Abstract
This article considers two revenants – a man and a ghost – who haunt the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal. Following Derrida’s assertion that haunting is historical, I take seriously the concept of haunting and insist upon its relevance to anthropological inquiry. As a mode of storytelling that comes from a particular way of apprehending the world, I argue that anthropology might give credence to specters as social figures and assign ethnography the task of chasing after ghosts, not simply for the poetic spaces they may open up but out of a concern for justice and responsibility in the past, present, and future. My own ethnographic encounter with the two revenants described here has generated questions about the often taken-for-granted equivalence of the real and the true. Likewise, it has encouraged me to interrogate the unpredictable (and oftentimes uneasy) cohabitation of memory and history, both within the Fann Clinic and beyond.
Keywords
There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not. (Michel de Certeau)
In these pages, I reflect upon a man and a ghost, both of whom haunt the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in their own way. 1 The man, Demba, is a charismatic ex-patient from Rufisque, a town about 25 kilometers from Dakar, who has spent much of his adult life returning to Fann. 2 The ghost is that of French military psychiatrist Dr Henri Collomb, who, according to some, has been roaming the halls of the institution since his death in 1979.
Both Demba and Collomb’s ghost are, in a sense, revenants. In French as in English, the term ‘revenant’, which comes from the French verb revenir, ‘to return’, refers to a person who returns after an extended absence or after death, though the latter usage is more common. The term ‘revenant’ is not indigenous to Senegal and has no direct Wolof equivalent; it comes to Senegal from France, by way of the same colonial encounter that led to the eventual establishment of the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in 1956. The word revenant, then, offers a clue to the kind of haunting Demba and Collomb’s ghost do (they return) while at the same time drawing attention to the space from which they emerge. By this I mean not only the space opened up (and quite possibly foreclosed) by the colonial encounter, but more concretely, the space of the Fann Psychiatric Clinic, a place in which the ‘palimpsestual tension’ (Bhabha, 1994) contained within the postcolonial continues to manifest itself even today. 3
Established four years before Senegalese independence, Fann was a product of the late French colonial regime that also came to be recognized by first president Léopold Senghor during the 1960s and 1970s as an exemplary institution of the nascent Senegalese state. Under the directorship of Dr Collomb from 1959–78, the predominantly European group working at Fann channeled their energy and resources into sociological and anthropological research, clinical practice, and theoretical inquiry. They also trained a generation of Senegalese and West African psychiatrists. Calling for a multidisciplinary approach, the Fann group sought to create a space at the crossroads of clinical psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences in order to lay the foundation for a truly cross-cultural psychiatry. As I have noted elsewhere, L’Ecole de Fann, or the Fann School, as the group came to be called, not only positioned itself as a radical departure from colonial psychiatry, it also challenged conventional Western psychiatric models and attempted to establish new forms of therapy (Kilroy-Marac, in press). Based upon their work at Fann, Collomb and his collaborators produced a considerable body of literature that gained the clinic international renown.
During the late 1970s, as the first generation of Senegalese psychiatrists replaced their mostly European counterparts at Fann, the clinic began to distance itself from this experimental approach. The rejection of Collomb’s project, along with the heavy impact that structural adjustment had on Fann during the 1980s and 1990s, led to dramatic changes in the clinic’s philosophy and practice. By the 1990s, the clinic had embraced a more conventional biomedical approach; current doctors and staff working at Fann recall Collomb’s era with strategic ambivalence when it is remembered at all. In short, Collomb’s Fann exists in the present-day clinic as something of an absent presence. My own larger project considers Collomb’s project and its eventual disavowal while also seeking out its traces that may still exist in the present. More broadly, it tells a story of postcolonial (and neoliberal) transformation as it traces the changes that have taken place within the clinic during the past five decades.
Since its inception, the Fann Psychiatric Clinic has been a space of contact and encounter between the colonial and the postcolonial, between local exegeses of mental illness and Western psychiatric models, between madness and its other – a place in which seeming opposites are brought together and held in tension. As revenants, both Demba and Collomb’s ghost emerge from and return to this space in-between, the space of Fann. As haunting figures, they draw attention to – and mediate, and sometimes disrupt – these categorical distinctions. Forcing their way out of the past and into the present, Demba and Collomb’s ghost return uninvited; they allow us (for as the anthropologist, I too have been caught) to take notice of how the past, welcomed or not, may come to inhabit or occupy the present. Here I take a cue from sociologist Avery Gordon’s assertion that the haunting figure ‘is primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of a life, sometimes of a path not taken’ (1997: 63). As I show in these pages, Demba and Collomb’s ghost are closely connected; their entangled stories do, in fact, index a path not taken at Fann. They haunt the present-day clinic by force of their own dispossession from it.
My engagement with Demba and Collomb’s ghost as revenants has also been guided by the writing of Jacques Derrida. In Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Derrida searches for traces of Marx in the then-present (1990s) and considers his relevance for the future. Here Derrida engages in a profound meditation of specters, spirits, and haunting. As he writes about the ghosts that troubled Marx, Derrida also confronts some of his own ghosts – such as différance, deconstruction, and the nature of spirits – and advocates inviting ghosts to the table, so to speak, in lieu of banishing or attempting to suppress them. To be with specters, he suggests, is to bring forth ‘a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’ (1994: xix).
