Migrant trauma, city walkers

Ankhi Mukherjee, Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford, explores psychoanalysis in relation to the urban poor.

Ankhi Mukherjee

Professor of English and World Literatures

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Ankhi Mukherjee

Professor of English and World Literatures

22 Sept 2025

Key Points

Teju Cole's Open City and Rawi Hage's Cockroach are books about city workers who are negotiating, rewriting and owning the city through walking and that's their walking cure.
Those who have the double whammy of being people of colour and who are also poor are often seen to be unalysable as if they don't have the mental resources to sustain talk therapy, even for free.
Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who work at the intersection of poverty and race, in global cities or in war zones, realise very quickly that the mainstays of Western psychiatry will have to be adapted and retooled.

Walking the City

There is an influential essay by Michel de Certeau called “Walking the City”, published a long time ago in 1984, which talks about foreign practices that disrupt the geography and geometry of cities, their visual presentations, their panoptic constructions and their theoretical constructions.

Photo by Dmytro Zinkevych.

I was reminded of the Michel de Certeau essay when I read two novels recently: Teju Cole’s Open City, published in 2011, and Rawi Hage’s Cockroach published in 2008, which are both about foreigners walking around and dissecting the city. Now, this pairing is also interesting because not all foreign migrant workers are equally underprivileged. The walker of Teju Cole’s Open City is a psychiatrist in training in New York. He listens to opera. In fact, we don’t know he is Nigerian for a long time because he resists a certain kind of easy identification. He doesn’t like people coming up to him and assuming a certain kind of brotherhood. On the other hand, Rawi Hage’s protagonist is somebody whose psychosis is deep, and who thinks of himself as an ugly and wily half-cockroach, scuttling around hungry and feral in an icy city, which we think is Montreal. We don’t know why he, this neurotic Arab, has had to leave his country, which is revealed to be Lebanon. We also don’t know what his plans are in Canada. All we know is that “Cockroach” is somebody who has tried to kill himself, has been put into state-mandated therapy and is seeing a counsellor.

On the one hand, you have a psychiatrist who is walking the city and who is, through these peregrinations, discovering his own connection to New York through his discovery of slave burials, the kind of unseen but visible life of slavery in Manhattan. On the other hand, you have somebody who is on the opposite end of the social spectrum, who is not an analyst but an analysand and who is increasingly going underground, not just scuttling overground.

Cole engaging John Freeman at New York Barnes & Noble, Oct. 7, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Two sides

The character of Cockroach is actually very rich and kind of Kafka-esque, if you will. Rawi Hage’s Cockroach has a hallucinatory reality, where it is about Cockroach’s traumatic memory. It is about his hallucinations and delusions, but interrupted by the therapy sessions, when somebody kind of like me, a scholar or a therapist, is trying to figure out what it is that has gone wrong with this person’s life and how he can be reinstated to a modicum of normalcy.

This is also true of the Teju Cole story set in a deeply uneven, segregated, racist city. In the Teju Cole novel, because the character is white-collar and hyper-educated he experiences the aftermath of slavery and colonialism in a very different way from our other, half-cockroach, protagonist. However, in both cases, they are walking; they are ambulating, and this always reminds me of Freud’s essay on Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva.

Refusing to be frozen

In Gradiva, Norbert falls in love with this bas-relief that he sees in Rome, and Freud says that what this character has fallen in love with is this beautiful woman who has what he calls Gradiva’s gait: one foot lifted, as if she’s about to walk. Theorists and critics have gone over Freud’s essay and the Wilhelm Jensen novella and said, ‘No, I don’t think Norbert is obsessed with the form of the foot. It’s not a fetish.’ It’s a long story. He goes to Pompeii and finds out that actually this Gradiva figure is a childhood sweetheart, but some critics have resisted the Freudian reading by saying that what Norbert falls in love with is not the form of the foot, but the motion that Gradiva implied: that she’s not going to be frozen. She will always already be in motion.

