Cafe Babanussa

(
K
AREN
H
ILL:
J
ANUARY 27, 1958–
M
ARCH 27, 2014)

I
N THE FALL OF 1984, DAYS AFTER
I
HAD FINISHED
reporting on the federal election campaign that ushered Brian Mulroney into his first majority government as prime minister of Canada, a phone call awakened me in the middle of the night. It was about the health of my sister, Karen Hill, who was living in Germany. The call came from my sister's husband. They lived in a rundown coal-heated walk-up flat in West Berlin. They had married in a civil ceremony—without fanfare or family—a few years earlier, so that Karen could work in Germany. Her husband and I had never met, or spoken, so I knew something was wrong.

Karen, who was twenty-six at the time, had moved to Europe five years earlier, after graduating from the University of Ottawa. My sister had a lifelong travel bug, and an equal passion for learning languages. English was her mother tongue,
but she also spoke French and Spanish and more recently had learned German. In Berlin, she worked as a secretary at the Max Planck Institute (which carried out research in the fields of science and social science), had a crowd of expatriate friends and—from what she told me in her letters—had zero intention of returning to Canada.

West Berlin was a long way from Don Mills, the sleepy and almost entirely white Toronto suburb where we had grown up, and that was precisely why Karen had taken off. She wanted to escape our controlling and overbearing father. And she wanted to step out of the long shadows cast by our father and older brother, both named Dan, and both successful in their fields—our father as a human rights activist and our brother as a singer-songwriter. As well, she wanted adventure. She wanted to come of age racially, sexually, linguistically and politically, and Berlin seemed to her the perfect place to shape and define her life. It was cosmopolitan, multilingual and multiracial. Most important, it was an ocean away from Don Mills. Karen had met her husband in Portugal and followed him back to Berlin, where they moved in together. She drank, smoked, danced, devoured newspapers and politics, visited museums and art galleries, made a decent living with her job, studied German, learned about European politics and began forming connections within the Afro-German community.

When the phone call came to me that night, I had imagined it would be Karen herself, to commiserate about the fate of Canada in the hands of a Conservative government. But it was Karen's husband on the phone, and he was distressed.

Karen was sick, I was told. She was not making sense in her head. She was pacing the apartment, acting irrationally and speaking in gibberish. He did not think she could be left alone.

I was fully awake now.

During her periods of good health, our mother was lively, intelligent, inquisitive and playful. Our mother, Donna Hill, had struggled with bipolar disorder since she was a young woman. So had her twin sister, as well as a paternal aunt. But Karen had never shown any signs of mental imbalance.

As children, adolescents and young adults, Karen, Dan and I had coped with our mother's hospitalizations and long absences from the house. We had learned to recognize when our mother's health was starting to deteriorate: she would not sleep and would pace frenetically at night. I developed a term—
hospital ready
—for the right time to take Mom to emergency: hospitals were too crowded and too busy to admit a person who was simply pacing the house.
Hospital ready
meant that Mom had become a danger to herself, and that we could now convince doctors to admit her for psychiatric treatment. We witnessed our mother locked in a fetal position on her hospital bed, and counted the days before she would get up and start moving again. Her mind would begin to return, and eventually we would bring her home.

Dan, Karen and I had all asked each other, “Which one of us is next?” When that phone call came, I finally had the sad answer.

Within twenty-four hours I was on a flight to West Berlin, with instructions from my father to bring Karen back
to Canada. I landed on a cold fall day, the air acrid from the smoke of thousands of coal furnaces. Karen's husband greeted me warmly, and with relief. He was sleep deprived and beside himself with worry.

Karen barely recognized me. She was dishevelled, agitated and pacing the flat. She would scribble feverishly in a notebook one moment, put on a record of Aretha Franklin the next, and then plug in a kettle, turn on the shower and return to her notebook. I peeked at the pages: they were full of incoherent ramblings that nobody but she could interpret.