Both Demba and Collomb’s ghost burst out of the past and into the present. As haunting figures, their arrival signals a disruption of linear time and ‘makes the present waver’ (Jameson, 1995: 83). I am reminded here of Derrida’s insightful statement that ‘haunting is historical … but it is not dated, it is never docilely given’ (1994: 4). In the present-day Fann Clinic, both Demba and Collomb’s ghost evoke a certain degree of ambivalence regarding the clinic’s past, when they are noticed at all. Though their presence is tolerated, the two are, above all, unsettling figures that appear to do little more than ‘get in the way’ of the doctors and staff currently working within the clinic. For me as an anthropologist, then, engaging with Demba and Collomb’s ghost has meant taking seriously that which is brushed aside as irrelevant compared to the more tangible or ‘important’ issues of the day. It has meant listening to stories that seem fantastical and entering into dialogue with conflicting accounts of past and present – accounts that range from subversive to reactionary and everything in between. In speaking with these revenants, I have sought out the past in unlikely places with the hope that such an approach might open up new possibilities for the telling of Fann’s history as it provides a new context in which to understand Fann’s present. In this endeavor, Luise White’s (2000) Speaking with Vampires has been particularly good to think with, and the title of this article marks my indebtedness to her work. Likewise, the Comaroffs’ encounter with both the madman and the migrant (1987) has served as a helpful reminder that historical consciousness may appear in forms very different from that of the conventional historical narrative.
By way of my engagement with the intertwined stories of Demba and Collomb’s ghost, then, this article takes seriously the concept of haunting and insists upon its relevance to anthropological inquiry. As a mode of storytelling that comes from a particular way of apprehending the world, I suggest here that anthropology might give credence to specters as social figures and assign to ethnography the task of following ghosts, not simply for the poetic spaces they may open up but out of a concern for the past, present, and future.
Demba’s arrival
Demba vividly remembers the first time he was brought to Fann some 30 years ago. Over the course of many months he told me portions of the story, which I eventually put together and read back to him, hoping to get it all right.
The story goes something like this: Heavy traffic, scorching sun. An old green car – old, even then – lurches toward the city. Inside sit two men. They are brothers, same mother and same father. Elder brother is driving. The window next to him is rolled down even though black exhaust and deafening noise are pouring into the car; it is much too hot to keep the window up. His head buzzes. He is frustrated by the traffic. He can feel his heart beating hard in his chest. He wishes he could drive faster, but he cannot. Younger brother is laid out on his stomach in the back seat. He is positioned awkwardly, uncomfortably. His legs are bound, his knees are bent, and his arms are tied behind his back. The right side of his face is pressed into the worn plush of the seat. Younger brother cannot move. He howls. Elder brother ignores younger brother and his howling for as long as he can, and then he finally turns back to scream at him. He curses and hits him hard. Younger brother continues to howl. All the way into the city, their noise fills the car and pours out the windows, mingling with the sounds of the busy road. Finally, they reach their destination. Elder brother pulls up to the front steps of the whitewashed building. He quickly parks the car, gets out, and runs panting inside. A few seconds later he returns with doctors, nurses, and a social worker in tow. ‘Dafa dof, bilâhi! He’s crazy, I swear on god’s name. I cannot do anything for him. He cannot stay with us any longer’, elder brother is saying this as the group scrambles down the steps to remove the howling man from his agony. Already elder brother feels great relief; this terrible burden will now belong to someone else. ‘Untie him NOW!’ booms a man’s voice. All move to untie younger brother; they somehow manage to pull him out of the back of the car. He is still folded upon himself and howling. He is hot and sick. The doctor leans down and speaks firmly in French. He grabs the man by the arms and pulls him up. ‘Stand up! Quiet. Be quiet. Calm yourself. Stand up.’ Younger brother stands up and looks at the man. That was the first time he, Demba, saw Dr Henri Collomb.
According to one of the psychiatrists currently working at Fann, the clinic’s main priority is to restore patients to what he refers to as ‘baseline mental health’, or in other words, to restore their ability to function normally. For most patients, he says, this seems to take about a month or so. The nurses agree that this is all many need. Often, when the nurses are asked what is wrong with one of the patients, they say, ‘Oh, she’s not sick, she’s just tired. She will be better in no time, inchallah (god willing).’ Most patients are admitted, stay a spell, leave, and never return.
Some patients, though, are admitted over and over again, at regular or irregular intervals. There are also patients who come back on their own. Sometimes they return for treatment or medication, or sometimes simply to visit, check in with doctors or nurses, watch TV, or to look for odd jobs they might do around the clinic to make a little bit of money. Some even stay a while, temporarily claiming unused rooms as their own and going about their business. Les anciens (the elders; the old-timers), as people call them, know and understand the place, though doctors and nurses sometimes complain that these anciens are meddlesome and cause trouble.
Demba is one of these folks; one of les anciens. He has been a regular at Fann, coming and going, longer than any of the other patients, longer even than the doctors currently working at the clinic. When he comes around, he stays in room number 4 rez-de-chaussée droite (first floor, right corridor) and refers to it as his own. He even has his own key. In a way, Demba ‘knows’ Fann better than anyone.
