Creative writing

The DECOLMAD Project introduces a new series entitled “Psychiatry, Arts and Mental Health”. It aims to show past experiences and current activities that challenge "psy" institutions, knowledge, practices, and agents.  

This series opens with a brief report on the “Arts and Mental Health: Creative Writing” event organised by DECOLMAD. On March 15th, authors, teachers and students of writing workshops analysed the intersections between creative writing and psychological health/suffering at the Psykiatrisk Ambulatorium in Amager, Copenhagen. The event included a round table where participants shed light on different aspects of therapeutic writing. They highlighted how concepts and methodologies such as “expressive writing” and “life story writing” support patients' recovery and mental health. Likewise, participants discussed how creative writing allows patients to acknowledge their emotions and communicate their afflictions and coping strategies to experts, practitioners and communities, and struggle against stigma. Besides, they also examined various ways in which mental illness, emotional pain and ideas of the mind are constructed, developed and explored in creative writing.

The roundtable continued with poetry and narrative readings. Participants such as Orlando Mondragon (psychiatrist resident and poet), Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese (poet, literary translator and creative writing tutor), Birgit Bundesen (psychiatrist, head of REWITALIZE), Thea Inuk Lønberg-Jensen (writer), Karna Herland (writer), Sidsel Welden (writer), and Anna Rieder (writer) shared their works with the audience. They addressed several issues such as psychiatric institutions and mental health, homosexuality, the Ukraine war, migration, gender transitioning, and brotherhood, among others.

 We want to express our deep gratitude to the participants and audiences who attended this DECOLMAD’s event. And we are delighted to share with you some of the participants’ writings.

Writing I:

Orlando Mondragon’s Poem: “Recuerdo la primera vez” (“Jeg husker den første gang”)

 

 

Recuerdo la primera vez que mi padre se orinó en la cama: un aroma de hierbas y vinagre se agazapaba en el cuarto.   No quería que lo bañara. No podía. No había forma.               ¿Cómo dejarse desnudar por su hijo maricón? Su hijo que deseaba los cuerpos de los muchachos en las canchas de futbol y las piscinas, que sentía placer adivinando la apretada hinchazón de las braguetas.        ¿Cómo dejarlo acercarse a él sin sentir todos los cuerpos de los hombres tocados con lujuria, todas sus manos?           ¿Cómo taparle los ojos al acoso y al temor?             Lo dejé solo, sentado en la tina del baño. Cuando regresé me sorprendió verlo sin ropa: se había desnudado. La piel formaba pliegues como en una cortina, como si ese traje,                               el traje de huesos que era mi padre, le quedara enorme. Sólo sus costillas apretaban la piel desde adentro, sólo sus clavículas parecían romper su viejo cascarón. Su pubis decolorado                                        y triste.         Ahí estaba el tallo oscuro de su glande, un molusco                         brotando de su pelvis.       Su cuerpo, el cuerpo de mi padre, era el de un hombre que se estaba muriendo.

Jeg husker den første gang min far tissede i sengen: en aroma af urter og eddike gemte sig i soveværelset.   Han ville ikke have, at jeg badede ham. Han kunne ikke. Slet ikke.   Hvordan kan man lade sig blive afklædt af en bøsserøv af en søn? Den søn som ønskede sig drengekroppe på fodboldbaner og svømmebassiner, der følte glæde ved forestillingen af de stramme svulmende gylper.   Hvordan kan han lade mig komme tæt på ham uden at mærke alle kroppene, af mænd befamlet af begær, alle deres hænder?   Hvordan dækker man chikanens og frygtens øjne?   Jeg lod ham være alene siddende i badekarret. Da jeg kom tilbage, blev jeg overrasket over at se ham nøgen: han havde klædt sig af. Hans hud dannede folder som i et gardin, som om den dragt,                               den knogledragt, der var min far, var alt for stor. Kun hans ribben spændte huden indefra, kun hans kraveben syntes at knuse den gamle skal. Skambenet misfarvet                                        og trist.   Der var den mørke stilk hans penis udgjorde, et bløddyr                       som skød frem fra bækken.  Hans krop, min fars krop, tilhørte en mand, der var døende.

Writing II:

Anna Rieder & Birgit Bundesen: An extract of “Snowberries”

Anna

Discharging

The logic of the psychosis isn’t rational, you can work with the thesis, the butterfly effect, if a butterfly flaps its wings somewhere, it can cause a hurricane on the other side of Earth. Was it sitting in the windowsill or taking off toward the half-open window, it settles on my beer bottle and says, be quiet, so I am. little firebird.

