TYRE NICHOLS MEMORIAM

What Did I Do?

As people of color, we have come to ask that question with a sincerity that shows the depth of our heartbreak. The final word that was missing in that question, that Tyre Nichols repeatedly asked, as he approached his too-soon ended life, was the word wrong.

He didn’t do anything wrong on that January night, because there was no way to be right. He knew that in the blackness, once pulled by Memphis policemen from his car, only several yards from his home, his life could end, violently, and without any logical cause. And it did. This is the terror, the anxiety of being Black in America. This anxiety that is specific to those of us who carry the ancestral lineage of our Black and Brown Africanist ancestors, know too well the fear that can live in us as a culturally rational sense of knowing that our skin color puts us at life-threatening risks. We call it now Black when ____________.

Fill in the blank.

Once again, the emptiness, the blankness of the hole left in us, deepens as we witness another Black man brutally beaten almost to death on an urban landscape. Death would come later for Tyre Nichols, in the hospital, where his family could only grieve as they looked at their loved son, brother, father.

We look in mournful wonderment questioning how anything this young man could have done to five Black policemen with guns would necessitate his being beaten, shoved up against a wall while arrived emergency ambulance services waited, walked around his battered body. While they spoke with one another, talking amongst themselves—while he waited for care. While they waited for what?

The analytical space of sharing must hold much for those of us who bear witness and can tolerate recollection of the words and images that speak to the brutality of Black men being brutalized. We cannot turn our gaze away. The inner eye remembers Rodney King, Emmet Till all the others before and since them….Trayvon Martin.

Even if we do not watch television or listen to the news, the psychic, phenomenological field of our work welcomes the energy of the analysand into the room. It must hold whatever they bring.

Do we ourselves not feel the anxious pressure of others who breathe and must bear witness to their own archetypal grief? The generations of our Africanist people?

We are those who welcome the wounded into our circle of soul and healing every week. They don’t stay only in their analytical chairs but can visit us as we walk into the minutes and hours long after they have left. They have brought with them their own deep cultural suffering that joins and is held by the arms of the analyst of color who truly does feel their pain. Who recognizes the anguish of the question.

What did I do (wrong)?

There is no answer to that question because there was nothing done by Tyre Nichols that could ever justify what happened to him or even perhaps save his life. His words of calm questioning contrasted with the cursing and enraged language directed at him by the five Black policemen seem like whispers now as he called to his mother.

There is no rational or logical reasoning that has caused the death of people of color through the centuries. Much rationale has been offered including biblical verses. I believe there is a Racial Collective Understanding now, reinforced since the death of George Floyd, that the only logic is one of a consciousness of racism. People of color have always been awake to the ancestral legacy of slavery and the brutality expressed against our bodies. We know racism and its effects on the Africanist cultural body.

More others are waking up.

Internalized self-hatred does not stay closed within the self. It too can show itself in the behaviors we witness on both a personal and professional level. Is this not a part of self-analysis? Must we not “analyze” our own inner psychological workings to train to become analysts? How does this work for an analyst in training who is an individual of color? How can self-deprecation and self-hatred as a person of color live and be experienced in that space—how does it move towards healing? Perhaps, a difficult question for us Africanist people, as we continue to bear the deepened sorrow of brutality upon the body of our kin by our kin.

Where do we put the questions? There would certainly be more than one or two, regarding intergenerational cultural pain and anguish, while being in those self-reflective moments, when there is only unrelenting introspective suffering.

Forever asking: What did I do? This would seem to be one of the questions of our Africanist Archetypal Grief.

In moments, that January night on the sidewalk, Tyre Nichols would be recorded calling to his mother.

Blessing

May you be blessed with remembering being held in the arms of your Mother

May you remember all that is Mother so that you may give this love to yourself in your next Life.