There were days when I would arrive at Fann in the early morning and find Demba waiting for me, ready to talk regardless of what else I told him I needed to do that day. There were also periods in which many weeks would go by without my seeing him at all. When Demba was around, I spent lots of time sitting in the courtyard with him and listening to him talk. To be sure, the stories he told me about his life and his experiences at Fann sometimes bordered on the fantastical, better understood as iterations of desire, hope, hopelessness, and regret than objective, chronologically ordered fact, though this may be the case with all life history narratives, whether or not they happen to be collected inside a psychiatric clinic. Demba’s stories certainly led me to question my assumptions about the equivalence of the real and the true (i.e. the assumption that truth can only spring for that which is empirically sound, and conversely, that whatever cannot be observed, cross-checked, or chronologically accorded cannot possibly be true), which Crapanzano has called a distinctly ‘Western presumption’ (1985: 5; see also Comaroff and Comaroff, 1987; White, 2000).
Demba had a lot to say. Our time together oscillated between enjoyable and very difficult, for both of us I think. There were moments when we laughed and joked with one another. He was intensely interested in my life back in New York, my family, my romantic interests; I shared my own story as he shared his. Twice he pushed me to tears with unkind words, and several times I scribbled in my field notes that I was not going to be talking with him anymore. Demba’s frequent use of sexual innuendo was sometimes more than I could take. And then there were the times when, as we sat together, I could not make sense of what he was talking about – sometimes I couldn’t understand his words and sometimes I couldn’t understand his ideas. Several times he accused me of being able to transmogrify: he was certain I turned myself into a cat each night so I could enter into his room and spy on him. It was rather uncomfortable and seemed very messy to me. Our relationship was rocky at best; our understanding of each other partial at most.
There is no doubt that I was an active participant in the construction of Demba’s life history – by reordering it and writing it, of course, but also (perhaps even more importantly) by my very presence, and by asking the questions that I did. The life history, Crapanzano reminds us, must be understood as ‘an immediate response to a demand posed by an Other [that] carries with in the expectations of that Other’ (1985: 8). By following certain lines of inquiry and not others, for example, or by inviting Demba to tell me about his family or his relationship with Collomb, I both limited and helped produce the stories Demba told. I often had the impression that Demba felt validated through the telling of these stories; he proudly viewed himself as a gatekeeper to Fann’s past. But Demba also sought me out because he thought I might offer him a way out of the cycles of suffering that had plagued him throughout his life. Although I gave him a bit of money when I could and brought him food from time to time, Demba knew I was neither rich nor well-connected. Nevertheless, I know I represented to him the possibility of escape – not just momentary escape into story or fantasy, but a more permanent escape from his life in limbo, as a revenant.
The rightful heir
Here is what Demba remembers of his first day at Fann: Food to eat. Injection to sleep. A young nurse escorts Demba to Collomb’s office. Collomb is still making his rounds, so Demba is told to wait. He selects his seat carefully and sits on its edge. He folds his hands in his lap and looks around. He hums softly under his breath. Enter Collomb. Demba jumps up and wipes off the palms of his hands on his pants. Collomb smiles at him and shakes his hand, tells him he hopes he slept in peace. Collomb shuts the door, sits down, and motions for Demba to do the same. They sit facing each other, Collomb’s desk between them. Collomb leans forward and says, ‘Demba, I think you should stay here with us for a while. You’ll be comfortable here, and I think we will be able to help you.’ Demba gets angry. His hands are squeezed into fists and his face is tense. ‘You see me and you think I’m crazy, but I’m not. If you think you can cure me, you are wrong. You don’t know what my problem is. You are just as crazy as I am.’ He stands up again. Collomb is not the slightest bit fazed. He remains entirely composed. He stays seated. ‘Why do you say that? What do you mean?’ His voice is gentle but fills the office just the same; it seizes Demba.
We are sitting on a broken concrete bench in the courtyard behind Fann. I look over at Demba again, who is sitting cross-legged on the bench, holding on to a pile of notebooks and folders in his lap. His eyesight has deteriorated these last couple of years, he’s told me; his vision is foggy. I wonder what he sees. His old glasses don’t work so he doesn’t bother using them anymore. He wears a black and white knit hat on his head, ‘to keep the wind out of his ears’, he says, and he is clothed in his standard fashion: a dark green army jacket over an old t-shirt, black bubu pants rolled to the knee, and blue flip-flops on his feet.
I try him again. ‘Then what happened, Demba? Then what did you say to Collomb?’ Demba blinks. He looks back at me and crinkles his face into a grin. His few remaining teeth are brown, decaying, jagged. ‘I said, give me a cigarette! Then I will smoke and we will talk.’ He glances down at the pack of Marlboro Reds in my bag. He knows to look for them there; he has already smoked several since we sat down together.
I hand Demba the pack. Chuckling, he reaches for them. He takes two, sticks one behind his ear, and bites the filter off of the other. With a loud th
wwwp
, he spits it out onto the ground in front of us. He lights the cigarette, inhales, and goes back to his story: Demba says nothing as he takes and lights the cigarette from Collomb. He sits down again. ‘My brothers are jealous of me – they’ve always been jealous.’ Demba starts, his voice quivering. ‘We are like lions with each other. In primary school one of the teachers told me I was very smart and encouraged me to continue with my studies. They hated me for that. I went away with the priests for secondary school. That was the first reason. Later, my father took me aside and told me that I was his heir – that I was the eldest in his eyes even though I was actually his fourth-born son. I was his chosen one. He confided in me his secrets, the family secrets. This caused a terrible conflict between my brothers and me. They made my life hell. After my father’s death it got even worse. We used to fight with our fists after that. I left the house then to be on my own. I was working in a sawmill. But I got in some trouble; I got a few women pregnant. A little ñama-ñama you know.
