I
Every magic trick consists of three parts. The first part is called the pledge. The magician shows you something and pledges to you its utter normality.
*
“Family history?”
“I have had younger sisters with similar episodes when they were young, but they are all much better now, doing well. Mother would sprinkle burning incense from traditional healers and various Islamic medicines. She would play cassettes with recordings of the Qur’an recited in a loop so their demons would escape. I have had my fair share of the incense and bottles of Islamic and traditional medications, too.”
“Any fears?”
“Irrational fears? It’s the accident. Since the accident, I have been afraid to be driven by someone. I only drive myself. My body trembles, my heartbeat accelerates. I watch every action of the driver and step on imaginary brakes with my legs at every turn. Eventually, I would drop off the car because I couldn’t stomach the tension and the memories.”
I am the patient, talking with Doctor G, and going back and forth through a lot of episodes. Something has always been wrong with my mind. I was prone to hallucinations and paranoia, episodic anxiety disorders and depressive episodes. On and off. We deliberated on my illnesses, served each other symptoms and probable diagnoses like a tennis marathon.
Before then, I was travelling back to Kaduna from Abuja in a taxi transporting eight passengers. There were three men in the rear seats, four of us squeezed in the middle seat, the driver and one other passenger in the front seat. I removed the brown blazers I wore for the interview I had just finished, used it as a makeshift headrest, and continued to read from Christopher Priest’s novel, The Prestige.
There was this moment in the novel, this part where the magician Angier first disappeared by being wrapped in a ball of light on stage, and within a blink, he reappeared at the back of the stage. An illusion. At that exact moment in the book, reading the illusion, I found myself floating in the wind, the car rotating mid-air, flying and then my sight went dim.
I opened my eyes and found myself laid down on the pavement. There was a bamboo straw roof providing shade, and many heads from above thronged towards me. A man lay next to me, covered in earth and blood. He struggled to breathe, like the air suffocated him. He finally managed to take a deep breath, and it would be his last. He was now just a lifeless body oozing blood. I took rapid breaths to confirm I had plenty more to go. There was pandemonium and the name of Allah was uttered all around me. I made an effort to rise from my position, but my torso did not budge; no movement. My brain was foggy and a blur. I was able to raise my hands, but the men surrounding me in flowing kaftans stopped me as I felt the liquid dripping on my neck. I returned my hands and they were filled with crimson blood. “You need to calm down. You have been in an accident,” a voice echoed from above.
Everything flooded back. I remembered boarding the taxi. I recognised the driver; he sat on a slab far from me, but he had no fingers on his hand, just a stump where they used to be, and blood and tears. I must be in a very bad condition, with the way everyone looked at me. It’s my head, they said. The skull had cracked. I felt the blood rushing down my neck. Maybe it had split in half, maybe the inside of my brain was visible. That might explain the look of horror on their faces.
I escaped the accident, the only surviving passenger, with a bald spot in the middle of my skull that would never grow hair again; with a broken finger on my right hand that would not completely heal, even after surgery, and wouldn’t allow me cross my knuckles or write without strain; with the paranoia of riding as a passenger in a car that I was not in control of, that I was not driving myself.
II
The second part is called the turn. The ordinary becomes extraordinary.
As a teenager, in different episodes, across different times, I would experience a form of depersonalisation. My mind would be detached from my body. I would wake up in the middle of the night wanting to smash my head on the bright green walls of my room and paint them red. Like just ram into the wall and make something break. Cement blocks or my head. Make something break. Tears burned my cheeks. I would spend the night wrapped in my father’s chest and wake up the next morning with eyes all over the house rolling at me, concerned about the previous night’s incident. But in that household, we did not speak openly of demons and devils. We did that in hushed tones and invited the Sheikh to pray everything away. Time would roll, and my demons would roll over with it.
Another time, in my third year of university, I had been having on-and-off bouts of fever. Malaria, I assumed. Maybe stress from all the school tests. I lost weight fast, got placed on different antimalarials and antibiotics. I got better. Then I got worse.
On a particular day, I woke up and found myself walking upside down with a knife in my hand. I ran and tried to ditch the knife, but it would not leave my hand. I ran back and forth, confused, and found a mirror in the bathroom to look at my reflection. I was normal in the mirror. There was no knife, I was not upside down. But I could feel it. I was turned upside down, blood draining from my feet to my head. I hit the mirror with my fist and pain seared through my body. I ran outside howling, hitting whatever I could lay my hands on. I needed to be free, to be normal, and not be roaming around upside down in my own body. My roommates ran after me and restrained me. A security guard helped to return me to the room. He asked my roommate whether I had partied the night before and I was still high from a hangover. Later, I would sleep and wake up refreshed, like the episode never happened.
It is 7 a.m. in another time period, in another hospital. We sit: grandmother, father, and I. Three generations waiting for instructions and a psychiatric doctor. There were other patients sitting on wooden and metallic benches arranged haphazardly within the open space. There was a nursing station, a room where all staff trooped in and out; then two consultation rooms on either side of the space. In the open space of the emergency section, we all sat waiting: patients and caregivers, first timers, without an idea of what we carried in our heads, what our relatives carried in their souls.
