UNTRODUCTION – 01
I recall her saying that her sketches would be ‘crude nudes
for lewd prudes’, by which she meant to counter what she believed
was a warp in written and graphic works of Western art,
to cinemise or gossipise the force of womanhood
with figurations of a flaccid femininity.
(Such terms herein obliqued are lifted from her diaries.)
– 02
Hers was but one
of many cases of delusio Caligaris
identified in treatment-centres, and given import
in professional journals and conferences, throughout
the 1990s. What was, till then, a rare condition
(first drawn attention to by a Dr Fritz von Harbou
in Berlin in 1927) seemed overnight
to mushroom, along with an epidemic of rampant
somnambulism, throughout immigrant populations
of the unsettled and settled tribes of the entire world.
Simply propounded, delusio Caligaris is
a complaint which may assail a mental patient after
immatisation in a therapy-facility.
The condition involves her slowly coming to believe
she is directing the functioning of the institute,
rather than being but one of its inmates ‒ among which
group she is likely to seem a kind of chameleon,
or at best its most suggestible member, with leanings
towards solacium potestatis (otherwise known
as ‘consolation-controlitis’: vide Agressive
Defense: Control-Freakery in an Age of Cowardice
Codified, Berne & Hyde, Pentagoff Press, L.A.; p. 2)
Such tiltings within the psyche may lead to the splitting
or diverting or, in extreme cases, sheer postponement
of personality as identity ‒ a syndrome
indicated by Fatima’s anti-fiction sketches,
as she termed them, that conjure two male stand-ins for her self
– 03
For all its extolling of the miracle of Woman,
Fatima once scrawled after one session with me, Art shrinks
the feminine principle to mere fuckability
‒ an outrageous but understandable claim by a ‘bitch’
who had spent all her adult life as an overworked ‘whore’
within what was then mainly a man’s field of faux-pursuit,
that hunt-scent perverted (or ‘male cross-stitchery’, as she
later called it) to Certifiable Accountancy.
– 04
Being put out to grass from their ‘field’ became her first stage
of fertile depersonalization. This I treated
for eight years (before her suicide). In treatment she seemed
far from delusional: mild-mannered and soft-spoken, her
slightly ironic lazy-lidded gaze suggesting none
of the incoherent anxiety usually
displayed by depersonalized megalomaniacs.
Yet it was the same Fatima (but was it?) who would mock
our one-to-one sessions with hummed sentiments like With you
I rule creation or I’m sitting on top of the world
UNTRODUCTION – 05
And once, without a trace of irony,
she offered to write me a ‘nice’ commendation towards
my next job ‒ as an auto-mechanic or cleaning-maid
(a ‘slip’ revealing her obsession with self-revision).
Less kindly, she was once eve/adamant that very few
women give a fuck for the minds of the men who fuck them
and fuck them over ‒ and over (Fatima had no faith
in the promises of the Sexual Revolution);
that they are no different from men in not giving a damn
for the different feeling-mind quiddity of their not us
– 06
Arterra distrusted the cages of realism,
with its verysilimitude [sic] the strangler of dreams.
Thus, for example, her near-blind bookseller is given,
in all his unlikelihood, as a presence in her ‘dream’,
a figure of entry in her ledger of no account.
We must also not forget that Fatima Arterra
‘sketched’ in a so-called foreign tongue, having picked up only
English scraps while growing up in Angola and Macão.
Those scraps, dismissible in a world of business-numbers,
are less ignorable for their influence on the near-
glossolalial utterances of her word-sketches
– an idiomatic strain she called a distant cousin
of the Pole Conrad’s trick of reviving great bad writing
whose snakes of sentences undermined the ladders of Taste
by empathically echoing the complexities
threading the inner/outer magic-bag of consciousness.
– 07
A more detailed analysis of my patient’s complaint
is not intended here: these few lines are proffered only
as a layperson’s guide into an orderly-seeming
mind’s mazelike detours of which its unrevised ‘sketches’ are
ample examples, evidence revealed only after
Fatima’s sudden death.
Lissana Cesare-Ábusem, PhD, ASPUC
(from *fatima solagua arterra’s nudes* by Brian Chan, 2015)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 