Tortured artists

>> Therapist Nicole Heusch helps refugees exorcise their demons

by CRAIG SEGAL

The first time the 20-year-old Punjabi refugee woman with short hair showed up at Nicole Heusch's door, she looked small and sad in her drab oversized winter coat. A social worker had referred Manjeet--a victim of torture in her home country--to Heusch for her skills as an art therapist.

Several years ago, Indian police showed up at Manjeet's house to arrest her father, who they suspected of being a separatist. She and her mother couldn't or wouldn't say where he was, so police raped them separately. The first time two cops held Manjeet down while a third raped, beat and insulted her. The second time one cop tied her up and raped and beat her. "She still has flashbacks about the rapist's laugh," says Heusch, an art therapist at the Montreal Children's Hospital who has worked with 120 refugees in Montreal, one third of whom are torture victims like Manjeet. "Raping a woman in a society like that is an attack against the man. It ruins the woman's honour and spoils her for marriage."

Heusch showed me slides of Manjeet's artwork at her plant- and painting-packed apartment near de L'Église metro station last Thursday night. The first is a collage with lots of babies signifying Manjeet's desire for children. Above the children is a dark-skinned man covered in blood who "haunted her dreams." But the most important image, Heusch says, is the young fisherman with a dozen freshly caught fish flung over his shoulder. "We asked her what this was," Heusch says. "She said the fish are out of water and can't survive. It meant she was suicidal. So we tried to make sure she was in a good environment and didn't get isolated."

Hopeful scribbles

In another exercise, Heusch had Manjeet close her eyes and make a scribble and then open her eyes and add whatever she wanted. She turned it into two crying eyes looking at her crying self. "It is normal for trauma victims to disassociate themselves so that not everything is soaked in horror," Heusch says. In a similar scribble she drew herself crushed under the wheel of a car--"an easy, practical way to die"--and, crossed out with an "X" a cop who raped her. "This was the most hopeful sign for me, that she had symbolically killed her aggressor."

Heusch has many other personal pieces of art, like the sickly sculpture of the "hand that does bad things," and a 10-year-old boy's painting of French warplanes bombing his native Algeria. It was all he could come up with when his teacher asked the class to draw fables from their homelands. "All he knows is the war with France," Heusch says. "It's all his parents talk about."

Patching things up

Other artwork is less personal, but no less important. Heusch worked with a group of 10 Indian refugee women on a large quilt. She says group experience gets the women out of their personal relationship with the therapist, to a table with other women with similar experiences. But the atmosphere at the table stayed social. The women didn't sit around comparing torture stories. "We did group therapy for two reasons: to break isolation and to bring them together," Heusch says. "They were very careful with each other. They talked about French courses and compared lawyers and social services."

"Heusch's work makes a lot of sense to me," says Gitanjali Lena of the Canadian Council for Refugees. "Loneliness, racism and poverty are all things that really affect your health. But as effective as art therapy is, sometimes refugees just need the fundamental day to day things to survive." Lena says Canada, which landed 26,708 refugees last year, is doing a thousand and one things wrong in its treatment of them. The Council is in Ottawa this week arguing that racist and homophobic refugee officials are closing the doors on many deserving refugees.

"We just completed a program that we have with child refugees and we had really positive results," says a research team secretary with the Transcultural Psychiatry department at Montreal Children's Hospital who works with Heusch. "Young refugees who had therapy got much better than the children who didn't have it. The children really increased their ability to communicate." The woman, who wants to remain nameless, is frustrated the government won't allocate more money to helping refugees. "We hope the program will expand. The problem is the government is cutting all the budgets for these kinds of programs. We were just denied a $1-million grant for a national project to help new immigrants in schools."

"They prefer to invest in money-making projects," says the woman, who is working overtime to fill out grant applications.

Meanwhile Heusch says refugees who are victims of torture can recover and become regular tax-paying citizens with a little help. "My clients are healthy. They have just had a normal reaction to extreme pain. They're in better shape than many patients I've seen at the Douglas, for example. With a stable environment and acceptance these people move on."

Quilt: Anatomy of art therapy
1) The women find the quilt to be a huge intimidating space, so they create a protective barrier around it so they can have a safe place to work in. "That's what we call 'building the hold,'" explains Heusch.

2) The women are afraid to start, so they begin with easy, neutral images they are familiar with. The donkey and the red truck especially represent home.

3) A traditional Indian woman making butter. Now the women are saying this quilt is about them. It's gone from abstract to personal. "They started with the edges, putting the most emotion right in the middle."

4) This is a Romeo-and-Juliet-style Indian fairy tale about a man and woman who meet around a well. They married young and had some big trouble. "The quilt is becoming much more personal."

5) "They were stuck after the fairy tale and we pushed them and asked, 'What about India and Canada?'" The Indian flag has a protective barrier like the quilt.

6) The space between India and Canada is woman's land. "It represents losses you cannot compensate for even in fantasy."

7) "Finally they came cautiously and boldly to Canada. There is a sense of coldness here, not so much life in this country. No people." The white stuff is snow.