The hospital housed old buildings, mostly uncompleted, abandoned, with shrubs growing within them. The emergency section was the first point of call for any new patient.
An hour later, a wooden seat and a table were placed in a corner of the space. A woman, wrapped in a red veil and face glammed in makeup, sat down and brought out a laptop computer from her bag and a bunch of files. That was when the record-keeping began and our data was collected. Her assistant tore a sheet of paper and cut it into tiny pieces. He wrote numbers on them and shared them with us according to the arrival times. We were number 17.
Before any patient saw a doctor, they would pass through the makeshift record table to register their name, the caregiver’s name, and other details. It was our turn now and I presented all the details about grandmother. The record keeper punched all of it into the laptop and then transferred the same information to a plain sheet of paper and inserted it into a green file branded with the hospital’s logo.
“Where are you from?” the record keeper asked.
“State of origin or residence?”
Her face got flustered and impatient.
“Anyone. Just give me the details,” she hissed.
After she gathered all the necessary information, she passed me a printed piece of paper with a bill on it and summoned the next patient.
“Excuse me?” I ask again, “What am I supposed to do with this?”
She rolled her eyes at me.
“Didn’t you see what the others were doing with it?” She returned to typing on her computer.
“No. I didn’t.”
She sighed, rose, and directed me to a hallway.
“There. The second to the last room, pay up and come back. And better hurry, because I don’t have all day.”
The payment centre was a single room barricaded with burglarproof steel. I passed my paper through a slit and the face of a man emerged. He requested the amount printed and I passed the cash through the same opening. He passed me a receipt. I collected it and returned to our section, leaving him in his cash hole.
The doctors were young and well-dressed. Courteous to everyone. Each consultation room housed two doctors on each end. So, there were always two patients at a time with their caregivers. We went in with grandmother and met a young couple with their child, a toddler. They were explaining to the doctor how the girl, a three-year-old, no longer talked or walked, and that she had just stopped developing for a while. The mother was still a teenager and had an older child at home. The father was timid and did not say a word to the doctor. He seemed eager to leave. Like he was not there on his own accord. We took our seats to see our own doctor, but the conversation from the other end of the room continued to separate my body from my mind.
We were in one of the eight public psychiatric hospitals in Nigeria, serving a population of about two hundred million people. 1 in 4 Nigerians suffers from some sort of mental illness. There are fewer than 250 psychiatrists in the country. Caring for people with mental illness is typically left to family members. If someone exhibited severe forms of psychosis, they would be taken to a traditional or religious healer. I was 25 years old the first time I visited a psychiatric hospital for my illness.
These psychiatric hospitals were, some years back, called Lunacy Asylums and were run together with prisons. Nigeria’s last semblance of a mental health legislation was called the ‘Lunacy Ordinance’ of 1916, updated to an Act in 1958, all under British colonial rule. Under this act, if you attempt suicide, you will be prosecuted and jailed. Attempted suicide remains a crime according to the Criminal Code Act, punishable by one year in prison. Britain abolished the same law in their country in 1961 — yet, it would remain in Nigeria for another half century and counting.
I had watched on the news how Ifeanyi, a 25-year-old, was locked up for weeks. His crime: he tried to take his own life. Ifeanyi had jumped from a bridge into the Lagos lagoon. After being rescued by fishermen, he was handed over to the police, who arrested him and put him in jail.
When police arrest people with actual or perceived mental health conditions and send them to prison and then to rehabilitation centres, many are chained, forced to sleep, eat, and defecate within the same confined place, so they do not run away and kill themselves. Like Ifeanyi.
As a child, I attended evening Islamic schools, cramped under zinc sheet roofs in the hot sun of northern Nigeria, reading the Qur’an. I remember young women in their hijabs, reported to have psychotic episodes and said to be possessed by devils and djinns, being whipped, causing deep wounds on their skins, until they slumped and fell.
III
Now you are looking for the secret. But you don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. This is the third act. The hardest part. The prestige.
Doctor G had a provisional diagnosis of traumatic stress, but also placed me under tests for complex partial seizures. A single area of my brain might be firing too many neurons at a time, which leads to hallucinations and the inability to remember any of the seizure events. He scribbles an electroencephalogram test on a paper with my name on it to measure my brain activity.
And this is why I am at the neuropsychiatric hospital with baggage rising over my head. It is the only public facility with an EEG machine, serving the state’s population of over 6 million people.
I find a nurse sitting alone in a room, white coats hanging on the walls and a chair and table with a machine on it covered in white clothes. She collects the paper and scribbles the amount for the test on it and tells me to shave my head before I return. I need to be bald, have every bit of hair removed. I step outside the hospital and find the closest barbershop. The barber has seen me come out of the hospital. We do not talk, but he understands, and proceeds to shave my head and with it, the entire load of baggage I carried.
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