It's all about staying in the outer whirls. A hermeneutic helix, or more precisely, a centrifuge, if you end up in the centre, there’s only one way, down. Do not plunge headlong into disaster. It is about establishing some landings before the abyss, it’s impossible to get out of the rabbit hole again.  

Birgit says, I’m allowed to quiver a bit. Shuffle my feet, close to the abyss without falling in. Birgit is my doctor. We sit in front of each other in the conference room, my mother sits by my side. I’m worried about you, you can die from this. I have arranged a network meeting with FACT. I cry, or I look angrily at the ceiling, cross my arms, or sit with open palms. The body sways in and out, in rapid, brief glimpses. That’s the problem, everything is perceived in glimpses. You have a time perception disorder, she says, you move either in euphoria or everything is black to you, only vertical movements exist. When you go bad, you can’t remember it ever being good or bearable.  

The small psychoses, the brain feels burned afterwards, and I must lay down like a sleepy child, they put me to bed.

This quiver, this constant hunger.

I am in doubt whether I’m the butterfly.

Birgit  Department A1. (Anna 29.3. Epicrisis)

I say to you: little moth, you are related to the sky, sudden cloud formations, hailstones in May, the moth flapping towards the light, like a hole in the world, to get out. Specks of dust dance a rainbow dance on the windowsill, we put brackets around time, stay quiet for a while, a cleaning lady enters and cleans the table with sanitizer, you say you’re scared of the rabbit hole.

My self resonates in the room, your self, our yous, the abyss is insurmountable. The medicine divides us. Something is brought forth by the quivering nerve strings of lyric poetry, a language beneath language. The table is cold, your silhouette against the pale Monet-poster. The silence lives.

You say: I feel like a waterlily, my neck is so long. The medicine makes me scared, to be without makes me scared, my heart is a heart of pain, it’s silent and inexpressible and maybe wicked.

I say: little moth, you’re dancing in there, you are also the shimmering dust. Waterlilys have deep roots in the sea bed, their leaves are shaped like hearts, they own the leaves of honey, their long stems are windpipes sucking in the sky. The only reason the rainbow can hurt is because of its quivering existence, it disappears like everything else. Look up! Look to the side! Don’t look down, don’t look down, you get dizzy, there’s nothing good down there!

Writing III:

Karna Herland’s prose: “Letters to my brother”

First letter - now

I must admit, there is still a part of me that hesitates every time I call you “brother”. There is too much space between us for the word to land comfortably. Space, in every sense of the word; physical, legal, emotional. Could I call you anything else though, I ask, challenging myself with a fierce loyalty and a blunt refusal to admit what is hiding behind; a shameful, mostly suppressed part of me that wants to create more space between us. To avoid the word “brother” to mark us as not a unit, as two separates whose paths just happened to cross.

I thought this confusion of terms would get easier when you moved out. When the concrete thing that bound us together got dissolved. But if anything, you moving made me more conflicted. These days I get confused and stressed when you come up in conversation with people who don’t know your name. You demand some sort of label, some sort of way to connect you to me, but “brother” sits more uneasily than ever, now that there is no longer a physical space in our home allocated to you. No evidence to support this claimed relation.

In a sense, it did become easier when you left, but only because it made it easier to forget the parts of me that would stumble over the word “brother” before, the parts that wanted to create some distance. Now that distance is all there is, the only thing left is a fierce loyalty and a kind of protectiveness.

You not living with us anymore, makes me question if I even have the right to use the term “brother” when talking about you. When I was asked the other day, if I would deem a novel suitable to read to a younger sibling, I immediately thought of you. Yet if I were asked how many siblings I have, I would no longer mention you, because we are no longer. You probably don’t use “sister” when you talk about me. You have your own brother, and I have mine. Maybe we should just leave it at that and move on. That is what we have done, if you were to read any official documentation on us. You have moved out, on, in, with other people.

Despite everything, “brother” is still the term I end up using. Anything else warrants too much explanation. Who has ever heard of such a thing as an “ex-brother”? Yet in my head, that is increasingly what I have labelled you as. The term seems to cover our situation:

someone who used to be a big part of my life, who is not anymore.

It might even imply that the splitting was somewhat painful,

maybe it is something I still struggle to process,

that your leaving maybe left a hole,

but that there also was an immense relief on the bottom of that hole.

That this relief is something I think I will feel guilty about always.

