Frimbo is an admirable erudite, reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, while the “closed room” scenario with a handful of characters evokes Agatha Christie. The writing is accessible, the rendering of Harlem accents remarkable, and the accurate references to state-of-the art forensic medicine, using anatomy and chemistry, are engaging. The conversations between Archer and Frimbo explore the nature of science, faith, and psychology. 

Some passages contain philosophical observations: ‘Pure faith in anything is mysticism. Our very faith in reason is a kind of mysticism’ (p. 214).  
 
Fisher was an African-American physician-author whose clever novel contains only African-American characters, including the physician and the detective. Specialized in radiology, he lived most of his life in Harlem, but he had studied medicine at Howard University. The author of many short stories and plays, he was also a gifted musician and composer. He at died at the age of 37 from an abdominal cancer attributed to his work with X-Rays.   

The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem
Rudolph Fisher  

Miscellaneous Original edition 1932  
Publisher University of Michigan Press 
Place Published Ann Arbor MI 
Edition 1992 
Page Count 316 

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.   
Web image by Salah Ait Mokhtar 

Soto explores his uncertain status in relation to his family, and to the larger society in “You’ve Gone Too Far.” Detailing the “evolution” of his siblings and cousins, who “were no longer Mexican rednecks,” but “held down jobs” and “stopped jamming parking meters for free time,” Soto describes how his family nevertheless feels uncomfortable about him. “My family feared that I had evolved too far.” Drunken Christmas horseplay with his brothers reveals their distaste and distrust of his intellectualism and sophisticated clothes. “They tore my book in half, / and stripped me of my Italian belt.” Only when they have succeeded in making him sick/drunk do they accept him (at least temporarily) back into the family fold. The poem illustrates well the difficulties that can arise when one member of a family elects to live life differently from the rest yet wants to maintain a relationship with its members. The situation has resonance for the children of immigrants, for children who are more educated than their parents, or for anyone who has chosen a life unfamiliar to family or friends.  

“TV in Black and White” focuses on the role of television (in the 1950s/1960s) in shaping, reflecting, and failing to reflect American society. Soto remembers his childhood in which “[we] were sentenced to watch / the rich on TV …”. Sitcom characters played golf, ate steak, and dressed fashionably (the Donna Reed Show, Ozzie and Harriet). “While he swung / we hoed / Fields flagged with cotton . . .”  

Now life is for many relatively luxurious, “Piano lessons for this child, / Braces for that one — “ “But if the electricity / fails in this town, / a storefront might / be smashed /” “and if someone steps out / with a black-and-white TV, / it’s because we love you Donna, / we miss you Ozzie.”  

Soto’s critique is still relevant today. The ubiquity of television and streaming, even in low-income households, confers enormous power on the images and narratives presented. Now there are many more options for viewers of different cultural and economic backgrounds. Yet the dominant culture still exerts a major influence. The gap between representation and reality continues to be an important source of social dissatisfaction and unrest. 

Gary Soto 
https://garysoto.com/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gary-soto#tab-poems

Mexicans Begin Jogging
Online: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/by-gary-soto/  
New and Selected Poems, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1995, p. 51

You’ve Gone Too Far 
Published in Junior College, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1997, p.24

TV in Black and White 
New and Selected Poems, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1995, p.50

Web image by Jr Korpa 

In this poem of high irony, 21 stanzas of couplets brilliantly spin out stereotypes of Indigenous people promulgated by white American culture. Among the stereotypes that Alexie develops: the tragic Indian; Indian women as sexual objects for white men; Indian men secretly desirable to white women; Indians as violent, alcoholic, childlike, mystical,” and members of a “horse culture.” But in addition, Alexie emphasizes how American whites have co-opted Indian culture: “white people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves” until finally, “all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.” The poem is a painful reminder of how the United States has at one and the same time decimated indigenous people and their culture while exploiting those people and that culture for its own gain. It is a commentary on stereotyping, loss of identity, and loss of a people.

Sherman Alexie is a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and film writer. He is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indigenous person and grew up on a reservation in Washington state. His work focuses on relationships between Indigenous people and white Americans and on life within a white power structure. Alexie’s writing is consistently humorous and ironic.

How to Write the Great American Indian Novel
Sherman Alexie
https://fallsapart.com

Source The Summer of Black Widows, pp. 94-95
Publisher Hanging Loose Press
Edition 1996
Place Published Brooklyn, New York
Alternate Source Native American Songs and Poems, pp. 28-29
Alternate Publisher Dover Thrift Editions
Alternate Edition 1996
Alternate Editors Brian Swann
Place Published New York

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image created by Medhum.org

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A precocious young person on a track to success, Wang experiences a manic episode at Yale that leads to her first hospitalization. After a second hospitalization, her college washes its hands of her. Hitting roadblocks time and time again requires her to rebuild her life over and over. This is not a conventional chronological autobiography but rather essays that provide different approaches to the author’s experience of mental illness. The plural “schizophrenias” of the title encompasses the whole schizophrenic spectrum of disorders. As Wang explains, her own diagnosis is “the fucked-up offspring of manic depression and schizophrenia” (p. 10).   

In an essay entitled “High-Functioning” we learn how the author, having been a fashion editor, knows how to pass for normal: “My makeup routine is minimal and consistent. I can dress and daub when psychotic and when not psychotic. I do it with zeal when manic. If I’m depressed, I skip everything but the lipstick. If I skip the lipstick, that means I haven’t even made it to the bathroom mirror” (p.44).   

Later, in “The Choice of Children,” volunteering at a camp for bipolar children makes Wang think about what it would be like to inflict her diagnosis on her own offspring. In “Reality, On-Screen” she attempts to convey the sensation of decompensating to psychosis. And in “Yale Will Not Save You” she considers the failure of universities to accommodate mentally ill students.  

This is a special and rare book. As with Elyn R. Saks in The Center Cannot Hold, Wang’s disability seems not to have robbed her of her cognitive faculties, resulting in a sense of lucidity. Yet, at the same time, we are never far from madness. As a result, the essays glisten like polished jewels while the author’s voice retains the air of authenticity.   

While Wang has understandably had ambivalent experiences, in every case where The Collected Schizophrenias might have lapsed into an anti-psychiatry rant, the author instead considers a range of perspectives. She is devoted to taking her medication, yet she open-mindedly explores alternative therapies, spirituality, and even the notion that her illness might have bestowed talents or some evolutionary advantage on her.   

We should not have to be reminded that once civilians become patients they do not lose their intelligence. Wang writes that “a primary feature of the experience of staying in a psychiatric hospital is that you will not be believed about anything” (p. 98). Indeed, when she is asked how she is doing and she replies she is doing well, she is said to be lacking in insight. At other times, she is advised by certain well-meaning people that given her diagnosis “I should be proud of how coherent I am” (p. 54), and by others “who don’t believe in mental illness… that in other cultures, a person who would be diagnosed with schizophrenia in the West might be lauded as a shaman and a healer…They are likely to be the type who boast about never taking aspirin for a headache” (p. 23).  

There are many insights to be found in this book that should prove eye-opening to mental health practitioners. It should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the experience of having an illness.   

Publisher Graywolf Press 
Place Published Minneapolis 
Edition 2019 
Page Count 202 

Web image from Wikicommons
An earlier version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.