4
That brought me big problems. Someone put a spell on me [m’a marabouté], tried to attack me. Maybe it was one of the women’s sisters, maybe an aunt. I got really sick after that. I had to quit my job and go back to the house with my brothers. I have children, you know. Everyone calls me impotent, but I am not impotent! I have children! When I went back to the house things got really bad. They said that I was crazy and locked me up. My oldest brother hates me the most. He tied me to the tree and hit me with a stick. And then I heard him talking to my brothers in the courtyard. “We’re going to take him to Fann,” he said. “He’s too crazy to stay here with us, and he’s too crazy to be out wandering around.”’ Demba talks and talks to Collomb. He talks about spirits [tuur, rab] and witches [dëmm] and invisible worlds. He talks about philosophy, about Senegal, about life in general. After many hours of attentive listening, Collomb leans forward to close the distance between them, and says, ‘You, Demba – you’re my friend. You’re going to stay here with me for a while. You’re sick, but you’re not crazy. You have many ideas. Because you’ve worked with wood and are good with your hands, I’m going to give you some paper and watercolors and you are going to see what you can do with them. You are a philosopher, Demba. Put your thoughts and ideas on paper. Everything that is in your head – draw it, write it, paint it.’
Demba pauses and looks back up at me. He sits up straight, puffs his chest out a little. ‘I know everything about Collomb, everything! Now what is it you want to know?’
Demba had not spent his entire life sick, nor had he spent the majority of his days in the clinic. Nevertheless, Fann had come to play a central part in the way Demba understood himself; the institution structured and framed his stories as it laid the foundation for his very identity. In his illuminating work on narrative development in institutional settings, A. Jamie Saris (1995) rightly insists that there are factors present, larger than the experiencing self, which mediate and shape the production of a story. He rejects the notion of a ‘romantic freedom innate to “narrative”’ and tacitly questions the institutional authority (and basis for knowledge) that shapes narratives of chronic illness in particular (Saris, 1995: 65). According to Saris, these narratives are always plotted upon an ‘institutional topography’ that in turn structures their very expression (1995: 67). It was upon the institutional topography of Fann, then, that Demba charted his life. His first encounter with Collomb had in many ways been a (re)birth; in that moment, Demba entered a new, filial relationship that would allow him both to escape the terror of his brothers and re-imagine himself, proudly, as Collomb’s chosen son. It was also the moment in which he became an artist. Demba’s experiences with Collomb at Fann allowed him to narrate himself, or perhaps, made it possible to speak at all. It is not just a series of memories but the very possibility of remembrance, narration, and meaning that is inextricably linked to the institution. He cannot talk about himself without referencing this place and this man.
A spectral landscape, a ghostly return, and a theory of haunting
I had come back in search of Collomb’s ghost. That was not exactly what I told Demba, though, at least not right away. During my first visit to Fann two years earlier, a young intern had said something that had surprised me and stayed with me. As I sat reading through patient files in a small room adjacent to the Pavillon des Dames, I saw that each patient had been asked whether or not she had a tuur in her family. 5 Tuur is a Wolof word meaning ‘to pour’, but it also refers to a kind of invisible being that allies itself with – and protects – a particular family. Familial tuur can often be traced back to the founding ancestors of one’s lineage; the tuur is passed from one generation to the next but normally makes itself present to only one person from each generation. The person chosen by the tuur must acknowledge and reaffirm her relationship with the spirit lest she suffer great illness or misfortune. In addition to the tuur, each patient had also been asked if her family possessed a domestic altar (xamb) where the tuur were thought to visit or reside, at which sacrifices could be made by members of the family.
When I next crossed paths with the intern, I asked him about these notations. Why were patients asked these questions, and what did the doctors and nurses do with the information? He laughed, and explained that Collomb and his colleagues had begun asking patients about tuur and xamb during the early 1960s and documenting the responses. The habit at the clinic was an old one, he said, but really, there was no reason that such questions should be asked anymore at all. ‘Collomb and his colleagues were interested in traditional therapies’, the young doctor told me. ‘They wanted to collaborate with local healers to learn more about their ways; they wanted to see how these therapies worked to cure people. Of course we don’t do that anymore here. If people want to consult healers or have their ndëpp (spirit possession ceremony), they can do it outside the clinic. This is a hospital, after all! I think Collomb may have been as crazy as his patients.’ The young intern paused and looked at me. ‘He still roams the halls of this place, you know. People have told me they have seen him, in any case. And it wouldn’t surprise me, not one bit.’
I thought about this brief exchange for a long time after it took place. The young intern had described the notations – and Collomb himself – as useless relics of the past that, despite having no proper place within the present-day Fann, still make themselves visible from time to time. In particular, I wondered about Collomb’s ghost in relation to Senegal’s already crowded spectral landscape. Here, wild rab and domesticated tuur spirits exist alongside djinné. 6 Witches (dëmm) travel at night, attempting to devour the vital energy (fit) of their victims. There are winds that can enter your body and make you sick or crazy (febaru ngelaw), and strange entities that can catch you when you are walking alone at night (jommi). As a friend in Dakar once told me, there are many more invisible beings wandering through the world than there are visible beings. Some trouble humans and want their attention, while others move about quite oblivious to them. There are those that live in forests or near the water, and then there are those who choose to live in large cities. ‘There are probably even some in this room with us right now’, she said to me, laughing.