Karen's family doctor in Berlin had been trying to help her ride out her episode at home. However, as I learned that first time and would learn again in the coming decades, when Karen was becoming ill, almost nothing could prevent her from sliding into the pit of madness. She would have to hit bottom before she was able to begin climbing the long and difficult path back to sanity.

Eventually, even Karen's sympathetic doctor gave up hope that she could recover without active medical intervention. Her husband and I had no choice but to have Karen committed to a psychiatric hospital. Karen was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder—the same illness that had affected our mother and her twin sister at about the same age.

It broke my heart to leave Karen in that state. She was so far gone, so deeply locked in her own psychosis, that she seemed to have no idea what was going on around her. Unable to carry out my father's wishes, I returned to Canada feeling sad, worried and defeated.

It took months, but Karen—bolstered by medications including an antipsychotic called Haldol, which she detested because it stifled her creativity and made her feel mentally sluggish—eventually recovered. She started functioning again, more or less normally. She left her secretarial job and eventually took courses to complete a certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

A year after Karen's illness, I quit my job as parliamentary bureau chief of the
Winnipeg Free Press
and moved to the tiny village of Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the southwest coast of Spain, where I began writing fiction every day. Karen came to visit, and she was full of spirit, adventure and laughter. She flew from Berlin to Malaga, where we met up and took a two-day bus ride back to my village. We passed through the interior of Andalusia and stopped the first night in a gorgeous hilly village called Arcos de la Frontera, where we stayed in a cheap
pension
room with two single beds. We were supposed to catch an early-morning bus the next day, but when I awoke around five, Karen was not to be found. I got out of bed and stepped outside. Just down the street, my sister was knocking back brandy at a bar, collecting free drinks from men who were happy to take her German cigarettes. I reminded her that we had a bus to catch. She replied, with a grin, “Just brushing up on my Spanish, brother.”

I loved every minute that I spent travelling with Karen in Europe. There wasn't a museum or art gallery that she didn't frequent, a café she wouldn't stop at, a street she wouldn't walk or a foreign newspaper she wouldn't peruse. In Berlin, to
which I returned twice to see her when she was healthy, Karen introduced me to her working-class quarter called Wedding, and to the vagaries of heating a frigid apartment with a coal-fired furnace. “Careful,” she said one day as she headed out the door to work. “If you do it wrong, you'll blow yourself up.”

I found, in travelling together in Europe and later in Canada, that we could talk about anything. How my fiction was going, and how she was enjoying writing poetry. How our first marriages—each of which would end in divorce—were faring. How our children were growing. And what had happened to ignite Karen's mental illness. She said that she had been drawn into management-labour conflicts at the Max Planck Institute, and she had found them overwhelming. Her marriage had also been troubling her. She had developed insomnia. Pacing at night, she had become increasingly anxious and finally entered into a period of psychosis, to be followed later by a pronounced depression.

Karen fared well for a year or two after her initial breakdown. She commenced a cycle of treatment and wellness, but it did not last. The illness returned, and she struggled with it for the next thirty years.

The side effects of her numerous and ever-changing medications involved trembling, weight gain and, perhaps most frustrating of all, a numbing of Karen's artistic and intellectual vigour. Karen detested the medications, and often changed or reduced them—sometimes closely following her doctors' instructions, at other times acting on her own. Usually, she enjoyed good mental health and was able to function nor
mally. But then she would become acutely ill, which invariably ended in hospitalization.

I have lost count of the number of times I took Karen to emergency wards and waited long hours for her to be admitted. She despised being hospitalized as much as she hated the drugs, and twice she escaped from the hospitals where she was supposed to be locked up. The first time, she slipped into street clothes and blended into a group of people who were visiting her psychiatric unit at the Toronto General Hospital, got out unnoticed and walked home to her apartment, where we found her hours later. The second time, a few months before she died, she ripped an IV from her arm and slipped out of Sunnybrook Hospital, walking for hours in scant clothing in freezing winter temperatures, again on a path towards her apartment. I found her at home that time too, with blood—from her IV wound—all over the bannister and the walls. The police arrived a few minutes after I did. They didn't know me, and it took some time to explain the situation. They escorted Karen back to Sunnybrook. My sister, the linguist, traveller, poet, gardener, writer—and escape artist!

