 are giving language to a world that is rendering us all increasingly speechless. 

In You Know How Mami y Papi Get, Eliza Jaquez finds ways to enliven the dry universality of psychoanalytic concepts. She describes being stopped in her tracks by a term like “object relations”: “This (psychoanalytic) language palette is significantly muted when compared to the vibrant magentas coating my English or the bursts of flamingo pink saturating my Spanish,” she writes, “but once I walk through that linguistic portal, my homegrown blend of Spanish serves as a reminder that on this side of the looking glass, we are not objetos. We are gente.”

When they take the psychoanalytic terms “transference” and “interpretation” onto a South African farm or onto US college campuses, Mark Solms and Jyoti Rao also are also walking us through a “linguistic portal.” In Student Activism as Interpretation Rau explains how the work of social justice activists functions like psychotherapy when activists are “imploring us to attend to our collapsed and curtailed capacity for love.” She connects the attributes of psychoanalytic interpretation: introjection, catharsis, insight, identification, and working through to social justice activism in universities. Channeling Freud’s 1915 monograph Why War, Rau reminds us that “We must find a way to differentiate ourselves from the compelling calls of the past … and be able to bear standing too close to the great changes ….”

“…Karim and I are planning to meet tomorrow…to see what we might do together. I’m guessing we’ll have some ideas. I—we—will be in touch.” —Eyal
“…We need a new language, a new ideology, a new analytic praxis… The responsibility to help move in this direction is on our shoulders. Who is going to do it if not for us? And yet, it is like trying to build the pyramids of Giza. Unimaginable.” —Karim

As kids, Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin grew up within hours of each other, one in Beirut, the other in Tel Aviv—to parents who were born in what had been Palestine/Israel. From an astute understanding of the unconscious process, they have written, separately, about belonging and unbelonging and about the interpolation of culture on our beings. Now they meet, for the first time, to write about the impact the current catastrophe in their homeland is having on their souls, about the trauma and resilience in their families’ histories, and about the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking today. In a profound illustration of “analytic action,” Dajani and Rozmarin are embarking together on a project that they hope will culminate in a new angle from which to understand our human condition.(…)

“It turns out that when you meet the president of the United States, you are not allowed to have anything in your hands or your pockets, so the fact is I couldn’t show President Biden Shegofa Shabazz’s ‘Letter to the UN’ published in ROOM 6.23. I could only tell him about it,” Layne Gregory wrote to me, correcting a rumor that had been buzzing about. Layne Gregory is one of the founders of the Asian University for Women’s program Writing for Friendship. 

None of us, and perhaps least of all Shegofa, ever imagined that her “Letter to the UN” (which had been rejected by at least four different magazines and newspapers before we published it) could have had such reach. Nor could we have imagined that within weeks the IPA UN subcommittee would invite Shegofa to speak to them, register a formal human rights complaint on her behalf, and work actively to find other platforms to amplify her voice. 

ROOM is more than a magazine. It was conceived as a psychoanalytically informed community platform following the 2016 US election. Our editorial process is unique. In keeping with our belief that lasting change can only happen from the ground up, we open our doors and wait for readers to write. We never know, from issue to issue, what will rise to the surface of our collective consciousness. Like Shegofa, the authors of ROOM 10.23 are hoping against hope that their words, which are so particular to their separate histories and psychologies, might be heard, might have an impact. 

“It has been almost two years since we were waiting for you to take action. We expected you to not be just a viewer,” Shegofa Shahbaz wrote to the UN. But because she wasn’t sure the UN would read a letter written by a twenty-year-old college student sent on behalf of all the Afghan girls whose lives have been shattered, Shahbaz sent it to ROOM, hoping we might publish it, hoping it might find its way to the UN. Of course we will publish it, we told her. We will publish it in English and Dari so that other Afghan girls might find strength and hope through these words that they might be heard—that they will be recognized.

In their “portrait of an analyst as a young man,” Murad Khan shows us how, from an early age, they also had to learn how to recognize and thread a needle through precarious forces. “We are all caught in a three-dimensional matrix, under forces that push us in different directions depending on the context we’re in at any given moment,” writes Khan in “Re/calibrating” their quilted memoir of surviving family, country, medical school, and professional community. From Jerusalem, Naftally Israeli describes the seemingly insurmountable forces that have pushed his homeland into “apparent madness.” From the prophet Isaiah to the analyst Donald Meltzer, Israeli’s essay, “From Exclusion to Erasure,” delves into the heart of darkness, a crazy quilt that has become Israel. “A complex and integrated view of the truth cannot be maintained by excluding entire swaths of the population from ethical (not just ideological) recognition,” he writes. “For recognition to be truly ethical […] it should be translated into action.” For Israeli, ethical action in his country must translate into new legal definitions relevant to unrecognized minority groups, new forms of political representation, and redistribution of resources.

Eighty years ago, Albert Camus wrote, “I want to express by means of the plague the suffocation from which we all suffered and the atmosphere of threat and exile in which we lived. At the same time, I want to extend this interpretation to the notion of existence in general.” The chorus of interlocking voices heard in ROOM 2.23 echoes Camus’s experience of suffocation, exile, and threat while challenging us to revisit the “notions of our existence” and make new use of what we find. 

“What is it that makes us worry or wonder about each other? What are we tracking for?” Keiko Lane asks in “Viruses, Vaccines, and Proximities: A Story in Five Scenes.” “It’s the evolution of a kind of queer epidemiological cruising. A relationship to risk. A relationship to proximity. Each virus,” she writes, “asks something different from us in how we navigate care and contact. They overlay each other, multiplying in complexities.”

The authors in ROOM 2.23 open the playing field and suggest that not just each virus but each war and each migration “multiply in complexity” and ask for something different from us.(…)

There is a “deep and somber unity” when the different impressions of our senses enter into “correspondence.” So writes the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his seminal book The Poetics of Space. It is this “correspondence” that allows us to receive and transform the immensity of the world into the intensity of our intimate beings. There is an intimate “every- dayness” that runs through all the essays in ROOM 10.22. And much as residual impressions from the day are trans- formed nightly into dreams, the synergy of these writers forms an unsettling social dreamscape.

Svitlana Matviyenko’s day began at five in the morning on the 181st day of the war, a day before Ukrainian In- dependence Day. “Everything here is now immersed in a complete silence that you can only encounter in a small town like mine…The rocket attacks are most typical at this hour. When they are detected by our national radar system, the entire river canyon is filled with the wailing sound of air raid alerts.” In her essay, August 23, 2022— Kamianets-Posilskyi, Matviyenko recounts the events of a day laced with horror and anxiety. “Many of us here in Ukraine are bracing ourselves for tomorrow,” she writes. Her accompanying soundscape brings the birds, the river canyon, and the crescendo of the early-morning air raid from her window straight into ours.(…)