Walking to Africa Jessica Le Bas (Auckland University Press, 2009) 86pp ISBN 978 186040 446 8

Gill Ward

The publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand. Their money was wisely spent.          

If you are a reader of poetry books like me, I would hazard a guess that you will read this in one sitting.  It is a fearless and graphic account of how it is to be the mother of a child who rapidly succumbs to the grip of a frightening spiral into mental illness, and the sometimes helplessness of your parentage being taken over by an army of health professionals, doctors, counsellors and well meaning friends who lose sight of your daughter and see the illness before the child.

This is not always so in Jessica's story, because the whole poetic narrative is threaded through with love and hope and sometimes humour. The poet has a sharp eye.  She sees into the intentions and psyche of the specialists working to help her beloved daughter.  She describes her passage through foreign and sometimes hostile territory, making it like a travelogue where the participant is more than an observer of the inhabitants but rather lives the life with them. It is a frightening terrain and Le Bas, in her poetry, describes for us her struggle to come to terms with it. She does this in a series of portraits of the people with whom she interacts along the way, accounts of incidents both sad and hopeful and an examination of her own reactions.  This is raw writing.  It is realistic and Le Bas does not spare either us or herself in the telling of it.

And it is a far off place
this place they call Cure
where the main streets are named Treatment and Therapy
and wild wind rushes through

If you have a loved one struggling with mental illness, which of course makes it your struggle too, this book will comfort you with the knowledge you are not alone. You will see your emotions and traumas, uncertainty and pain. But sometimes you will smile and nod in agreement. Above all it will help you realise that a person with depression, schizophrenia and other fragile states of mind is still there, is still to be loved and still to be garlanded with hope.           

In this compelling narrative of candid verse and prose poems Le Bas takes us with her into the bewildering world of psychiatric hospital wards and home-front distress. Her unselfish personal exposure is to be applauded.  She truly shares her talent.
           

Le Bas runs the gambit of emotion. She touches despair but holds on to hope.  Halfway through the book:

On the worst day of your life
her eyes fall slack inside
their sockets spark
 
plummet past her heart
suckle a dry desperation
cry

Yet look at the last words in the book:

         And it is poetry
       And it is life
 
Her wide open plain
her lane of pain and beauty
rain and sunshine.

It was a privilege to review this collection of moving and finely crafted poetry. It deserves a wide readership.

 

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