After Karen's first marriage ended, she stayed in Berlin and became involved with a Sudanese political caricaturist. They married, and although the relationship eventually ended, it led to the great joy of Karen's life—her daughter, Malaika Hill. About a year before the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Bloc crumbled, Karen moved back to Toronto. Malaika was born there in May 1989.

Karen moved into the Bain Co-operative Apartments,
near Withrow Park in Toronto, when Malaika was an infant, and they lived there together for more than twenty years.

From her first days back in Canada until her death in 2014, Karen lived a complex and rich life. Right away she began writing about her experiences in Berlin: her romantic adventures, her marriages, her experiences coping with mental illness in the hospital in Berlin, her travels throughout Europe, her experiences with racism in Germany, her connections to the Afro-German community, and what it had been like as a young Black Canadian woman to live in Germany through the 1980s.

But hers was also a difficult life. She worked at many jobs, including a few years managing an adult-education program in English as a second language at the Toronto School Board and a stint with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. However, each time Karen had a job, the stress of work—not the intellectual challenges, but social challenges such as dressing and getting to work on time, and dealing with colleagues or bosses—seemed to catalyze another period of acute mental illness. After several cycles of taking a job only to suffer another devastating breakdown, Karen grudgingly accepted that she would be unable to keep working. She went on a form of long-term welfare and entered into a life of poverty alleviated only by the generosity of friends and family and by a fortunate housing subsidy at her beloved Bain Co-op.

Although she was unable to work for a living, Karen still pursued countless interests. She was a phenomenal cook and baker, and at holiday gatherings everyone devoured her
linzertortes, cheesecakes and pumpkin pies. She adored her daughter, Malaika, who became the love of her life. She gardened outside her own modest apartment and in the backyards of friends and relatives. She drew, painted and created multimedia art at the Creative Works Studio, a Toronto arts program for people living with mental illness or addictions. She was a loving sister to Dan and to me, and a regular confidante and companion to our parents. She travelled to Cuba, Germany and Eastern Europe whenever she could come up with the money. She loved her cats, maintained many friendships and had a steady stream of visitors, both at home and during her hospital stays.

For the quarter century that she lived in Toronto, Karen created. She wrote dozens of poems, two of which were published. “What Is My Culture?” appeared in the anthology
Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out
and “A Breath of You” in
The Freedom Seeker: The Life and Times of Daniel G. Hill
, a curated exhibit in the Ontario Archives about the life of our late father. And from 1989 to 2012, she worked on
Café Babanussa
.

I have known writers who have faced all sorts of problems—unemployment, poverty, poor sales, hostile reviewers—but I have never personally met a writer who, in order to write, had to confront mental illness for a quarter of a century. Karen wrote whenever mental illness did not completely disable her. I imagine that for my sister, writing must have felt like
hauling a brick-laden wagon uphill. She had to calm her mind and focus on her work, but the writing process stoked her anxieties. Still, Karen never complained about creating under the stress of illness.

Karen began
Café Babanussa
as a collection of short stories. Then she toyed with converting it into a memoir. Finally, she settled on a novel. She named her protagonist, Ruby Edwards, after our two American grandmothers: Ruby Bender was our white maternal grandmother and May Edwards, our Black paternal grandmother. The novel explores the life of a young Canadian woman of mixed Black-and-white identity, coming of age in a community of African expatriates and refugees in Berlin, and also experiencing a sudden, debilitating form of mental illness. The Café Babanussa draws its name from a real place: it was the café-bar where Karen began to step into Berlin's Black community. It was where she met her future husband and father of Malaika. For Karen, Café Babanussa was a home away from home.