Because despite everything,

you are still someone I care deeply about.

All of those assumptions would be correct.

                There is also something defensive about my insistence on the term “brother”. To say anything else would unleash a horde of negative stereotypes your way. That was always the dilemma: Do I call you brother, protect you, and imply a relationship I wasn’t always feeling? How deep does the relationship have to go to be stated with certainty? Do I say “brother” and claim you in a way I don’t know if you would want to be claimed?

                Of course, I always knew the solution to my problem. One word, which would explain it all, yet put you in a box I worried would be too tight for you. If I would just add the word foster to the “brother” I always used, they would all nod with a perceived understanding.

Writing IV:

Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese’s version

(on the basis of the Polish translation from the Ukrainian by Aneta Kamińska, published on March 10, 2022)

Ірина Шувалова (Iryna Shuvalova / Iryna Szuwałowa)

from: Kyiv – Nanjing (24-26 February 2022)

1. unutterable

 

o    o    o

here here

it lies

the unutterable

 

heavy

like a dead body

of the loved one

 

long

like the night

of the bombing

 

grab the unutterable

under its blood-wet armpits

drag it

leave marks

 

the morning

will show

from afar

these red smears

Writing V:

Thea Inuk Lønberg-Jensen’s prose: “Can you see?”

“There’s a man here who has changed his gender and he… erh, she says she has booked a test,” the nurse said into the phone, her voice low and her eyes dutifully fixed on the computer screen on her desk. They only strayed briefly to look at me, averting themselves again as soon as they could.

I sit at a bus stop outside Hvidovre hospital. A bus rolls slowly by. Stops. Waits. Its engine humming rhythmically. I don’t get on. I just stay on my bench, waiting for it to drive away.

A woman with a grey scarf sits on my bench, a lit cigarette in her hand, the smoke drifting lazily in the mild wind. Her chest barely covers the blue sign on the wall beside her depicting an x-ed out cigarette much like the one in her hand. She doesn’t look at the sign or the many other signs around her. She chooses not to see, or maybe she is unable to? Maybe she has chosen not to look at those signs for so long, she is blind to them — forever in ignorance until some stranger dares to point out their existence to her, and then the woman has to admit to herself that they were there all along. A surprised “Oh…” and a “sorry” if you’re lucky.

A woman with a stroller walks past me on her way into the hospital. Two blue eyes above a blue facemask drift slightly my way, jump back to the entrance in front of her. Her heels click decidedly on the pavement, and the sound intermingling with the humming of the bus composes a short symphony before she reaches one of the big glass doors. Almost the entire front of the hospital is glass — both floors. Unnecessarily towering windows permitting anyone to look through as if to show you that this is, in fact, a hospital. A hospital performing itself, the performance barely dimmed by a couple of curtains drawn on the top floor. Just to be safe, a big sign above the doors exclaims the obvious: “Hvidovre Hospital”.

I had come to the hospital to get a blood test. I had been here before, many times in fact, but this time was different. I had scanned my card, waited in line, talked to the woman at the reception. But the system was not prepared, and they couldn’t see me. I never had my test, because it wasn’t for me. It was for someone who is here but who doesn’t exist anymore. At least not officially.

The next bus rolls slowly by. Stops. Waits. People get out and walk towards the glass entrance, the patients inside so clearly visible from the outside. I wonder why some of the curtains are drawn. I wonder if someone has forgotten to pull them aside and let the light and the sight in. Are all the curtains closed at night? Probably not, but if they were, wouldn’t people get confused? If there was no performance to watch, they would have to just trust that sign above the glass doors. Trust what the hospital is telling them despite not being able to see for themselves. I can’t imagine them not being confused, because that is what they always are when I show them my sign.

I had left the blood test department, wandered into the nearest bathroom. I called my doctor, but the line was closed for the day. I sat down on the floor, too low for the mirror above the sink to tell me what I already knew. My eyes stung, and I wiped them off with the toilet paper beside me, careful not to smear my mascara. Then I got up, ignored the mirror, left the bathroom, kept walking out through a big glass door, kept walking until I reached my bench.

A small tree stands beside the bus stop. Its bark is smooth and dark and its branches curl and twist in crude formations. There are no leaves on it, although a few buds do dress the crown. White and silky, they are almost in bloom. Tiny buds with flowers on the inside. I can’t see the flowers yet, but I still know that they are there.

Another bus rolls slowly by. Stops. Waits. I get on.

Thea’s piece has been published in the Fall 2021 issue of Tint Journal.