Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (38 page)

These three women were drawn to one another’s difficulties, and after many years they spoke to one another about shared feelings of anguish. Joelson had gone to the hospital in Ilulissat for training in midwifery and had learned there about talking therapies. She found comfort in her conversation with these other two women, and she proposed an idea to them. It was a new idea for that society. In church one Sunday, Lange announced that they had formed a group and wanted to invite anyone who wished to talk about problems to come and see them, individually or together. She proposed that they use the consulting room at Joelson’s place and promised that such meetings would remain confidential. She said, “None of us needs to be alone.”

In the following year, all the women of the village, one at a time, each unaware of how many others had taken up the proposition, came to see them. Women who had never told their husbands or their children what was in their hearts wept in the midwife’s delivery room. And so this new tradition began, of openness. A few men came, though their ideal of toughness kept many away, at least at the beginning. I spent long hours in the houses of each of these three
women. Amelia Lange said it had been a great insight for her to see how people were “released” after talking to her. Karen Johansen invited me in with her family, gave me a bowl of fresh whale soup, which she had said was often the best answer to one’s problems, and told me that for her, the real cure for sadness was to hear of the sadness of others. “I am not doing this only for the people who speak to me,” she said, “but also for myself.” In their homes, the people of Ilimanaq do not talk about one another. But they go to their three elders and draw strength from them. “I know that I have prevented many suicides,” Johansen said.

Confidentiality was of the utmost importance; a small settlement has too many hierarchies that cannot be disrupted without making problems far greater than the problem of silence. “I see the people outside who have told me their problems, and I never bring up those problems or ask in a different way about someone’s health,” Joelson said. “Only if, when I say politely, ‘How are you?’ they begin to cry, then I will bring them back with me to the house.”

Depression is a disease of loneliness, and anyone who has suffered it acutely knows that it imposes a dread isolation, even for people surrounded by love—in Greenland, to some degree, an isolation imposed by the impossibility of being alone. The three women elders of Ilimanaq had discovered the wonder of unburdening themselves and of helping others to do the same. Different cultures express pain in different ways, and members of different cultures experience different kinds of pain, but the quality of loneliness is infinitely plastic. Those three women elders asked me about my depression, too, and sitting in their houses and eating dried cod wrapped in seal blubber, I felt them reaching from their experience to mine. When we left the town, my translator said this had been the most exhausting experience of her life, but she said it with incandescent pride. “We are strong people, the Inuit,” she said. “If we did not solve all our problems, we would die here. So we have found our way to solve this problem, this depression, too.” Sara Lynge, a Greenlandic woman who has set up a suicide hotline in a large town, said, “First, people must see how easy it is to talk to someone, then how good it is. They don’t know that. We who have discovered that must do our best to spread the news.”

Confronted with worlds in which adversity is the norm, one sees shifting boundaries between the accurate reckoning of life’s difficulty and depression. The families I visited in Ilimanaq had in general made their way through tribulation by observing a pact of silence. An effective system for its purpose, it saw many people through numerous cold, long winters. Modern Western belief holds that problems are best solved when they are pulled out of darkness, and the story of what has happened in Ilimanaq bears out that theory, but the articulation is limited in scope and location. Let us remember that none of the depressed people in the village talked about their problems with the objects of those problems, and that they did not discuss their difficulties regularly even with the three women elders. It is often said that only a leisured class in a developed society falls prey to depression; in fact, that certain class is distinguished merely in having the luxury of articulating and addressing depression. For the Inuit, depression is so minor in the scale of things and so evident a part of everyone’s life that, except in severe cases of vegetative illness, they simply ignore it. Between their silence and our intensely verbalized self-awareness lie a multitude of ways of speaking of psychic pain, of knowing that pain.

