In Medias Res

“Go, go, go, said the bird: humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

In ROOM's tenth year, we find ourselves in the middle of a world at war with itself.

“Psychoanalysis rests on the assumption that people can change; that through thought, reflection, and the painful recognition of one's own destructiveness, something new can emerge … This moment is testing my belief in ways I never expected,” writes Nina Jamshidnejad in No Language in Times of War. “I am considered a traitor, as if refusing war makes me aligned with the regime I myself had to flee.” The new analytic setting that Darya Navidi describes in A Bag of Broken Tiles: Report from Tehran is built not on neutrality or consistency but on proximity to survival. “There (are) moments when this (feels) less like analytic work and more like standing in the middle of incompatible realities.” Separated by thousands of miles, both women are paralyzed politically and psychically between two irreconcilable positions with nothing to hold on to and no ground beneath them.

Laura Farha is also suspended in an incomprehensible reality. In On This Land she describes working with a patient whose Shia Muslim village in southern Lebanon neighbors her own Christian one. “We have both dreamt of returning, she to open a school, me to raise goats.” Now her patient's home has been destroyed by rockets and her village has been prohibited to offer shelter to Shia Muslims seeking refuge. In return, the Israeli military promises to spare Farha's home from utter annihilation. If her patient knows about this, neither of them speak of it. When Jamshidnejad says, “War destroys more than bodies and cities. It destroys the invisible structures that make human co-existence possible: trust, shared reality, and moral recognition,” she is also speaking for Navadi and Fahra. She is speaking for millions.

Racism also destroys “trust, shared reality, and moral recognition.” This Black Thing tells how Jennifer