#mod snail

Hi, are you only accepting personal accounts from autistics? How about someone with an autistic sibling. Perhaps it’s helpful to know about interaction between someone autistic and someone who isn’t? Writing autistic characters generally means there’s interaction with those who aren’t. I also have many accounts on dealing with idiotic people who won’t understand my sister’s needs. There are also some people who try to help my sister but are actually helping wrongly.

Hi!

We were debating a little on how to answer this. This could potentially be interesting, but there is the possibility of harmful sibling narratives, and we want to avoid a situation where we get too many submissions from allistic family members. Focusing on and boosting autistic voices is an important part of what we do, and we are a little hesitant about setting a precedent of having allistic people writing about us on the blog.

With that in mind, we do think it could be interesting to have a post where there were points of view from both an autistic and a non-autistic sibling. While we are very familiar with interactions between autistic and non-autistic people (we have to interact with a lot of allistic people in real life!), there are interesting discussions to be had about sibling relationships that could be useful for our readers.

A similar model could be used in general for talking about other relationships between autistic and allistic people. Rather than hearing from just the allistic person, including the autistic person’s viewpoint could help to contextualise the relationship. It also means that we get the opportunity to promote autistic voices, particularly those of people who might not otherwise share their opinions and experiences with a wider audience.

Tl;dr - we’d love to hear from you and your sister, but we won’t be taking personal accounts from non-autistic people without input from an autistic person as well.

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Hey, just want to let you know the question about the autistic character in a fictional African country is my question. I have actually been to Africa - Uganda to be exact. That’s what I’m basing part of it on, but it needs to be fictional because I need to adjust the government and some of the terrain vehicles in.

I went with a church that associated with some medical groups. I have seen them training and teaching the local doctors a lot of medical basics.

Now, I don’t know about autistic people, but I’ve seen and heard so many cases about the mentally ill getting very poor or absolutely no treatment, or even being maltreated, especially with the very few expert psychiatrists around.

In one example, while I didn’t see the boy, but I heard of one with ADHD getting beaten and screamed at by his teacher because the teacher thought he was just very naughty. He had to be diagnosed by our psychiatrists and they had to teach the teacher and locals what to do.

In fact, one of the guys from Heartsounds told me that they had to teach that mental illnesses were not caused because they were cursed or something. In fact, he also talked about a lot of “healers” who actually tried to heal people by witchcraft. Something that went away in the West a long time ago.

In fact, I may be “improving” the situation by writing my autistic character as not being maltreated and being able to live quite well.

Hello!

This is probably beyond the scope of our blog but these are important conversations to be having. I want to begin by saying that I myself have never lived in Africa, and I would encourage any people who do live (or have lived) in Africa to share their thoughts. I will also add that by my understanding of this message, you have not lived in Africa either, although you have visitedUganda. To me, this is an important distinction - visiting a country doesn’t give the same understanding that one gets by living somewhere.

I think that we may be misunderstanding one another a little. My worries about colonialist overtones do not really come from the set-up of your story. A character who is homeschooled and living in a community where there isn’t knowledge of autism is not worrying to me. Instead, it is the language you chose to describe the set-up that makes me worry.

The colonialist overtones didn’t come from the idea that the doctors might not know about autism or that they might be ill-informed about mental health. It was calling them “uneducated” which raised alarm bells for me. There is a difference between being ill-informed or having no training about a particular subject and being “uneducated” in a general sense.

I am not doubting you when you talk about the difficulties and mistreatment faced by people with mental illness in Uganda. There is an extreme shortage of psychiatrists in Uganda, and there is stigma against mental illness.

Your example of the child with ADHD is unfortunately not unique to Uganda. Interpreting children with ADHD as being “naughty” is common around the world, and children with ADHD often receive harsh punishments. In a country where corporal punishment widespread (even if it is technically against the law), it does not surprise me that a child with ADHD would be punished in this way.

Similarly, stigma against mental illness and problems with the treatment of disability are not unique to Africa. As @scripttorturesays:

Does Africa generally have problems with the treatment of disability? Yes. But so does almost everywhere else. I don’t see these sorts of stories set in rich Gulf countries like Saudi and yet I know exactly why that is: because they mostly choose to isolate and imprison their disabled population and if you can’t see the abuse people assume it isn’t happening.

I think that working directly with disadvantaged people means that you become very conscious of the hardships and mistreatment that they experience. I realise that you have seen things first-hand in Uganda, and these things are troubling. I also think that if you do not have experience of working with patients with mental illness in the West, you won’t have the same awareness about people’s experiences in your home country. Which is not to say that things aren’t better in your home country - just that it is complicated, and some experience in one context does not permit complete objectivity.

I also want to talk a little bit about traditional medicine and witchcraft. There are real problems and dangers associated with witchcraft. However, traditional medicine has an incredibly important part to play. @scripttortureagain:

Yes, there are problems with stuff that really doesn’t work in a lot of African countries (there are also major problems with faked pharmaceuticals by the way) but the West has a long and massive history of misinterpreting African traditional treatments that actually work. We regularly dismiss genuine herbal medicines because they come with a song and dance.

We talk about the Ifa corpus as ‘divinitation’ when it’s used as a sophisticated therapeutic tool for mental health problems! I was lent a book on the ifa corpus by a friend at the university a while back and it literally contains a ‘divination specialist’ learning about Western psychology techniques and responding with ‘Oh! That’s your Ifa!‘ Like- genuine joy and surprise that Westerners had this too! Coupled with curiosity about how we performed ‘readings’

In the West, we operate within a completely different cultural framework, where it often seems easy to draw a clear boundary between “science” and “superstition”, but that is a Western perspective. Definitions of mental illness itself are very cultural, and presentations of mental illness vary around the world. This is absolutelynot to say that psychiatry does not have a place, but it is important to work within the cultural setting.