Somehow, the idea of Collomb’s ghost – another sort of revenant – milling about the halls of Fann and joining this already diverse and cosmopolitan group of spectral characters captivated me. As a number of people explained to me during my years in Senegal, spirits of the recently (or for that matter, the not-so-recently) dead don’t normally make themselves manifest and wander about on their own; if they do, it is usually a sign that something terrible has happened. Perhaps the person died tragically or wrongfully? Perhaps she was not given a proper burial? In these cases, the recently dead person may haunt the site of her death. But this is quite rare, or so I was told, and it is always a very bad thing. No, Collomb’s ghost roaming the halls of Fann did not fit this description. Clearly his was a ghost of another kind; a foreign ghost who haunted according to a different set of rules. What is more, this was a ghost from the West, from France, from a country that had once colonized Senegal. What was it doing at Fann? Why would Collomb’s ghost have returned in the first place? What unfinished business might it have? What did people in the clinic make of this ghost? These were but a few of the questions that inspired my own return to the Fann Psychiatric Clinic and led to my meeting of Demba. Just like that, I too had become a revenant. Following a ghost means you sometimes have to act like one.
Demba laughed at me, of course, when I finally told him I had come back to Fann to look for Collomb’s ghost. He didn’t believe a word of the young intern’s story; he thought the intern was pulling my leg. He would roll his eyes at me when I mentioned it, and he barely put up with me when I asked about it. I tried to tell him that the ghost story was important to my project. ‘Maybe’, I suggested, ‘we could look at this poetically. I could explore the figure of the ghost as a way of approaching history. Look at it as a way that the past might come to inhabit the present.’ Demba would just laugh. He couldn’t believe I was awarded money for such a project, and he found this to be much more interesting (and amusing) than the possibility of Collomb’s ghost milling about the halls of Fann. He often shook his head at me, grinning. ‘Shaaa-dut-dut-dut. They sure do have money to throw into the water over there, don’t they?’
For me, though, the question remained a serious one. Why would Collomb’s ghost be roaming the halls of this place? More generally, I wondered, why do ghosts return at all? They must have some raison d’être; they must have some sort of job to do. A ghost may come to demand redress for past injustices or warn of the future ahead. It may be unhappy and unsettled, or vengeful and angry, and it may want to stir things up. Whether conjured up or appearing on its own volition, the haunting figure calls out to those who care to encounter it. It beckons them to stop for a moment, look around, and take note of how both past and future come to play in the present.
‘The ghost’, writes Gordon, ‘imparts a charged strangeness into the place or sphere it is haunting’ (1997: 63). Here something unusual happens to time itself. Indeed, Derrida describes the spectral moment as one ‘that no longer belongs to time’, insisting that spectrality causes us to doubt the ‘linear succession’ of time and ‘the border between the present … and everything that could be opposed to it’ (Derrida, 1994: 39). In discussing what he calls the ‘spectrality effect’ and considering the way spectrality may complicate the relationship between presence and absence, present and past, he playfully coins the term ‘hauntology’ to reference the logic of the ghost. Haunting, he writes, contains both a ‘first time’ and a repetition; as such, haunting is ‘[a]ltogether other … This logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of being. … It would harbor within itself … eschatology and teleology themselves’ (1994: 10).
From this perspective, to acknowledge, address, and chase after ghosts is to complicate ideas of linear, homogeneous time and approach history not as the cumulative effect of events, or in the spirit of ‘progress’, or as a justification for the present, but from a more critical perspective. Gordon calls on Walter Benjamin and likens his idea of the monad to the sign of a specter’s presence, or in other words, the presence of a haunting of some kind. Benjamin (1969: 292–3) describes the monad as follows: Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes … a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.
A wavering present
The presence of Collomb’s ghost, like the tuur and xamb notations discussed above, signals another way of doing things at Fann. At the same time, it gives notice to the current institution’s uneasy relationship to its own past and suggests that this past has not been fully accommodated within the present-day clinic.
Demba also signals this unsettled past-in-the-present, not just by the force of his returns, but by the way his recollections of Collomb’s Fann serve to underscore what he identifies as the vast disjuncture between then and now. To Demba, the failures of the present-day clinic are not just infrastructural; they cannot simply be blamed on material inadequacies or a lack of resources. The problem has to do with what Demba (sometimes very vocally) identifies as the current staff’s ‘business as usual’ attitude and what he perceives as their lack of commitment to the place. ‘The doctors today, they just don’t care’, he admonished on several occasions.
Despite the fact (or indeed, because) Demba has been returning to Fann for so long, he is cast as a marginal figure at Fann; his words are dismissed as the words of a madman. But Demba isn’t the only person who speaks of how Fann has changed over the years. ‘Since Collomb’s departure’, Bintou told me, ‘psychiatry at Fann has fallen into banality (tomber dans la banalité).’ Bintou, now retired, began working as a nurse at Fann in 1971; her sentiments are shared by many other Senegalese women and men who worked alongside Collomb and his colleagues as nurses, social workers, or translators during that era (see also Kilroy-Marac, in press). Another retired nurse, Seynabu, told me that the present-day Fann operates as though it has no memory of its own past; as if it had no history. ‘The doctors currently working at Fann’, she told me, ‘use the prestige of Collomb’s name … but in reality the clinic is not like it used to be. They have forgotten the past. They don’t want to remember.’ The irony of a psychiatric clinic having memory problems of its own was, of course, not lost on her.
