“What Has No Name “, A Shocking Book
“… this story really has to do with what has no name, with seconds of fright for which there is no language.”
-Peter Handke-
” What has no name ” is the title chosen by the poet Piedad Bonnett to narrate a tragedy that left her speechless. Her 28-year-old up-and-coming artist son Daniel had committed suicide on May 14, 2011.
Piedad Bonnett is a very successful Colombian writer. He has a prolific work, translated into more than five languages and a collection of national and international awards. But not only that: he also formed a harmonious family, with a stable marriage and successful children. What happened then?
Daniel’s story
At age 19, Daniel, Piedad Bonnett’s son, had a critical acne problem and was forced to use a very strong drug for the skin. According to his mother, this was the beginning of the end. He argues that no one warned them about the side effects of that medicine, among which “cases of depression, psychotic symptoms and rarely suicide attempts have been reported.”
It’s hard to guess whether or not it was the drug that triggered the boy’s instability. The truth is that since then he began to change his behavior. A few years later he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
The news was devastating for the mother and the entire family.
A good part of the book narrates the successive bewilderment in the face of dry and imprecise responses from psychiatrists. The failed diagnoses, the treatments without criteria, the dismissive gesture of the doctors. The anguish over the stigmata in the face of the disease, the doubts about the future.
Thus, the author describes her impressions of those years: “ I watched him live, with a secret trembling and helped him dream, hoping that a serene balance would one day settle in him forever and allow him to have a future of plenitude, a woman, maybe children ”.
Finally, Daniel managed to obtain a good margin of stability thanks to treatment with a psychiatrist who combined drugs and psychoanalysis.
Everything seemed to have reached a point of equilibrium until the boy decided to leave the country to go to do a master’s degree at Columbia University in New York. There he began to receive different treatment and the consequences were fatal.
Suicide
The reality in another country, far from the affections and understanding of his parents, ended up upsetting Daniel’s balance. From the stability achieved it gradually passed to a growing concern. He saw the psychiatrist at the university and took his medicines, but at the same time, he felt more and more pressured by the demands of the environment, by his ability to perform.
Daniel was an excellent figurative painter. But in the academic environment the axiom that “painting has died” prevailed. This sentence was etched in his mind as with fire. He felt insecure about the validity of what he was doing; a certain fear of failure, of nonsense.
At Columbia he tried to take his profession to another realm: art administration. It was a desperate way of giving practicality to his creative activity: “Nobody buys paint anymore, Mom, he would tell me. What am I going to live on? “
The conflict between the painter that he was and the art administrator that he forced himself to be, resulted in constant unease. He saw several therapists in New York and visited a new psychiatrist, who gave him a high dose of medication and did not periodically review possible reductions.
His mother writes the book “What Has No Name” to give Daniel’s life a place in memory. Also to give testimony of the deep pain that overwhelms those who are helpless witnesses of a deep suffering in someone they love.
One of the great values of the book is to denounce the cracks through which psychiatry moves and the gigantic tragedy that someone who suffers from schizophrenia is faced with.
An extraordinary book, without a doubt, beautifully written.
Image courtesy of Casa de América.