Fanny Brewster Ph.D., M.F.A. is a Jungian analyst, Professor of Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and member analyst with PAJA. She is a multi-genre writer who has written about issues at the intersection of Jungian psychology and American culture. The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race is her most recent book. (Routledge, 2019). Dr. Brewster is available through her website, www.fannybrewster.allyou.net/

Our Historic Moment

by Fanny Brewster, Ph.D., MFA, LP, Jungian Analyst

We are beginning a historic new time in our American collective, welcoming a new president, a first African Asian American woman vice-president, with an electoral change that reinforces the strength of our American democracy. This is important to me as an African American woman, a mother, and a descendent of African slaves. All of these and more are relevant to my personal and professional life. The politics of America, and the constant striving for social justice, have been and remain hallmarks of the life of America’s citizens of color. We have depended on American laws and acts of justice–from the Abolitionist Movement to the Black Lives Matter Movement, to provide us with visions and acts of freedom for our bodies, our minds and hope for our future children of color. The economic, political, and educational struggles of Africanist people lasted through four hundred years of slavery. Our cultural lives have been marked through these centuries with an awareness of the struggle for survival, and the necessity of faith, tied to a belief in the resiliency of our cultural group. This is a part of my American identity as an Africanist woman and my calling as a Jungian analyst.

Psychoanalysis began from Eurocentric roots. As a Jungian analyst, I have been taught American Jungian psychology with the elements of this Eurocentrism, including its influences of raciality and colonialism. I believe that the movement of 21^st century psychoanalysis, is to move us into a consciousness that acknowledges the pain of American racism, while creating a new voice of diversity and inclusion. These must always be recognized, as they have so often been excluded, as a part of our training as professionals in the field of psychology. The attention we give to racial diversity, inclusion and equity, provides more assurance that we as practitioners, can give our patients a deeper understanding of compassion and healing. In advancing the relationship between social justice and psychoanalysis, we must accept our historical beginnings, and commit to integrating the specialization of psychoanalysis through the acceptance of those traditionally designated as “Other”, due to skin color, culture or ethnicity. We as psychoanalysts are not separate from our American politics, and therefore social justice which must always speak to issues of American societal racism, and its elimination. The consciousness of the American psyche bears the history of slavery and the potential for repair. These have a presence that includes how we live psychologically–as citizens and psychoanalysts.

We cannot separate the two because this is a time that calls us to be in humility for all that we have endured as American citizens of a racialized body politic, as we become even more conscious containers for healing racism, within our psychoanalytical clinical settings, as well as for the communities we serve.

We embody all of our history–no matter how painful. In this moment, we must hold a vision and light for revealing and healing our racialized American shadow.

Reverie: All That We Can Hold

What the Silence Says
I know that you think you already know but –
Wait
Longer than that.
even longer than that.
Marie Howe, Magdalene: Poems

Now there really are many spaces in between.

Between the memories of not-that-long-ago missing family that has transitioned.

Between the remembrance of walking into a room and what is forgotten in a moment’s slice of time. The sought for object gone.

Between the small anxiety of trying to remember last night’s dream image and being startled (again) into realizing that the death numbers of those who have died from the pandemic has not waited.

It keeps growing each day. Somewhere.

There is a silence in which I walk feeling my way along. Masked. Covered. Bubbled.

Uncertain.

I sometimes think that I’m waiting. Not like at 42^nd Street, hot July day, for the 4 train. Knowing it will come. More like watching clouds float across Caribbean waters.

They move like something unexpected.

Uncertain.

This is the word we use now. Uncertain. All the conversations about what we knew for the future have almost stopped. There is a silence here. It meets us in that space where we might consider nothingness. It can feel like the uselessness of the self just before falling into giving up. Letting go.

We can still hold on though once we recover from the blankness of the space between.

Dissociation.

We can hold on to hope that things will change once we recover. Once we get the remedy. The vaccine.

Some of us can hold on to our rage at such malicious incompetency that has allowed so many to die.

Then the silence returns and we hold all that we can.

A DAY IN AUGUST

a visit by spirit

He came just before dawn
my first companion in chains
the father of four sons
who died
exhaling his last fevered breath
onto my back
now he returns
breathing softly onto my worn flesh
he whispers in my ear
words I cannot understand
but I know it is him
telling me of the pain
the joy of leaving his body
the apprehension of giving up life.
I listen intently
to know what my life
could be on another journey
a different kind of journey.

He does not touch me
will not touch me
unless I say
yes,
take me.

Pushed forward
by the cradle rock of the ship,
leaning,
I smell him
not as when we were chained brothers
with the pungency of vomit,
bloody sweat sticking to our salt bodies,
but different.

