“When Black Women start Going on Prozac”: Race, Gender, and Mental Illness in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s Willow Weep for Me

Meri Nana-Ama Danquah's Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression (1998) is a first-person narrative by an author who, without identifying as "disabled" or signaling any alliance with the disability rights movement, describes the "suffering" her "illness" caused and recounts her "triumph" over it, an overcoming achieved through a combination of "courage," "resilience," prescription drugs, and other medical interventions (237, 18, 262). As such, Danquah's memoir is precisely the kind of text that much disability scholarship in the humanities has taught us to critique. Foundational work in this field has stressed the formation and assertion of positive disability identities. It has also underscored the distinction between illness and disability, describing disability in terms of visible bodily difference rather than sickness or suffering. Moreover, disability scholars have criticized personal narratives that highlight disabled people's courage or show them "overcoming" their impairments; framing disability in terms of an individual's struggle against adversity, they have argued, deflects attention from the political realities of disability oppression. (1) These arguments have enormous importance. They form the basis of a scholarship that has redefined disability, demonstrating that it is best understood not as a biological given, but rather as a social process requiring sustained intellectual and political attention. Yet Danquah's memoir, in its deep engagement with the politics of race, gender, class, and mental illness, forces a reconsideration of several of these tenets of disability studies. Most important, Willow Weep for Me makes it clear that disability studies, which has tended to define disability as a visual, objectively observable phenomenon, must also carefully attend to the phenomenological aspects of impairment, particularly those that involve suffering and illness. Such attention will necessitate developing more nuanced ways of describing intersections of multiple forms of oppression than have predominated in the most influential disability scholarship. Examining such intersectionality in Danquah's memoir complicates aspects of some disabled people's critiques of the medical or psychiatric model of mental illness; for many African American women with depression, lack of access to health care, rather than involuntary administration of it, is the most oppressive aspect of the contemporary politics of mental illness. (2) Danquah's memoir may also be the basis for a critique of a tendency, within much disability scholarship, to avoid representing impairments in terms of sickness or suffering. The social model's (bodily) impairment vs. (socially produced) disability binary, which has often lead to a de-politicization of impairments, cannot be upheld in Willow Weep for Me, which illuminates both the suffering that impairments can cause and the role of politics in producing them. But on the other hand, Danquah's narrative also complicates some disability theorists' deconstructions of the impairment-disability distinction. These postmodern analyses of impairment tend to see individuals' reliance upon impairment categories as invariably serving to buttress hegemonic constructions of disability; but Danquah's autopathography demonstrates that such categories can be mobilized in ways that are politically resistant. Finally, Willow Weep for Me presents challenges to disability studies' critique of "stories of overcoming"; by highlighting individuals' power in relation to oppressive political and economic structures, Danquah's narrative offers a powerful antidote to despair. In order to apprehend the significance of Willow Weep for Me, a critical method that can account for intersections of multiple forms of oppression is crucial. "I am black; I am female; I am an immigrant," Danquah writes. "Every one of these labels plays an equally significant part in my perception of myself and the world around me" (225). …