Close to Home with Shari Appollon

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Shari Appollon, a Haitian-American psychoanalyst who trained at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. Appollon explores how her psychoanalytic training has complicated her vision of her family's origins in Haiti and her own experience in America. In caring for her mother at the end of her life, Appollon noticed parallels between not entirely knowing her own mother and not knowing Haiti. She unfolds how vulnerability in writing both exposes and fortifies the self.
 

"As children, my siblings and I were not allowed to travel to Haiti, out of fear that we would be kidnapped. For that reason, my grandmother lived in my mind as an omnipotent super-being in that she visited Haiti each and every year and managed to avert the mystical thugs who I feared would take her away with the request of a large ransom in return."
— "My Mother's Haiti," ROOM 2.24