Call it a difficult night

by 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 young narrator/protagonist.

Institutionalised after a ‘final break’, a young woman remembers in sharp detail her disturbing childhood visions, which have become overwhelming by the time she is at a boarding school in the US and later at university in South Africa. 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's 30.

Set mainly during the 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, takes us deeper into the feelings of the young woman and further into the workings the mental health system which generates the 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.

160 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2015

About the author

Mishka Hoosen is a writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing program at Rhodes University and Interlochen Arts Academy. Her debut novel, Call it a difficult night, was published by Deep South Books in 2015. After apprenticing as a perfumer for a year, her current research focuses on the cultural history of perfume, and her work deals mainly with the senses, queerness, and embodiment.

Reviews

[Hafsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first foray into South African authors, and I got this book at the author's launch at the Time of the Writer in Durban.

This is a book unlike any other I have read; it takes a bit of time to settle into the author's writing style, but it is unique and brilliant, a mix of prose, poetry, ethnography, memory, history, and commentary. The timing/setting jumps every few pages, which can get a bit confusing, but is needed for a work like this.

It is, primarily, a book about madness- the narrator's own experience being institutionalized, her interactions with the doctors, nurses, friends, lovers, fellow patients, and the ways in which each responds to and understands the boundaries of sanity/madness.

It is also a commentary against the ways in which society and its institutions deal with mental health/psychiatric illness/medication.

Loved the last few lines: "Nothing is redeemed. Nothing is healed. I am not whole. But the wound is named, and it shines."

[Lara · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully written account of madness which pulls you in with its language and leaves you feeling broken by the end.

Told that she is dying, the main character is sent to a mental institution where she confronts her demons, and witnesses those of others, all while reminiscing about the loves that have made her and the images that have torn her apart.

Far from a light read, but one that will stick with me.

[Maddie Melton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I know I will come back to many times and see new meaning in its words. I bought four copies of this book because I can think of so many who need it and will continue to need it. Haunting. A vein of honesty runs through this text that is seldom found and must be held onto desperately when it is.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

'There is a language that comes up spare and bright as a bone from a break. It standards beneath us like a rock in the place where there is nothing else left. It is a language of nothing more.

Nothing is redeemed. Nothing is healed. I am not whole. But the wound is named, and it shines.'

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly moving and lyrical. I read this in one sitting. Her words will undo you.