MEBA

I was perhaps 13 when our house maid went crazy. It was the middle of the night, a school day, with my room not far from that of hers, when she started screaming. I was so terrified I forgot what dream I was having. I heard my father going to her bedroom and my mom reciting a Christian prayer, but I did not get up, I preferred to stay there, all safe and huddled up in my bed because I did not want to see what was actually going on. In the morning, I found out that she must have gone crazy. But what is crazy? Did it mean that she had a mental disorder and should be taken to a mental institution? Not necessarily. When we called her family, we were told that her ancestors had a history of possession by evil spirits. Today, I would have found that ridiculous, but back then, I did not. I was a Christian, and the devil possessing people for his own wicked means is a recurring theme in Christianity. So, when she was taken to a far off church and – days later – came back totally sane, it did not surprise me.

It seems the new Star Wars film has got to Edna Mall – or any other mall in the world – to stay. But this is expected because it was the most anticipated film in some time with a large international fan base, making it a goldmine for any film theatre willing to screen it. But having already seen and written about it, I took to the Addis Abeba road for something novel. I was thinking perhaps an art film would do. So, I contacted places like the Italian Cultural Institute, Goethe Institute and Alliance Ethio-Française but none had anything to show. So, I thought, I should face my fears, swallow my pride and treat myself to an Ethiopian movie. And through some recommendations, I stumbled upon Meba.

Meba is about life in a mental institution. More so, it is about a doctor, who is also mentally ill, who helps heal patients through moral means. The doctor is Meba, and when he returns to the metal institution there is widespread joy among the patients. Around the same time, another patient, a schizophrenic by the name of Meheret, is brought to the hospital and is placed, like all the other patients, under the care of a chief doctor whom the patients have nicknamed Chegogit. But Chegogit is the opposite of Meba, she does not just treat her patients, she studies them, like rats under a microscope.

As the film evolves, we learn more about the workings of a mental institution which is much unlike the infamous Amanuel Mental Hospital. It is always clean, almost luxurious, and much more inviting than any Ethiopian college dorm I have ever seen. And the staff, with the exception of Chegogit, are all friendly and not in the least bit condescending towards their patients. Add to this Meba, a doctor infinitely sympathetic to mental patients to the point of sacrificing himself for their well-being; it is almost heaven on earth. But, along the way, Meba and Meheret start to fall in love and all the patients become too enamoured of Meba. This poses a threat to Chegogit’s treatment plan and how she runs her institution; she sincerely believes that Meba is causing more harm to the patients than is doing them good.

There seems to be a struggle at the heart of the film. Meba is a doctor much like the pioneering French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel, who believed in treating his patients with the utmost care and respect. Meba tries to understand the mentally ill as if they were just any other human being with certain understandable social problems. To him, they are not biologically or physically sick but just disheartened. He believes he can cure them just by talking to them and reaching that humane part of them. Chegogit, on the contrary, believes that by studying them she could cure not just them, but mental illness. Even though the film’s attempt was otherwise, she did not seem to me a villain, but maybe even a martyr who was willing to be cruel to a few to save the lives of many. To her these mental patients are just a means to an end; their suffering might just bring others liberation. None the less, the film leans to the other side and tells us which one is right, and which one wrong; no ambiguity, just the artist pompously answering a question rather than asking one.

What is impressive about Meba is the level of accuracy in the depiction of mental patients from how they act, what they look like to what they are like. The acting by the actors playing the roles of people who are mentally challenged was mind blowing. It was reserved but at the same time credible. The acting was further enhanced by extremely effective makeup that gave the actors dry lips, unwashed hair and unshaved beards.

On the other hand, the score the filmmakers decided to employ for the movie is shrivelled up junk. More than anything else, it is what damns the movie, because with just ambient music or a modest score, the film would have looked more realistic and serious. And less damningly, there is the flow of the film, which is in total disarray. Subsequent scenes, or even shots, are so incongruous they could have belonged to different films of different genres.

Back to that maid of ours; did God cure her after all? Or was the idea of God curing people of such ailments so thoroughly imbedded in her mind from early childhood that she healed herself through positive thinking? I think the latter, so do most scientists and psychologists. This proves something very important, that mental patients, however seemingly damaged, still have a chance. That, after they have been diagnosed with such illness, some part of them, the important part, the part that defines them, still exists, and can only be reached not by spiritual or even medicinal substances, but through human connection and love. This is the idea Meba indiscriminately tries to hammer into our heads, and it is not such bad advice.


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