There were the rock walls on the other side of a river with surreal colours, those hues typical of the waters of Western Canada; greenish, turquoise, all embellished with their glacial flour. There was the friend nearby, phone in hand, who was pushing me to do it, who was telling me quietly, out loud, with more or less insistence, his hand on my shoulder, then with a step back: “Take it out, Nath.”
There was my new toque covering my short curly hair. The structure of the hair had been so profoundly transformed by the chemotherapeutic chemicals that the hair follicles had not yet fully recovered from the slaughter that had just decimated them. They had first produced tiny chick hairs, which my husband had had to shave, once again, in that ritual gesture that he would have preferred never to have to do. Then, dark, almost black curls had appeared on my head, me who had always had straight reddish-brown hair.
That day, I had bought boots and a hat in an unaffordable shop in Banff to say a little that I was changing from head to toe, to make my grand entrance into life after the illness. As soon as the last radiotherapy treatment was over, after celebrating the end of the cooking of the heart with gamma rays, which still bears the marks, I had called the friend, the same one with whom escape had always taken the color of the road and the scream.
New York, Paris, Reykjavik, Rouyn or Vancouver, the plan was always the same: pack our bags, book overpriced hotels, make the worst decisions possible and above all: scream. Yes, scream. My “screaming friend”, whom I see less these days because we are increasingly becoming adults who no longer make enough space for madness, used to sprinkle our mid-thirties crises with these trips that cleansed us inside as we traveled, flew and snowstormed.
We would pause on the sequence of days, we would confront each other with our friendship which contained in itself the complete knowledge of the other’s inner world. He would put me back in my place in my life, in my relationship, in my art. I would return the favor. And often, on the road, we would roll down the windows and shout. Like idiots, crazy people, real friends, children, teenagers, champions of mental health, mad people, lovers, wounded people, overwhelmed parents, humans trying to hold on until the end, we would shout until the back of our throats was raw.
We had flown to Western Canada at the first possible moment after the treatments. I had cried almost every time I understood that I was still alive, finally, really? I didn’t know how to believe it, yet. He hadn’t said anything, had just put his hand on my shoulder and made me laugh by saying a delicious stupidity, the kind that only made us laugh. And when he saw this rock jutting out over the river, he had turned the steering wheel to the right and suddenly parked the car. He had then called out to me: “Aweye, go scream.”
So I took a deep breath, swelling the pulverized alveoli of my left lung, which had also been hit hard by the rays, the embolisms, and the shortness of breath. I filled them with all the oxygen I could before launching into the great Western air, onto the conifers, the walls, the river, the sky with all its blue-white, the horror of my last year, the life that had carved out a path for itself, escaping almost everything, all the near-deaths, and all its pain, above all. This cry, the one similar to the first gesture of newborns, had probably marked the beginning of my second birth. We are so often born during the same existence.
Shouting is something we are increasingly deprived of, in our stable lives, often measured in their deployment from morning to night. Fortunately, collectively, we no longer accept shouting at our children, at our employees, at all the people who, in the chain of power, find themselves in the place where accumulated frustrations end up.
However, screams are not limited to those of authoritarianism, of violence, no. They have a thousand and one colors, textures, and cast a wide net on the spectrum of human experience, screams. There is, in the clinic, a whole typology of screams that we are told about, that we are entrusted with, rarely now, in real time. The era of the clinic of the “primal scream” practiced in the famous 1970s, when body-psyche care was more explored in the same space-time, not always in a happy way, is quite over. We are now in the time of dichotomy. Here, we treat bodies; here the mind; there, hearts, which is not necessarily happier.
Now, the cry encompasses all three dimensions at the same time. And it emerges in our existences as an event, as what we let slip and which informs us about the level of pain, joy or surprise that takes hold of us. In the office, I was told about the cries of joy at announced births, the cries that seem to come from elsewhere when the trauma of death presents itself to us, under the face of announced mourning. I was told about the cries of victory, the cries of happy fanaticism in concerts or even, yes, the cries of rage, helplessness or terror, the howls of the world, which sometimes resonate between the poorly insulated walls of these apartments where family terror reigns. I have been told about the screams that also put an end to unhealthy dynamics, the screams of people who stand up for the first time in their lives, or those others, who deconstruct our world when they invite themselves like the manifestation of a shadow that we had not seen within ourselves.
Each time, it is a moment of relaxation, of complete reversal of the power of the pulsional world over the rational, contained layer of our existences.
Perhaps screaming could be prescribed for us. We could create spaces where we would be allowed to get out of ourselves the indigestible in sounds. I don’t know, but I do know that I wish for all of you to have your “screaming friend”, the one with whom you can scream your years on the walls of the world, without the silence that follows embarrassing you in the least.