But what exactly has been forgotten? From the perspective of Demba and these others, it is the quality of care and emphasis on l’ecoute (listening, particular to the therapeutic encounter) that was offered by Collomb and his colleagues, and also the Fann School’s commitment to understanding local exegeses of madness and its cures; in short, they assert that what has been forgotten is culture. According to Marie-Claude, who began working as a nurse at Fann in 1961, the most significant difference between past and present is that the doctors currently working at Fann ‘are no longer interested in culture. They don’t want to collaborate with healers; they don’t care about traditional therapies or traditional ways of explaining things’ (Kilroy-Marac, in press).
Collomb’s insistence that mental health research and clinical practice ‘in very different cultures … must include psychosociologists and ethnologists in addition to psychiatrists’ (1967: 18) led him to assemble a multidisciplinary team of researchers and specialists at Fann as early as 1962. In the years that followed, Collomb and his colleagues advocated a highly-localized, psychoanalytically-oriented psychiatry that not only took patients’ social and cultural worlds into account, but allowed itself to be modified by these ‘other’ worlds. The ‘Western psychiatrist necessarily experiences acculturation’, Collomb insisted, and ‘the observer is modified by his observation. A better approach [to psychiatry in Africa] supposes the abandonment – or at the very least, the modification – of Western frameworks’ (1967b: 1723).
In line with Collomb’s assertion that ‘every symptom assumes its true significance only in relationship to a cultural system’ (1967a: 18), the Fann School took the concept of culture as its point of departure and sought both to understand local exegeses of mental illness and integrate them into the clinical experience at Fann (cf. Collomb, 1965; Diop et al., 1966; Martino, 1968; Zempléni, 1966, 1967, 1968; Zempléni and Rabain, 1965). The group’s research made a major contribution to both anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry. 7 Equally remarkable was the way this research inspired Collomb and his colleagues to reassess both the physical space of the clinic and also the model of patient care offered at Fann. By the mid-1960s, Collomb had ‘opened’ the clinic; this enabled patients to leave their rooms, walk between divisions, and even go outside on their own. Patients’ families were allowed to visit at any time and could stay as long as they wished (Bartoli, 1968). According to retired nurse Aissatou, Collomb made these changes upon returning from Senegal’s Casamance region, where he had spent time with a renowned healer who ‘had many [mentally ill] patients in his care’ and ‘let them move about freely’. Aissatou recounted that Collomb had asked the healer why he let the patients roam about on their own. ‘In order to treat a person who is ill’, the healer had replied, ‘one must consider the person as one would consider oneself. He should not be isolated. If he is, he will withdraw, pull away. It will be impossible to help him.’ All at once, Aissatou told me, ‘Collomb opened the doors, took off the locks, and allowed the patients to move about as they pleased. They were able to go anywhere they wanted; they were able to sit outside, walk around, and talk to each other.’
Looking to local healing customs as well as daily life in Senegal for inspiration, Collomb and his colleagues organized group activities for patients and staff alike – from cooking to doll-making, art therapy, storytelling, and theatre – and offered communal meals and tea. Doctors and nurses got rid of their white coats and mingled freely with patients. By the mid-1960s, weekly town hall-style pënc meetings (pënc is a Wolof word meaning ‘village meeting or gathering’) were put into place to further contribute to the sense of community within the clinic and provide a forum for open exchange (Collomb, 1975; Dia, 1977). 8 Beginning in the 1970s, inpatients at Fann had a family member or close friend – an accompagnant – stay with them for the duration of their hospitalization to keep them better connected to their social worlds (Diop and Dorès, 1976). According to Gbikpi and Auguin (1978), the policy was inspired by Collomb’s interactions with local healers and stemmed from the wishes of patients and families themselves. The Fann School also brought their ethnographic research into conversation with psychoanalytic theory and practice. In this encounter, psychoanalytic theory itself was challenged, stretched, and reconfigured. Oedipe Africain, written by Marie-Cecile and Edmond Ortigues about the manifestation of the Oedipal Complex in Senegal, is a notable example of this (Ortigues and Ortigues, 1966; see also Bullard, 2005).
Current Fann doctors are quick to note that some practices have endured at Fann since Collomb’s time. Pënc meetings still take place, though somewhat irregularly and with fewer people in attendance. Demba, for one, thinks the present-day pënc sessions are a waste of time. El Hadj, who worked as Collomb’s principal translator during the 1960s and 1970s, wholeheartedly agrees. ‘Today the pënc is a joke’, he told me, ‘it is theater, and people are just going through the motions. It used to be a form of therapy, but not anymore.’ Current Fann doctors also note that patients still have accompagnants stay with them for the duration of their hospitalization, though this practice has also changed a great deal. Many families now hire attendants – accompagnants mercenaires – to stay with the patients instead of sending a family member. Communal activities are also less frequent, and they are not well attended by doctors or staff. Many activities, such as tea (ataaya) sessions and games, are organized by patients and families themselves.
