The moment I stepped inside our home late in the afternoon, my little sister H. said, “He cut his wrists with a razor blade.” I was instantly terrified even though I had been expecting worse for nearly a year and a half. Almost every time I came home from an ordinary day at the university, I was met with terrifying news about my brother; news of what he said, did or tried to do to others.

* * *

My immediate elder brother I.R. was my role model growing up. He deviated from the usual paths other members of our family chose, or had life toss upon them, and became the first to attend university since one of our uncles in the 1970s. He studied biology, was a well-mannered young man, and had lots of friends. He made our parents and our siblings proud and had everything planned for his future.  

* * *

He wasn’t only a role model to me though; he was also my closest friend. When we were still children, we moved to live in the south of Algeria in the early 2000s. We watched and loved the same shows—we ran from school to watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch on a French channel together. We enjoyed the same songs, listening to Eminem and Britney Spears religiously even without understanding a word. And we confided in each other our little secrets—the names of our crushes—while we came up with nicknames for our enemies. Sure, we had our rare fights over the remote control as kids; we had our disputes as teenagers over whose turn it was to go to the grocery store, but even those were soon resolved.

* * *

As a teenager, I thought that I looked up to him for his excellence in everything he undertook. For his firm belief in women’s freedom and equal rights in a conservative society, or for his hard work in our restaurant even after long school hours. And I believed I loved to spend time with him because, as our parents used to say, we were close in age—me being only two years his junior. But after he suddenly changed, I understood it was his warm gentleness that I looked up to. It was that tender character of his that I, my parents, other three brothers, and two sisters missed the most while we were suddenly witnessing his future fleeting before our eyes and life shattering into pieces at just twenty-six years old.  

* * *

Upon hearing my sister’s words, I thought about how my brother had started transforming. Memories flooded my mind while I was still standing at the house entrance. It was as if I was unconsciously trying to draw a logical timeline for a set of chaotic events. I recollected my brother standing outside our residential building looking at the scorching summer sun with his bare eyes for hours. A ritual he would repeat for days. I remembered him talking to no one in particular—to someone visible only to him. Then I remembered his deep suspicions that everyone was trying to kill him. At home, we didn’t pay much attention to it at first. Then we gradually started exchanging puzzled looks that escalated into private and long discussions about what was happening. We all agreed something was wrong.

* * *

At the start, our parents did little to look into my brother’s condition, make a decision or seek help—instead our father chose to over-work, and our mother chose to pray. They believed time would heal whatever caused his hallucinations. My siblings and I felt as though they were giving up on him—our father giving up on the only person whose advice he trusted in important matters, and our mother the only person who was willing to listen to her religious talk. We respected their choices and did nothing as well. As time passed though, they were proved wrong—my brother continued to drift away from our reality. 

* * *

I became unnerved, just like during the long sleepless nights we had to bear when he vanished. Months after his puzzling, erratic behaviour started, he took on the habit of disappearing for days. My immediate little brother R. spent nights driving his car around the city looking for any sign of him. He couldn’t bear the thought of him being hurt despite their  complicated relationship. They were at odds most of the time, with our brother I.R. decrying the former’s use of drugs and his decision to drop out of school. Fortunately, our brother always came back home. Those were the days which nearly made us all lose our wits, panicked and fatigued looking for him everywhere and calling everyone who knew him.

* * *

My little sister waited a few moments until I absorbed the information before describing how the incident happened. She told me in a frantic voice and out of control gestures how our brother had a sudden violent fit in the middle of the morning, and how she and our mother, left alone with him, had to call the police. She said that he was safe now, and staying over at the hospital for the night with our father and elder brother. That’s where her description stopped. She didn’t see how things happened exactly because, unlike our mother, she’d stayed hidden in her room, terrified. I thought that I would have done the same. However, she handled the events with our brother better than me most of the time. Like my youngest brother W., she spent as much time as they did before at home. They also both tried, unsuccessfully, to engage in trivial conversations with I.R. And they didn’t budge when he intentionally vomited in the living room after he ate, fearful the food was poisoned. 

* * *

I imagined the scenario, how my brother I.R., already agitated, became more furious when he heard the police siren, how he’d rushed behind the table in the middle of the living room while my mother watched him from the doorway—he always chased her away whenever she approached him. He must have then swiftly cut his wrists while my mother rushed to try to stop him. I couldn’t imagine where he grabbed the razor blade, but my mother was unable to stop him, an old woman, compared to a fit, enraged young man. The police arrived just in time and took him by force to the hospital.