Joseph Atukunda, who founded Heartsounds, believes that spiritual medicine does have a role to play in the treatment of mental health issues in Uganda. Here is an excerpt from an article from the BBC:

The psychiatrists at Butabika estimate that 90% of Ugandans believe that mental illness is linked to curses or demons.

And Joseph himself didn’t discount that possibility. He spent time at a traditional healer’s clinic run by a man called Dr Hassan Serwadda.

Dr Serwadda was clear in his diagnosis: there was witchcraft involved. “Some demons were on your head” he tells Joseph, “so I cut your head to put the medicine in it, I slaughtered a cock and bathed you in blood.”

For Joseph it was a difficult period, but he thinks the healer may have saved his life, and that tradition could have a wider role to play in mental health care.

“I was treated in this spiritual healer’s crude structures, but I am well now” he says. “Even conventional medicine has its advantages and disadvantages. So I can’t quite discard this spiritual healer as somebody who didn’t contribute at all to the wellness that I’m enjoying right now.”

The problem is that this whole discussion is an extremely complicated issue that needs to be talked about with nuance. The honest truth is that I don’t know if I have been successful in striking the balance between acknowledging the difficult situations faced by people with mental illnesses in Uganda and avoiding basing my reading of the situation from a solely Western perspective.

It is very easy to assume that one’s own way of thinking is right, but that is at the heart of colonialist attitudes. Europeans were able to conquer, invade, subjugate, all the while convincing themselves that it was for the good of those countries - after all, they were bringing “civilisation”, they were bringing Christianity. This “white saviour” attitude is ingrained in Western perspectives of other cultures, and it is very easy to fall into patterns of thought and speech that reflect these attitudes.

This is why it is so important to have an understanding of the issues around representation and the impact of the ways we talk about Africa. It is very very easy to phrase things in a way that plays into stereotypes about Africa.

In my original answer I recommended referring to @writingwithcolor unless you had an intimate understanding of the issues around representing African cultures. I would very strongly recommend familiarising yourself with the problems common in Western representations of Africa, and the effect that these narratives have on perceptions of Africa in real life.

• The Danger of a Single Storyby Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (this is a video, but closed captions and a transcript are both available). This is a good starting point for understanding the impact of representation in fiction. I strongly recommend this video!
• How to Write about Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina. This is a satirical article about stereotypical representations of Africa.
• The Americanization of Mental Illness by Ethan Watters. This is not specific to Africa, but discusses how culture influences presentation and interpretation of mental illness.
• An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’  by Chinua Achebe (opens as a pdf). This has a more academic approach.
• Of Africa by Wole Soyinka. This is a book discussing post-colonial Africa, but I have not actually read this myself. I have not included a link, but it can be bought as either a physical book or an ebook.

AlsoWritivism is running several events in the UK about African literature this week (although, the chances of you being able to attend this are slim - I don’t even know which country you live in!)

They are launching an anthology -Odokonyero: A Writivism Anthology of Short Fiction by Emerging Ugandan Writers - which you can buy from Amazon. It is available on amazon.co.uk and .com.au and other versions of Amazon, not just the American site!

I will conclude by wishing you luck with your writing. It’s a great opportunity to learn about other cultures, so I hope that you have fun with your research!

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I have an autistic character living in the modern day, in a fictional African country which is 85% rural. Anyway, my character has never been diagnosed because not only the doctors are poorly educated but because life is simple. His days are already fairly routine, he never went to school as his family taught him, he likes to pull off his shirt-which is actually normal. Things that need delicate hand control are troubling but he doesn’t do anything like sewing or even writing. He likes water and will often go into the river, which is a normal child activity so he’s considered childish. He does like knocking on things but that’s just considered a bit strange. Should I explain in the story that he’s autistic to readers, or just portray him and add a note in the end. I am generally trying to portray life and experiences as the characters themselves understand.

When to tell the reader that a character is autistic is your choice as a writer. Our ‘calling characters autistic’ series gives advice for when and how to call your character autistic, how to do it when ‘autistic’ isn’t a term that exists in your story, and ways of hinting that the character is autistic. Even if you do not call the character autistic within the main text, you can definitely think about how the other characters refer to him and how he thinks of himself. These things will add to the readers’ understanding of the character.

With regards to the set-up of your story, I think that it is important to address some potential colonialist overtones. You have probably thought about all of this and were light on the details of your worldbuilding because they weren’t relevant to the question, but it would be remiss of us not to address it, especially as our answer will read by not only you, but by many other people.

Having a fictional African country where “life is simple” and doctors are “poorly educated” rings some alarm bells. There is a tendency in the West to ignore the variety and richness that Africa has, and using a fictional country makes it much more likely for a writer to fall back onto stereotypes about Africa. Of course, you might have already have thought about this and already have an intimate understanding of the issues around representing African cultures, but if not, I would recommend looking at @writingwithcolor for more information about this sort of scenario.

Do you have to use a fictional country? Could you use a real country instead? Even if you do choose to create a fictional country for your story, it is probably worth researching the history and culture of (a) specific region(s) and basingit on a real country/real countries, otherwise you risk unconsciously projecting any innate biases onto your story and it becomes very easy to end up with something that comes across as “Western and Colonial Perspectives on Africa: The Novel”.

Here are some starting points:

• Writing with Color’s navigation post
• Writing with Color’s Stereotypes & Tropes Navigation
• Portraying African Cultures
• “African-like“ Regions and Coding

Best of luck,

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Hiya folks,

Sorry for our absence. Unfortunately life has been pretty full-on for all of us mods. The happy news is that I have added some new posts to the queue and the blog should hopefully be getting going again.

Looking forward to getting back into the swing of things!

-Mod Snail