Mishka Hoosen
Call it a difficult night is a story about madness. Using anecdotes, poems, dialogue, and fragments of historical research, it follows a nonlinear path in tracing the life of its narrator/protagonist. Institutionalised after a ‘final break’, a young woman remembers in sharp detail disturbing childhood visions, which had become overwhelming by the time she was at school and university. When she finally gets a diagnosis – temporal lobe epilepsy – a doctor explains that she is likely to be either demented or brain dead by the time she is 30.
Set mainly during her short spell in the mental hospital, the story proceeds through encounters with nurses, doctors, other patients and also the friends who visit her – many of them frightened by her state of mind. These encounters, painful but quite often funny, take us deeper into the feelings of the narrator and further into the workings of a mental health system which generates definitions of madness. She is defiant in her noncompliance and deeply suspicious of her treatment. She is sure that her hallucinations, dangerous and terrifying as they are, are preferable to the dulling effects of her medication and its theft of her creativity.
Call it a difficult night is a novel brimming with empathy, observation and lyricism, by an author who has the capacity to describe great joy and great suffering.