When asked directly about Collomb, current Fann doctors offer vague praise for his innovative approach to psychiatry while also making clear that the Fann School’s approach to, and insistence upon, culture is simply less relevant today than it was back then. The clinic is now much more biomedically-oriented and its doctors understand there to be a universal basis to mental illness. From this perspective, culture is important only insofar as it supplies the patient with a language of affliction and provides clues about the ‘really real’ condition that exists underneath or behind it; here, ‘culture’ must be translated into the universal language of psychiatry before it can be properly treated and cured. 9 In a way, then, it could be said that these doctors use culture to guide them to pathology; patients’ ‘real’ medical conditions are made legible to the doctors through the stories they tell.
As revenants, both Demba and Collomb’s ghost make Fann’s own present waver; they recall what is missing from the present-day clinic by referring to its past. Their (re)appearances signal another way – an old way, but also, potentially, an alternative way – of doing things at Fann; their presence makes visible the clinic’s ambivalence toward its own past while exposing the shortcomings of the present.
Departures and returns
I had watched Demba for a long time before we ever exchanged more than fast greetings to each other. I had watched him while pretending not to be watching. I had watched the way he moved his body; I had listened to his voice, to his words. There were days that his eyes looked yellow and dull, his gaze unfocused. On these days he would shuffle about, disoriented, not speaking but mumbling. There were other days that his eyes seemed glassy and his movements jerky. He would quickly become agitated on these days – his voice would rise and quiver, he would become frustrated, angry. He would complain about his general malaise, his old broken body. He would speak of injustice, of time taken from him, of money problems. ‘There is no such thing as madness, really. It’s just what happens when you don’t have any money!’ He would talk desperately about how it was time for him to marry, to build his house, to have a family. He was already in his 60 s, after all.
And then there were the days when his eyes were sharp, and his tongue and wit even sharper. On these days he would boss people around, get into everyone’s business, give advice and roll his eyes arrogantly. He had a lot of energy on these days. His paintings, drawings, and notebooks were never far away.
Our first real encounter was of his making. As I sat working in the clinic’s document room one day, he walked in, greeted everyone, and sat down across from me. I swallowed hard and smiled, looking over at Madame Dieng (the secretary) and Monsieur Fall (the document room specialist) for support. Demba started talking to me; he was writing a story, he said, something he made up himself, all from his head. He took a rolled up notebook out of his pocket and opened it, showing me pages and pages of text that he had written, in French, with a red ballpoint pen. This, he told me, was the first of three parts. He had two other notebooks – both also full – in his room down the hall. He started to tell me the story, and then he stopped, pushed the notebook over in front of me, and said, ‘You read it yourself. Read it and tell me what you think.’ With that, he stood up and left as quickly as he had come in. I had not said a word.
An hour later, Demba came back looking for me with loads of paper and cardboard tucked under his arm. He sat down again and asked me if I had read his story yet. I told him, nervously, that I had looked at it, yes, but it would probably take me a few days to finish. ‘No problem’, he said. ‘Here, look at my drawings and sketches. I’ll sell them to you. They aren’t expensive. They won’t be for you, anyway’, he winked and grinned, putting a stack of papers down on the table in front of me. ‘I did all these’, he said. ‘They are part of my series of pen drawings.’ Most of them were done in red pen, just like his story. And with that he got up and left, leaving the drawings in front of me. 10
A few minutes later, Demba stormed back into the room. This time he was very obviously upset about something. He had wrapped his head up in a white cotton scarf, and he carried a small knapsack. He scooped up his drawings and tucked them under his arm. He was yelling in Wolof, repeating himself in French (as he often did), and using Arabic exclamations for added emphasis. ‘I’m leaving right now and going back to Rufisque! They cannot treat me this way! This doctor is young enough to be my grandson and he thinks he can tell me what to do! No respect! I’ve been coming to this clinic longer than he’s been alive, bilâhi (I swear it)! I’ve been here longer than anyone! I was here when Collomb was here, bilâhi! That’s how long I've been here! I wouldn’t have been treated like this back then! Does anyone have money for a car rapide? I’m leaving right now; they can’t stop me. I’m free to go if I want to go. And I’m going, right now.’
Without looking up from his newspaper, and in a tone that told me this whole situation was nothing out of the ordinary, document specialist Fall told Demba to sit down for a second and calm himself. Demba cursed a response, and told him that nothing could make him stay. Then he turned to me and barked, ‘Give me your pen!’ I quickly handed it to him, and watched him take the cap off with his rotted teeth. ‘Give me a piece of paper!’ I tore out a piece of paper and gave it to him. On it, he scribbled: Artist-Écrivain, M. Demba Diop BP 1234 Rufisque. ‘Come see me after you read the story. I hope you’ll find me an agent and help me get it published. Come see me if you want to buy art – I’ll make you a deal. Hmph. I’m never coming back here again!’ Demba huffed and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.
Fall chuckled. He still hadn’t looked up from his newspaper. Perhaps sensing my uneasiness, he told me that Demba sets off like this every so often, that he has been doing this for years. ‘Sometimes Demba disappears for a few days or weeks, but usually he doesn’t get very far or go for very long’, Fall explained. ‘He’ll be back in no time. Demba suffers from occasional bouffées délirantes (temporary delusional states). He was treated for schizophrenia in the past, I think. But usually he is just fine.’ Madame Dieng sighed and shook her head. ‘Sacré Demba. What would we do without him? He is a fixture around here, un des anciens.’