The problem of depression in Greenland remains acute; suicide is the leading cause of mortality there, accounting for a full tenth of all deaths. The overall rate has held steady since 1980 despite programs designed to reduce it; the rate among younger people is escalating, often tied to alcoholism and domestic abuse. The suicide rate for 2014 was 78 per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2015, Astrid Olsen, who works to reduce suicide in Ilulissat, explained that she and her colleagues had ceased to use the word
imminorneq
, which loosely translates to “taking one’s own life,” and had started to use
imminut toqunneq
, which means “to kill oneself.” The new term more vividly evokes the reality of suicide as a form of murder, and evokes the emotional trauma that suicide can inflict upon a community. “It was as if a huge, heavy blanket lay over the whole town,” she said. “We had to lift that blanket off.”

In 2009, Greenland voted for and received self-rule. It is no longer a colony of Denmark’s as it was when I was there. Huge strides have been made with the establishment of hydroelectric power, which allows more of the population in settlements to live comfortably. Despite this cheering progress, the primary news from Greenland is that it is melting: in 2015, the Jakobshavn Glacier lost a piece of ice the size of Manhattan, an event so dramatic that it could be seen from space. Areas that were solid ice when I was in Greenland are now farms. Comparing photos I took in 1999 to photos sent to me since, my heart breaks. The loss of that landscape of ice is not merely an environmental catastrophe, but also a cultural one.

Esquire
, February 2014

I remember thinking even as I was having this experience that I’d tell the story for the rest of my life. A detailed version went into
The Noonday Demon
, but when it came time to recount the experience for the storytelling organization the Moth, I had to condense it and make it punchier. A transcript of the live version was included in the group’s first anthology,
The Moth
, then picked up by
Esquire
. There’s more information in the original, but the thrust and context of the experience are here. I’ve cleaned up some of the phrasing from the oral version. Though
Esquire
ran the piece only in 2014, I’ve placed it here in the book in keeping with the time I visited Senegal in 2000.

I
’m not depressed now—but I was depressed for a long time. I lived with blinding depression and had long stretches when everything seemed hopeless and pointless, when returning calls from friends seemed like more than I could do, when getting up and going out into the world seemed painful, when I was completely crippled by anxiety.

When I finally got better and started writing about recovery, I
became interested in all the different treatments for depression. Having started as a kind of medical conservative, thinking that only a couple of things worked—medication, electroconvulsive therapy, and certain talk therapies—I gradually changed my mind. I realized that if you have brain cancer and you decide that standing on your head and gargling for half an hour every day makes you feel better, it may make you feel better, but the likelihood is that you still have brain cancer, and without other treatment you’re still going to die from it. But if you have depression and you say that standing on your head and gargling for half an hour makes you feel better, then you are cured—because depression is an illness of how you feel, and if you feel great, then you’re no longer depressed.

So I began to open up to alternative treatments. I researched everything from experimental brain surgeries to hypnotic regimens. People wrote to me constantly because I had been publishing on this subject. One woman wrote that she had tried medication, therapy, electroshock treatments, and a variety of other approaches and had finally found what worked for her. She wanted me to tell the world about it. It was “making little things from yarn,” and she sent me numerous examples, as well as a photograph of herself in a room with two thousand identical teddy bears. Not that obsessive-compulsive disorder is the same as depression, but, hey—she’d been miserable before and she was pretty happy now.

As I was doing this work, I also became interested in the idea that depression has pitched up not only in the modern, industrialized West, as people tended to assume, but also across cultures, and across time. So when one of my dearest friends, David Hecht, who was living for a little while in Senegal, asked, “Do you know about the tribal rituals that are used for the treatment of depression here?” I said, “No, I don’t—but I would like to.” And he said, “Well, if you come for a visit, we could help you do some research.”

So I set off for Senegal, where I met David’s then-girlfriend-now-ex-wife, Hélène. She had a cousin whose mother was a friend of someone who went to school with the daughter of a person who actually practiced the
n’deup
, the ritual David had mentioned, so she arranged for me to go and interview this woman. I went off to
a small town about two hours outside Dakar and was introduced to an extraordinary, old, large priestess wrapped in miles and miles of African fabric printed with pictures of eyes. She was Madame Diouf. We spoke for about an hour, and she told me all about the
n’deup
. At the end of our interview, feeling rather daring, I said, “Listen, I don’t know whether this is something you would even consider, but would it be possible for me to attend an
n’deup
?”