Slight guava scent after first morning rain.

I am tempted to touch him,
let him take me

beyond where my captured body lay
but a great fear grabs me.

Squeezes my heart.
Holds my breath.
I cannot release, free myself.

And so he leaves me with my fear
and the terror of this life.

From, Journey: The Middle Passage, Psychological Perspectives, v. 59, Issue 4

A Day in August

Four hundred years ago the White Lion arrived in Hampton, Virginia,following it’s ocean voyage from Britain. This ship’s arrival and its occupants were to contribute to the creation of an American society that combined all that many of us hold dear, and paradoxically that which many of us have the strongest desire to change. Aboard the White Lion were twenty-plus enslaved Africans stolen from Angola. These men and women, were the ancestors of African Americans who were sold throughout Southern states, building an economically strong plantation system that amassed wealth for white America.

Many of us who seek change in our American social system wish to increase social justice. This type of justice points to a history of slavery and racism in the early American colonies and through four hundred years of social injustice. Injustice that included not only economic suffering, but also immense psychological and mental trauma.

It is difficult to separate Africanist suffering into strands of economic, gender, educational. These and more are so evenly braided together—from our American Constitution, to our contemporary education system. Not one place of our American society and psyche has been untouched by the arrival of the White Lion Africans who came ashore that day in August.

Engaging the psychological work of healing intergenerational trauma, recognizing cultural complexes, understanding archetypal DNA and epigenetics involved in attachment theory, related to the African Holocaust, binds us. All of us—as Americans. There is often a wish, perhaps as an aspect of a racial complex, to forget, create amnesia regarding those first African American ancestors. However, it rests with all of us who live today to remember them as creating the path for millions who followed. Their journey was one of suffering, as was that of their descendants. My writing is to remember and honor those first Angolan Africans stolen and brought to America. It is to remember them with love and compassion because their path has been our path, and we have not yet finished the journey.

Dr. Fanny Brewster is a Jungian member analyst with PAJA, Professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the author of The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race. (Routledge 2019). Dr. Brewster is available through her website, www.fannybrewster.allyou.net/

Meditation on Mothers and Death

Eshu’s Vision

Crows with iridescent rich feathers
swoop in layers in front of my windshield.
Their chatter hales down like hard pellets
fallen from an August rain cloud in this October month.
I drive into furious black wings, expecting they can be swept aside, made invisible,
that they have not chosen me, but only like me, are weary after night flight across a sleeping continent.

Their black pea eyes refuse to blink.
They push roughly against air forcing me to breathe deeper
like the first time, out of the birth waters,
trying to catch that first breath of air.

On this umbilical highway each exhalation releases:
wings rise and fall to earth,
these messengers of Eshu, bring divination, falling like rain,
blur my vision in embryonic thin air.

Finished, they fly east to the ocean.
Sunrise reflects like water and oil on wings of charcoal.
The space behind my heart darkens, while nigredo feathers fallen to earth,
predict my mother’s death.

The summer is only beginning, though these hot, humid days suggest August, rather than the light touch of warmth that June most often brings. For the last several months I have been thinking, actually more ruminating about mortality, and to say it in what seems a more blunt manner, dying. This is the close personal death—not the distant one of a collective ritual such as Catholic extreme unction or the death of an actor playing someone dying in a movie. It is not the hearing of the death of an actor who has been immortalized on the screen. I question. How could he die? How old was he anyway—surely not that old? Then I remember the years since I first saw him on screen. I realize that the difference of our age is not that great. I might be closer to death then I think. Of course I am because I cannot know the minute nor the hour. This thought makes dying seem so very close to me. As if I will die. Can die—soon. For these few seconds I know this and think I can actually feel my body dying.

I have begun with my own mortality but I also want to talk about mothers and our holding and lose of them. In a soft way, like a small pocket of lightly swirling cove water, under the ocean, I have been thinking only about my own personal mother’s death, and so a patient came not too many days ago, because she is in mourning about her own mother’s recent death. Of course, every one who walks through the analytical door is carrying a gift, a contributing reason for my existence as I am for theirs. They are each bringing something I must hold with love and bear with courage. This is because I have forgotten and need reminding of my necessary life work.

