Chuka Nestor Emezue// Content warning: domestic violence. In a 2012 article, Ashleigh Owens, then a J.D. Candidate at Fordham Law, shared the following story pieced together from local media publications: “On January 17, 2010, in West Haven, Connecticut, Selami Ozdemir murdered his wife, Shengyl Rasim, in front of their two children. Ozdemir then used the…
Author: Chuka Nestor Emezue
A weekend novelist among other powerful sins. This is my undoing. There are faultlines in my humanity trained to ink. The simple ramblings of a lover of silence, gin, and magic. Here, I forsake decorum, abandon habits, bare some, and forget old bonds.
From this fugue, my heart desires to evade the Devil, the subway rats, the landlord, his wife, and saccharinic writers. For besides their sharp fraudulence, I dread even more the malady that comes from being a disciple of many masters.
Now, I am driven to fondling the minds of the most misplaced, the least self-aware, the ones you will not read. Brat-pack types. Down and dirty fools. Sons of forgotten mothers. Grand, bold bastards, whose composed works are not page-turners. Those who upset our digestion. The ones whose newspaper poems keep out the sunset in attic windows. I am one of such – a remarkably errant thing.
Chuka N.E, 2014
Authentic Empathy & Therapeutic Alliances (Part 2)
In a previous Synapsis post, I introduced the notion of the Therapeutic Alliance (TA) – an active ingredient of psychopathology and psychotherapy. I discussed the antecedence of therapeutic relationships formed between victim service providers (VSPs) and male victims of sexual assault (e.g. rape, molestation, sodomy, etc.). My interest? Their therapeutic and extra-therapeutic rehabilitation and healing, and how this process (a continuum of healing, more or less) is impacted by social stigma. Male victims infrequently seek care, making further scholarship in this domain problematical, but welcoming.
Authentic Empathy & Therapeutic Alliances (Part 1)
Chuka Nestor Emezue // “Laying the pus-covered pad on the desk in front of him, he gave up his secret. During his escape from the civil war in neighbouring Congo, he had been separated from his wife and taken by rebels. His captors raped him, three times a day, every day for three years. And…
A Discursive-Material Analysis of Stigma As Narrated By Victim Service Providers
Chuka Nestor Emezue// How and to what extent do victim service providers (VSP) co-construct stigma in their narratives of victimhood? In speaking with several VSPs – those who provide rehabilitative services for victims of trauma – my qualitative research study (ongoing as I write) on embodied stigma and narrated victimhood, has so far underscored the…
Health-Seeking, Stoicism, and Illness Behavior in Men’s Health
“Well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.” – Zeno Chuka Nestor Emezue // While the concept of masculinity is socially conferred, its assumed philosophical attribute–stoicism–remains a personalized and guiding ideology practiced by stoical adherents (male and female) – either by omission or commission. My research looks at the foundational causes of…
Cuento Therapy, Storytelling, and Men Who Abuse Women
Chuka Nestor Emezue // In 1985, Dr. Giuseppe Costantino and his colleagues, Drs. Robert G. Malgady, and Lloyd Henry Rogler, drafted their popular paperback: “Cuento Therapy: folktales as a culturally sensitive psychotherapy for Puerto Rican children.” Their work positioned ‘Cuento Therapy,’ as a hopeful form of narrative therapy in the field of child psychotherapy and…
The Pump Handle, Fire Hydrants, Grapes: Health Care Metaphors in Negative Spaces
Chuka Nestor Emezue // Broad Street. West London. Summer of 1854. Wrought with a bad case of speaking anxieties, and once voted “Orator of the Year” by the Medical Society of London, Dr. John Snow confronts the Medical Council. Failing to sway his medical counterparts about the causal link of Cholera– through a not-so-elaborate fecal-oral…