In 2015, author Sanya Rushdi was hospitalized after her third psychotic episode and was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. Hospital, first published in 2019 in Bengali and then in an excellent recent English translation by Arunava Sinha, is an attempt to make sense of what had happened to her and the things around her during that period of time. This is not however a straight-up memoir but rather a work of auto-fiction. While most characters might share names and trajectories of their real-life counterparts, it would be wrong to read it as an unvarnished factual account of true events.
At just 125 pages, the slim novel follows Sanya, a Bangladeshi Muslim woman in her late thirties living with her family in Melbourne, with a history of mental illness as she experiences psychosis for the third time in her life. After a short stay at a community house, she returns home and is later institutionalized for a few months. Translator Sinha described Hospital as
superbly spare, without giving in to any excesses of language or expression at any point. And yet it is rich in terms of what it conveys, forcing the attentive reader to pause and think often.
His English translation bears out both of these qualities. Even without linguistic pyrotechnics, Hospital is very affecting in how it explores madness and sanity.
Mental illness makes language and its use suspect.
Language is important for Sanya the narrator. It defines an individual’s abstract inner world and makes its articulation possible. While it might become a prison-house when “exact meanings are yoked to words,” embracing its natural ambiguity can be liberating. In a long discussion with a psychiatrist, Sanya says:
The mental world of a healthy adult is immersed in language… [It] is the source of their thoughts and feelings. They pour these thoughts and feelings into it, and that is what can create confusion in their mental world. Language alone can unsnarl it, medication cannot.
Mental illness makes language and its use suspect. Since Sanya cannot be rational, as the belief goes, there is nothing of value in her thoughts and her self-advocacy is constantly ignored, overruled and dismissed. Living in the hospital is like being trapped in a terrarium. At one point, Sanya muses:
Is the community house better than the hospital? Maybe. At least it allows something like the ‘self’ to exist, something like ‘me’, something like ‘want’.
She has no access to electronic devices or the internet. She cannot venture out on her own. She cannot decline medication without consequences; unless she is an ideal patient , there is no hope of leaving the ward.
However, the ward provides Sanya an opportunity to slow down and reevaluate. The friendships that she forges with fellow patients shine through vividly. While under psychosis, every gesture and word seemed to overwhelm her. Sanya is a regular diarist and even looking at entries from her first few days at the hospital gives her a new insight into her older mental state: “Back then, I had assumed my sensations were real, but today I know they’re being inflicted on me, I can get out of them.”
In its English translation, Hospital was recently shortlisted for one of Australia’s premier annual book awards, the 2024 Stella Prize.
There are perceptible changes in prose style, small jump cuts in narrative, and Sanya’s rising suspicion about her surroundings that give a glimpse of her mindscape as it starts to go haywire. Sanya is supported by family and friends who only want the best for her, even if it is them who have her admitted out of goodwill when they notice her deteriorating mental state. They care for her, worry about her. Yet, at the end of the day, she stands alone. While others can empathize with her, they are unable to completely understand her. This is a much harder ordeal for Sanya; she cannot rely on her reason.
Rushdi is an almost unique case of a Bangladeshi writer living in an anglophone country (Australia) and choosing to write in Bengali. In its English translation, Hospital was recently shortlisted for one of Australia’s premier annual book awards, the 2024 Stella Prize. The novel is a plea to be understood, to escape the vicious cycle of madness and sanity by re-imagining what those terms denote, connecting disconnected, disparate islands into the mainland of humanity.