I wonder if it isn’t too mournful and dreadful in some way to be thinking about death in the summer. Doesn’t it belong in a dark month, a rainy, cloud-driven late January day? As a depth psychologist I can safely say not—it’s all right to bring the darkness anytime as it never really leaves us. Yes, there is safety here but there is also safety in wanting the light—the beautiful light of a blue-sky June day.

I struggle with wanting both—because I actually need both. It does remind me of what appears as a paradox to me of having someone bring you into the world, be your first place of heart connection, all the while having them die, and yet still be with them in memory. This is for all the years the rest of my life. This might seem so simplistic in thought but it holds a great importance in how I feel my life and feel into my life.

This apparent eternal connection to life and mother, even through her death, sometimes even more so because of her death, interweaves through my life and that of my patients.

As I read through pages of author discussions in service of writing a book on what I have called Archetypal Grief—African American mothers losing their children for generations due to slavery, and the emotional pain of such losses, I feel myself to now be living within the phenomenological field of mothers and death. But like many things, I feel myself to have been chosen in this moment because I have chosen a topic—a theme, that wants to be expanded upon and yet carries the weight of intergenerational trauma that remains today.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a pioneer in the field of writing about death and dying, begins to inform my writing work—allowing me to develop an idea for a new model of consideration. This idea is that something changes the model of grief with intergenerational dying and mourning caused by an archetypal event such as slavery. It is almost as if a mother, and all the enslaved future daughters she births and their daughter’s daughters, moving down the maternal line, will have no place for denial or bargaining as regards death. Emotionally, there can only be room for anger, depression and acceptance. This is what can frame the lived experiences of mothering slaves bound to death through birthing and intergenerational child loss. I’m speaking of this because it has threaded through my consciousness for the past year as I write about enslaved mothers. I also know that it lives in me as a member of this cultural collective.

Working Hands

Sunset red next to
azure blue
next to
spring green,
the colors
of the quilt
stream,
an unchecked flow
of
colored river
gradually meeting shore,
the working brown
of my grandmother’s
hands.

This past Mother’s Day was a May Sunday in the middle of the month. I performed a short ritual in remembrance of my mother and all of the women of my matriarch lineage. I also remembered the women on my father’s side of family. This day designated for mothers is not the only one in which we think about the women who have given us life. In speaking of the mother archetype Jung says:

Like any other archetype, the mother archetype appears under an almost infinite variety of aspects….First in importance are the personal mother and grandmother, stepmother and mother-in-law….or a remote ancestress….The qualities associated with it are maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and the spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility. The place of magic transformation and rebirth, together with the underworld and its inhabitants, are presided over by the mother.
C.G. Jung, CW, vol9i, para. 156, 158

As I consider the passage of my own mother into death, I think more of my own to-come experience of dying. I think about how we can be afraid of dying. As I age, I realize I am in the category of one more likely to die. This is sobering. It doesn’t seem to matter how much presence death has when one is younger—in the twenties, thirties, the later years adds a different quality dimension. How I can be afraid of it, and how each patient who discusses dying of a parent, friend or stranger is actually referencing their own death. I believe this is why we must consider wisdom as we age. It seems an important exchange—a trade-off, a softening offered against the hard edge of ego consciousness leaving the body.

As I write now, I wonder about my own purpose on choosing this meditation on mothers, death and dying. It feels not like swimming in a spiral of self-aggrandizement but more like a spider traversing her web. Seeking a place to belong while knowing that all is at once home.

Blue Pearl

Stepping outside of the hospital where she had just died,
my arms have become wings.

Blue pearl surrounds my heart
and moves in the birthing motion of a star,
unencumbered by fear of loss,
now desiring only a child’s life.

I am warm with sunrays.
All false joys are tossed away like disappointing fruit,
fallen next to discarded sorrow.
All of it waiting to be washed away by the next rainfall.

Ocean stone shines cerulean glory,
pierces doubt, recovers with winds of truth
any falsehood about love,
and it’s power to heal all that hurts.

Caresses heartbreak.
Breathes tender.
Like the velvet softness of aged skin.

Sapphire reflects upon itself,
star to star,
captures my breath,
recreates it pearl by pearl.

And by this I know you have arrived safely.

