‘I drink coffee. I don’t like tea. I am Dutch. We don’t drink tea. We drink coffee’.
I am sitting with A, taking down her words, as we enjoy our coffee and biscuits. I feel a great affinity for A’s position. I also come from a nation of coffee drinkers, and like her, I don’t like tea. I like coffee. My favourite novel about coffee, Max Havelaar is written by a Dutchman, Eduard Douwes Dekker, known as Multatuli. I have written a novel about coffee myself. Not about tea.
‘The English like tea’, she says. ‘I don’t like tea. I am Dutch. I like coffee’.
I have been thinking about identity a lot this week. On Monday we had the pleasure of working with the Counsellor Danuta Lipinska, and she talked to us (amongst other things) about the the effects of dementia on the brain, the loss of neurons and neural pathways. Baldly – brain cells go, and do not return.
It is the mechanical truth of the brain, but as with all mechanical truths about the brain, the correlation between this and ‘the mind’ cannot be fully explained mechanistically, as Danuta stressed. And with the mind, identity. Where there is loss, new connections need to be made. Where there is absence, personality traits are retained.
It is easy, and, in a pragmatic sense, correct, to think of dementia as a process of loss – no-one would choose it, and the life of a sufferer is circumscribed in large and small ways. But what strikes me as I sit with A is how the mind copes with this attack from within. For Freud, neuroses, dreams, and so on were not displays of the weakness of the mind, but coping strategies, ways of ‘going on’. There is something vital and emphatic in A’s position. She defines herself, presenting both who she is (culturally, historically) and who she is not. When I think about myself, my identity, liking coffee and not liking tea is one of the ways I say that while I live in England, I am not English. It is one of the tropes of my individuality in the place where I now dwell.
A likes coffee. She doesn’t like tea. This is no trivial thing. She is, with her words, refusing to be subsumed. It is a mind remembering itself, and speaking the truth of its identity.