And she said, “Well, I’ve never had a
toubab”—
the local word for “foreigner”—“attend one of these before, but you’ve come through friends. Yes, the next time I perform an
n’deup
, you may be present.”

And I said, “That’s fantastic. When are you next going to be doing an
n’deup
?”

“Oh, it’ll be sometime in the next six months.”

“Six months is quite a long time for me to stay here in this town, waiting for you to do one,” I remarked. “Maybe we could expedite one for somebody, move it forward? I’ll pitch in.”

“No, it really doesn’t work that way,” she said with a tone of mild apology.

“Well, I guess I won’t be able to see an
n’deup
, then, but even so this conversation has been so interesting and so helpful to me. I’m a little sad about leaving here not actually getting to see one, but I thank you.”

“Well, I’m glad that you could come. I’m glad it was helpful . . . but there is one other thing. I hope you don’t mind my saying this.”

“No, what? What is it?”

“You don’t look that great yourself. Are you suffering from depression?”

I hesitated. “Well, yes. Depression. Yes, I suffer from depression. It was very acute. It’s a little better now, but I still do actually suffer from depression.”

“Well, I’ve certainly never done this for a
toubab
before, but I could actually do an
n’deup
for you.”

“Oh!” I said. “What an interesting idea. Well, um, yes, sure. Yeah, absolutely, yes, let’s do that. I’ll have an
n’deup
.”

“Good. I think it will help you.”

She gave me some fairly basic instructions, and then I left.

My translator, Hélène, the aforementioned then-girlfriend-now-ex-wife of my friend David, turned to me and said, “Are you completely crazy? Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into? You’re crazy. You’re totally crazy. But I’ll help you if you want.”

First, I had a shopping list. I had to buy seven yards of African fabric. I had to get a calabash, which was a large bowl fashioned from a gourd. I had to get three kilos of millet. I had to get sugar and kola beans. And then I had to get two live cockerels and a ram. So Hélène and I went to the market with David and we got most of the things, and I said, “But what about the ram?”

Hélène said, “We can’t buy the ram today. What are we going to do with it overnight?” I saw the sense of that.

The next day, when we got into a taxi for the two-hour drive to the
n’deup
, I said, “What about the ram?”

Hélène said, “Oh, we’ll see a ram along the way.” So we were going along and going along, and there, indeed, was a Senegalese shepherd by the side of the road with his flock. We stopped the cab, got out, negotiated a bit, and bought a ram for seven dollars. Then we had a little bit of a struggle getting the live ram into the trunk of the taxicab. But the cabdriver seemed not at all worried, even when the ram kept relieving himself in the trunk.

When we got there, I said to Madame Diouf, “Well, here I am. I’m ready for my
n’deup
.”

Now, the
n’deup
varies enormously depending on a whole truckload of signals and symbols that come from above. So we had to go through this whole shamanistic process to figure out my
n’deup
. I still didn’t know much about what was going to happen. First I had to change out of my jeans and my T-shirt and put on a loincloth. Then I sat down, and I had my chest and my arms rubbed with millet. Someone said, “Oh, we really should have music for this.”

I said, “Oh, great.” And I thought, yes, drumming, some atmospheric, wonderfully West African sort of thing.

Madame Diouf came out with her prized possession, a battery-operated tape player, for which she had one tape:
Chariots of Fire
. So we listened to
Chariots of Fire
. I was given various shamanistic objects to hold with my hands and drop. I then had to hold them with my
feet and drop them. Madame Diouf’s five assistants had all gathered around. They would say, “Oh, this augurs well.” “This augurs badly.” We spent the morning like this. We’d started at about eight o’clock, and at maybe about eleven, eleven thirty, they said, “Well, now it’s actually time for the central part of the ritual.”