Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression
Author: Meri Nana-Ama Danquah
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Hardcover:
ISBN 10: 0393045676
ISBN 13: 978-0393045673
The first book to focus on black women and depression, seen through the personal journey of a young black woman's descent into despair.
Meri Danquah, a "working-class broke," twenty-two-year-old single mother, began to suffer from a variety of depressive symptoms after she gave birth to her daughter, which led her to suspect that she might be going crazy. Understanding the importance of strength in a world that often undervalues black women's lives, she shrouded herself and her illness in silence and denial. "Black women are supposed to be strong―caretakers, nurturers, healers of other people―any of the twelve dozen variations of Mammy," writes Danquah. But eventually, she could no longer deny the debilitating sadness that interfered with her ability to care for her daughter, to pursue her career as a writer, and to engage in personal relationships. "This is how the world feels to me when I am depressed," she writes. "Everything is blurry, out of focus, fading like a photograph; people seem incapable of change; living feels like a waste of time and effort."
She moves back to the city of her childhood where she befriends two black women who are also suffering from depression. With their support she confronts the traumatic childhood events―sexual abuse, neglect, and loss―that lie beneath her grief. This is not simply a memoir about depression, it is a powerful meditation on courage and a litany for survival.
From Publishers Weekly
Danquah, a black single mother and Ghanian-born immigrant, who moved to the U.S. at age six in 1973, has battled melancholy and despair, culminating in episodes of overwhelming depression. A performance artist and poet who has worked as a creative writing instructor, she discusses movingly how she overcame clinical depression in this candid memoir. Addressing the special circumstances of being both depressive and an African American woman, she notes, for example, that talking about one's parents is frowned on in African as well as African American culture. Her parents divorced when she was growing up in Washington, D.C., and she carried around suppressed rage at the father who abandoned her and the mother whose lover she claims sexually abused her. After she fled to Los Angeles in 1991, her world fell apart when, as she tells it, her common-law husband threw her out along with their two-month-old daughter. With the help of therapists, Danquah ultimately confronted these traumas and the self-hatred induced partly by pervasive racism. Yet antidepressant drugs numbed her and drove her to alcohol. She kicked both habits and now overcomes the blues (the book's title is from a Billie Holiday song) through music, meditation and vigilant monitoring to avoid self-destructive situations and moods. She tells her story poignantly and affectingly.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this brutally painful memoir, Danquah, a young single mother, reveals how her illness began, how it progressed to the point where she couldn't function, and how she finally got the support she needed to help combat it.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
``I have,'' Danquah notes early in this straightforward, moving memoir, ``been addicted to despair.'' For much of her life she has veered between bouts of mild depression and periods of extreme depression. She charts the costs of this lifelong battle: disrupted relationships, broken friendships, several promising careers disrupted, a college education left incomplete. While there is no shortage of books describing long struggles with depression, Danquah'is one of the first works to focus on the needs and experiences of black women suffering from clinical depression. As Danquah points out, black women suffer from the additional burden of being viewed in many quarters as tough, enduring figures, those who give solace but who rarely require it themselves. She also discusses her therapy with frankness and describes her discoveries about the grim childhood origins of her depression. This is likely to prove of special help to black women working to come to terms with serious depression. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Meri Nana-Ama Danquah is the author of a memoir, Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression.