I always find it very interesting to think about that in relation to these city workers: that they’re refusing to be contained. They’re refusing to be put in place. In fact, with Rawi Hage’s Cockroach there is very little that he wants to change overground in this racist city of Montreal, but he gangs up with the debris of the city, with cockroaches and rats and leftover burgers underground in that effluvial mess, to plot a revolution underground. In either case of Teju Cole and Rawi Hage, they’re refusing to be frozen. They are negotiating, rewriting and owning the city through walking and that’s their walking cure.

Canadian writer/photographer Rawi Hage (born 1964) at the October 13, 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domains.

Offering free psychoanalysis to impoverished populations

One of the things that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who work at the intersection of poverty and race, in global cities or in war zones, realise very quickly is that the mainstays of Western psychiatry will have to be adapted and retooled. They themselves will have to, therefore, unlearn some of the institutional training that they have undergone. With this in mind, I’d like to talk about two psychoanalysts whose work I have followed closely. One is Aisha Abbasi, who is Pakistani born and who practises in Detroit. The other is Neil Altman, whose book The Analyst in the Inner City is a truly pioneering work when it comes to this idea of offering free psychoanalysis or psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy to impoverished populations.

The Rupture of Serenity

Aisha Abbasi introduces her book, The Rupture of Serenity, as a journey. She uses spatial and kinetic metaphors. It’s a talking cure and a walking cure. She seems to suggest that analysis is a process. It is about going through different contexts and going through different ages. It is not at all static. Terms she uses to describe the contact between analyst and analysand include “intrusion” and “rupture”. These seem negative at first, but they are not. What she is trying to do is, to some extent, write back to certain ideas that transference in its most positive form happens when analysts and analysands have common cultural contexts. She’s repeatedly saying in the book that through her own work she sees the intrusion happening with her white patients. She also sees the intrusion happening with patients who are from the same part of the world but of a different religion. An intrusion is not disinvested of its negative connotations, but it is almost this rupture, this break, which leads to more meaningful connection and recombination.

Not what it seems

She writes in the book very frankly about how her life became very difficult after 9/11, because both her white patients, and also patients from other religions, started projecting certain aggressive attitudes, in fact sadistic attitudes, on her.

In this context, she talks about an Indian IT professional who had therapy with her off and on, with a few sessions before 9/11 and a few after 9/11. He keeps telling her that, ‘You can’t really travel now because, when you travel, all of your orifices will be searched.’ Of course, this is not a very pleasant thing to think about. She is woman; he is a man. She’s Muslim; he’s Hindu. She’s Pakistani; he’s Indian. But in the course of the conversations, she realises that what seems to be a breach into her body is not just motivated by violent thoughts. It is motivated by this person’s fear of being abandoned and this person’s fear of being neglected and overlooked. Ultimately, it’s related to the patient’s desire to be a part of her life, to be in her life and to be in her attention span. Therefore, something that begins as an intrusion, an interruption or a rupture, actually becomes something which is a very meaningful transferential circuit. Not only does she understand the patient better, she also understands herself through this process.

Unanalysable subjects

One of the things Neil Altman, who has primarily worked in the public sector, points out repeatedly when it comes to psychoanalysis offered for free to poor populations is the stigma around unanalysable subjects. He says that those who have the double whammy of being people of colour and who are also poor are often seen to be unanalysable, as if they don’t have the mental resources to sustain talk therapy. He constantly pushes against this prejudice, this stigma, and he gives examples where, if a particular session hasn’t worked, it is not just because the patient offered resistance – wasn’t analysable – but because of certain preconceived formations and prejudices that he, the analyst, brought to the session.

A bourgeois commodity

Psychoanalysis and mental health provision is a bourgeois commodity, unfortunately, which can be bought by people who have the means to buy it. There seems to be very little by way of looking after the mental health of those afflicted by poverty, by racism, by migrancy, by homelessness, by gender inequality, etc., and this is because some find it very difficult to think about those who are engaged in everyday struggles as also having interiority and an unconscious.