AUTHOR

Fanny Brewster Ph.D. M.F.A., is a Jungian analyst and author of African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows. (Routledge, 2017). She is a faculty member of the Philadelphia Jung Institute and can be reached through www.fannybrewster.com

Grief as Anger

One of the most recognizable stereotypes of African American women is that of the Angry Black Woman. I believe that this image of Africanist women has grown out of the Collective’s need to have a Feminine upon which to project strength.

Following the decades after slavery and the plantation system where black women worked in the fields, birthed and lost their children, took care of the children of others and suffered being a mothering slave, it seems that the American psyche would find these women to be strong of character. This is oftentimes applied to black women—that they are strong. But sometimes this strength is mistaken for anger—thus the angry black woman stereotype. Stereotypes exist because there was once an image, language, a story that created in our consciousness a tangible remembrance. The recollection becomes solidified as a stereotype.

When I think about the stereotype of the angry black woman I begin to search deeper, looking for something else that resonates with what has risen to the surface. But before going there it might be important to see why an African American woman might be angry. The emotion of anger within ourselves can sometimes make us afraid. We cannot tolerate the uncontrolled welling up and intense heat of the energy of rage or anger. We can be equally afraid of the release of this anger. I’m thinking of a situation that might cause one to be angry and yet be out of touch with how to express this anger—to have it suppressed for the sake of one’s survival. Just for a moment imagine that you are a female child born into slavery in the early 1800’s. Your mother has birthed you and returned to the cotton fields within a month of your birth.

She sometimes comes home to breastfeed you when given permission but otherwise, your early infancy is spent in the care of an elder in the shack where you may have been born. You might easily be cared for by a young boy if there is no elder woman available. As an infant, you continue to live with others in the shack who may or may not be biological family. As you begin to get older you are given chores to perform in the white family’s house or in the fields. These are minor chores and do not take up much of your time as you can still find time to play with the other small white children of the plantation owner. The day eventually comes when you are no longer allowed to play with these children. At the age of 8 or ten you must take on more serious jobs—you become a night-pillow for the mistress or worse yet for the master. Your body, that never really belonged to you, now becomes recognized by you as being the possession of another. Suspicion of the ownership of your mother’s body is now finalized in your mind as you understand that she too belongs to a white master. You find that your skin color makes you a slave. You are told that this is how it is and how it will be for the rest of your life. Imagine that this is your life—for the rest of your life. Imagine your anger.

The idea that slavery happened so long ago and has no place in our cultural thinking today is a part of America’s Shadow. It is difficult to bear the thoughts of what life must have been like back then but this is a necessary part of the healing of our American collective. We wish to forget and we cannot forget.

When we remember and attempt to make some changes good can happen—a civil rights movement emerges which does not end in another civil war; voting rights are guaranteed by law; segregation ends.

But we cannot shine enough light onto the shadow for too long and so once more we sit at the edge of shadow awaiting the next racial storm to begin. We have had our Ferguson and all the deaths of Black men and women by policemen within the last five years. I believe that our cultural complexes are so activated by fear and anger that we have a great difficulty staying with patience for understanding what might help us heal our American racial Shadow.

We can understand our anger, our guilt. What of the grief that lives under the anger? What happens to the emotion of generations of former slaves? Jung says that our history is in our blood. The DNA that we live with identifies us as historical and archetypal human beings. If I feel into how my ancestors before me lived, whether through mirror neurons or the spirit of ancestors, how do I carry the traumatic emotions such as anger and the underlying grief of centuries-old slavery? I think that we could be angry but we must also hold a deep place for grief. So when I hear about the angry black woman, I am also trying to hold psychic space for the grief-filled woman. Where does this grief emerge from and where does it go? I think that at this point it could be just enough to consider that such a thing exist—an underlying grief that rests within the bosom of generations of African Diaspora women. This grief can appear as anger. Why not? Within the clinical setting oftentimes the emotion of anger covers sadness and sorrow. What would make this unlikely in a cultural group that has survived 400 years of slavery? What is the archetypal grief of a mothering slave? These are questions that I ask myself because of the American life that I lead—both personally and professionally.

Biography

Fanny Brewster, Ph.D., M.F.A. is a Jungian analyst, PAJA member and Core Faculty with Pacifica Graduate Institute.