The Moth by Unknown Read Free Book Online

up! It had been quite an astonishing experience. Even though I didn’t believe in the animist principles behind it, all of these people had been gathered together, cheering for me, and it was very exhilarating.
    And I had a very odd experience five years later, when I was working on my current book, and I was in Rwanda doing something else altogether. I got into a conversation with someone there, and I described the experience I had had in Senegal, and he said, “Oh, you know, we have something that’s a little like that. That’s West Africa. This is East Africa. It’s quite different, but there are some similarities to rituals here.”
    He said, “You know, we had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide, and we had to ask some of them to leave.”
    I said, “What was the problem?”
    And he said, “Their practice did not involve being outside in the sun, like you’re describing, which is, after all, where you begin to feel better. There was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again when you’re depressed, and you’re low, and you need to have your blood flowing. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgment that the depressionis something invasive and external that could actually be cast out of you again.
    “Instead, they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to get them to leave the country.”
    Andrew Solomon is the author of the
New York Times
best sellers
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
(winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and many other awards) and
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of fourteen awards, including the 2001 National Book Award. His first novel,
A Stone Boat
, which was a finalist for the
Los Angeles Times
First Fiction Award, has recently been reissued. Solomon’s work is published in twenty-two languages. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell University and special adviser on LGBT affairs to Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry.

ALAN RABINOWITZ
Man and Beast
    I was five years old, standing in the old, great cat house at the Bronx Zoo, staring into the face of an old female jaguar. I remember looking at the bare walls and at the bare ceiling, wondering what the animal had done to get itself there. I leaned in a little towards the cage and started whispering something to the jaguar. But my father came over quickly and asked, “What are you doing?” I turned to him to try to explain, but my mouth froze, as I knew it would, because everything about my young childhood at that time was characterized by the inability to speak.
    From the earliest time that I tried to speak, I was handicapped with a severe, severe stutter. Not the normal kind of repetitious “bububub” kind of stutter that many stutterers have or many children go through. But the complete blockage of airflow, where if I tried to push words out, my head would spasm and my body would spasm. Nobody knew what to do with me. At the time there were very few books written about stuttering. There was no computer, no Internet. The reaction of the New York City public school system was to put me in a class fordisturbed children. I remember my parents trying to fight it, telling them, “He’s not disturbed.” But the teachers said, “We’re sorry, whenever he tries to speak, it disrupts everything and everybody.” So I spent my youth wondering why adults couldn’t see into me, why they couldn’t see I was normal, and that all the words were inside of me, but they just wouldn’t come out.
    Fortunately, at a very young age I learned what most stutterers learn at some point. You can do two things without