The Thousand And One Nightmares Of Abdul Hussain

Description THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTMARES OF ABDUL HUSSAIN is intended to be not a well- engineered best- seller, but, instead, a painful analysis of the soul of a schizophrenic who feels crucifed by confinement and drugs. There is no escape from his illness, his hell, from the bleak psychiatric system that wants to convert him into a passive nobody. He absconds from a mental hospital only to be a confused, penniless vagrant on London's cruel streets. This nervous book is about how British society can be uncaring, indeed pitiless, towards those having the misfortune of not being able to conform. The complex, the bewildering, schisms of class and race are uneasily investigated according to the viewpoint of our schizophrenic protagonist- Abdul Hussain. He tears through the existence of others. From the stuck up daughter of a baronet, to an elderly, despairing Afro- Caribbean mental patient, even to Mephistopheles in the abyss of Hell, we discover, with as much discomfort as possible, how NORMALITY can itself be a sort of curse, a cage that does not let the spirit fly and sing. Abdul Hussain is the brittle prism through which all that is ugly and unpleasant about ourselves is refracted- and we may not wish to see how hideous our pomp and pretence may really be. Abdul is at the very nasty interface between homelessness and mental illness. His is a mind that never is secure. He wanders from crisis to crisis, and becomes ever more wounded, ever more unstable. Here, then, is your entrance into schizophrenia. Feel entangled in its conundrums, its puzzles, its riddles, its dilemmas. These turbulent pages are a confrontation between SANITY and INSANITY- where SANITY is often the villain, and INSANITY is the martyr. Knot after knot of contradiction should encompass and enfold you. And, in the end, it is the brutal conventional lies that must always destroy freedom, full of a sweet fragility... About the Author Zekria Ibrahimi (born in 1959) is defined by his schizophrenia. It first hit him long ago, in his late teens. He is fifty years old now, grey and frail, almost a pensioner, and he does not always want to remember how, as an adolescent in the late 1970's, he suddenly became afraid of everything surrounding him, and, worst of all, of himself. He would run around the countryside and knock at the doors of strangers because he feared the apocalypse was pursuing him ... He would pick up rubbish outside in alleys and streets and hoard it in his not very palatial lodgings ... He was always wandering away from home, searching for ... what would never be found again ... the straight route, the level way ... He was a tramp, freezing during the nights in public toilets where he had various unsavoury insects as company on the cold concrete … There were years of pain when his schizophrenia became almost his only companion- albeit a sadistic one, punishing him even as he hugged it. Perhaps, to echo both R. D. Laing and Emily Dickinson, it is the entire globe, it is general society, that is truly insane. Schizophrenics simply burrow all too deeply under the surface. They reach the very core of the savage reality in us all. Most varnish over the anarchic truth within through the superficial sham paraded as 'civilization'. Schizophrenics prefer to be uncomfortably honest barbarians. Eventually, after much psychotic shouting on Hammersmith Broadway, the hapless Zekria was confined at the Charing Cross unit in the West London Mental Health Trust. Following the unsafe unstable freedom of his schizophrenia, came the restrictions of Section 3. He would not have survived without the multi- racial compassion of the individual doctors and nurses in Charing Cross. Yet the overall SYSTEM remains an ogre of rules and restraints, and the INSTITUTION of psychiatry can be as cold and vicious as in the days of lobotomy and insulin shock. Now he is elderly, but still he muses about being locked up, drugged up, about how, with schizophrenia, the treatment can...