I remember sitting there for a moment, thinking about what I had seen. Demba was clearly upset, but I couldn’t determine whether his leaving meant he was well or not well. Nobody seemed too concerned, or acted as though any of this might be a problem. Fall had said that Demba is usually ‘just fine’, but since he comes and goes at will, does that mean that he stays at the clinic when he is feeling well and normal, only to leave when he has an ‘episode’? As I sat scribbling all of this down in my own notebook, Fall motioned for me to look out the window. Sure enough, there was the army jacket-clad Demba walking back toward the clinic, holding his knapsack in one hand and his drawings in the other. I couldn’t see his face, but the sight of him made me sad. I guess he couldn’t make it home. Or maybe he had.
Toward a ‘just memory’
If Demba and Collomb’s ghost have led me to encounter the past in unlikely ways, they have also opened new possibilities for the writing of Fann’s history and provided new insights for understanding Fann’s present. What is more, they have led me to take seriously the concept of haunting as it speaks to questions of justice and social responsibility. ‘It is essential’, Gordon writes, ‘to see the things and people who are primarily unseen and banished to the periphery of our social graciousness’ (1997: 196). Every engagement with a specter – no matter where, when, or what kind – may be viewed as a political engagement of sorts: It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are dead or not yet born. No justice … seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, totalitarianism. (Derrida, 1994: xx)
Both Gordon and Derrida write of the ghosts of those who have been victimized, silenced, or disavowed (see also Kwon, 2008; Mueggler, 2001). Living a life in limbo, on the margins and as a revenant, Demba’s presence speaks to (as he himself speaks of) colonial encounters and postcolonial transformations, of madness and rebirth, of an unlikely inheritance and a dispossessed present. In contrast, though his project has been disavowed by the doctors currently working within the clinic, Collomb was neither invisible nor disenfranchised during his lifetime. Clearly, he had little in common with the victims of oppression named by Derrida; the privilege and authority of Collomb’s position should not be denied. To be sure, it is tempting to read Collomb’s ghost as a specter of colonialism who, by roaming the halls of Fann, continues to haunt and disrupt the postcolonial present – he was, after all, a French military doctor whose tenure at Fann bridged the colonial and independence era. As my larger project has revealed, however, the story of Collomb and his tenure at Fann proves to be much more complex than such an explanation would allow. Collomb did provide shelter for many, as Demba’s own story shows. Further, while he was alive, Collomb occupied and moved within a border zone at Fann; he willfully cast himself as a figure between worlds, just as his ghost does today. And, thus, as Gordon reminds us, ‘the ghost is haunted, too’ (1997: 139).
My search for Collomb’s ghost was, and continues to be, a search for what Paul Ricoeur has called a ‘just memory’ [une mémoire juste], or ‘an idea that will take shape … through our reflection on the abuses of a memory manipulated by ideology’ (2006: 68). I enter into dialogue with Collomb’s ghost not just for the sake of his memory, then, but for Demba and others who have spent time at Fann, and even those who are yet to come. Through the intertwined stories of these two revenants, I have been able to apprehend what Derrida (1994: xix) has described as ‘politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’ as it has played out on with this postcolonial institution. It was Demba, the self-appointed heir to a person – and a past – that has largely been rejected by the present-day clinic, who helped me understand this better than anyone.
Postscript
Upon my return to Fann in March 2013, I learned that Demba had passed away. During my flight to Dakar, I had rehearsed what I was going to say to him when I saw him again; I had imagined how our conversation would go. He would surely be angry with me for staying away for so long, for not finding him an agent, for wasting his time. He would be deeply disappointed in me and tell me I had let him down. As I sat on the plane thinking about Demba, I thought also of the small, leather-bound journal and a set of colored pens I had brought to give him. These seemed painfully, even insultingly, small next to the unfulfilled expectations he had for me, for our relationship. Though I knew he would love these gifts, I knew also that he might not accept them, and I felt deeply ashamed. After my too-long absence from Fann, Demba was the person I was most nervous to see.
The circumstances of Demba’s death, as they were recounted to me, were profoundly disturbing, and I will not go into the details here. In a very real sense, Demba’s absence now haunts Fann as much as (perhaps more than) his presence as a living revenant ever did. No longer does Demba leave and come back, or yell insults at the doctors, or brag about how he was like Collomb’s own son; gone is this troubled and troubling man who refused to allow Fann to relinquish a very specific iteration of its own past.
For my part, although I remain just as conflicted about Demba and the difficulties of our relationship as I was before, I am nevertheless filled with a great sadness. I deeply regret that I was not able to be the person he wanted me to be; I was never quite able to get things right or make things right for him. It is a small token, I know, but it is to Demba that I dedicate this article – Demba, whose absence will undoubtedly continue to haunt me, as it does Fann, for many years to come.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship Award and a Columbia University Travel Grant. A Zeising Award from Sarah Lawrence College allowed me to revisit Fann in 2013. I thank Michael Lambek, Amira Mittermaier, Kristen Drybread, Jenny Sime, and Knut Graw for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of Ethnography for their insightful comments.