* * *

I scanned the living room; it looked as usual, a bit messy, but no sign of what happened—no blood. My mother was sitting there on one of the sofas, eyes closed, praying quietly. I fumed silently at her. I never understood what a prayer’s use was. I joined her though and sat on another sofa opposite her with my sister. We stayed silent, and as I looked at my mother, still fuming, I thought about the old man they’d brought home to heal my brother at one point. The old man was short and had a white beard. He was wearing a brown burnous over a white thawb, and his head was topped with a taqiyah. He came with two assistants, two middle-aged men. One of them was carrying a bag and the other a big copy of the Quran. They were directed to the living room, where my brother was sitting talking to no one. They asked us to leave them alone with him and closed the door. I was disappointed that our strongly agnostic father had agreed to this—that he would think that what my brother needed was cleansing from evil. My family and I remained in the hallway, and listened in silence for two hours as the raqi recited Surahs from the Quran behind the closed door. Finally they opened the door, gave my other eldest brother M. a bottle of water, and ordered him to make our possessed brother drink from it for the upcoming days. The following days after the cleansing, nothing changed. My brother still inhabited another world. 

* * *

At home we weren’t surprised; we never really believed in religious healing. And even though we were generally neutral to every religion, we didn’t believe in any. Our despair turned into an occasion for joking about how the evil spirits in him were too powerful. Our eldest brother in particular found refuge in humor in times of crisis. This time wasn’t different. He uplifted our spirits with his jokes and banter. After spending most of his thirty years helping father at work, he had to push back his dream move to France. He chose to stay until he made sure his young brother I.R. was healed. 

* * *

My mother started praying loudly, calling for Jesus to help us. My little sister and I rolled our eyes, but chose to stay with her in the living room. Her pleas brought back the sound of the long prayers the priest of her church had recited when he came about a month after the cleansing episode with the raqi. The priest came with three of his assistants from one of the few permitted protestant churches in the north of the country. They too came for the evil spirits possessing my brother. My mother had called them. She believed in the power of Jesus now, when about ten years ago she believed in the power of Muhammad. The priest and his aides—two women in their forties and a young man—placed my brother on a chair in the middle of our living room, put their hands over his head and shoulders, and prayed deep into the night. The rest of us were ordered to stay there with them, and so we did. It struck me at the time how my brother remained calm. He just looked at them intensely and smiled in a malicious manner until they finished. I made myself believe that he smiled because he could still perceive how absurd the situation was, so I smiled too. Days after that long night of imploring Jesus for help, nothing changed.

* * *

After my brother came back home from the hospital and was better physically, he was admitted into a psychiatric hospital about four hours from where we lived. There he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. As soon as I heard that term, I Googled it. I looked into its symptoms, causes, and most importantly, how it was cured. I was deeply disappointed that it needed lifelong treatment, but I rejoiced that my brother could return to our world. We all did. His diagnosis came as a relief to a rollercoaster ride that spanned nearly three years. 

* * *

In the first months of his release from the hospital, we made sure he took his medications. But soon, we thought he no longer needed them. He seemed better, so going against the doctor’s orders, we stopped giving medication to him. A few weeks later, he relapsed. My eldest sister R. chastised us over the phone for our naivety. She had lived with our brother’s mental illness from afar in torturous helplessness. She had to adjust to living in France as a new married woman while impatiently waiting for good news about her sick brother. So our decision came and its consequences left her enraged. 

* * *

We admitted him to the hospital again. When he was released, we never made the same mistake. Instead, we committed to the new reality. He committed to it too. He never returned to his studies to pursue his master’s degree. He was too weak from medications to work. But love was waiting for him. And so he married last year and left to live with his wife in France, joining both our elder siblings to live there. And while leaving painful souvenirs behind, he also left heartening hope, which twined with his name’s meaning, “survivor,” makes it all stronger. A hope that accompanied me when the demons of depression surfaced in me at the end of last year. Witnessing his nerve-racking journey with his mental illness made me believe I, too, could recover from my own. And made me hold it dearly to pass it on whenever there is someone who might need it.

About the Author:

Saliha Haddad is a junior literary agent at Worlds Arts Agency. She graduated in the field of Anglophone Literature and Civilization in 2015. She is a literary interviewer for the online magazine Africa in Dialogue. Haddad has also written on cultural subjects for the Algerian online platform DzairWorld and for the magazine Ineffable Art and Culture. Her debut creative nonfiction piece appeared in Agbowo. Haddad is the Fiction Co-editor of the South Africa based literary journal, Hotazel Review.

Feature image by analogicus from Pixabay