Meet Anguezomo Mba Bikoro

We were lucky to catch up with Anguezomo Mba Bikoro recently and have shared our conversation below.

Anguezomo, we are so appreciative of you taking the time to open up about the extremely important, albeit personal, topic of mental health. Can you talk to us about your journey and how you were able to overcome the challenges related to mental issues? For readers, please note this is not medical advice, we are not doctors, you should always consult professionals for advice and that this is merely one person sharing their story and experience.

“Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt it’s not about that solution it is about being as fearless as one can and behaving as beautifully as one can under completely impossible circumstances. It’s that that makes it elegant”. – Toni Morrison
Living and co-existing with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder means to radically accept that often healing is not synonymous to success as we hope, because you carry the expectation that people can see you and validate your experiences of trauma. Instead embrace the solitude to accept pain in discovery, growth, transformation. Overcoming is not arriving to an end point but building a safe space, empowerment and inner peace within yourself that can no longer be dismantled by actions of violence. Resilience is how every trauma endured can be turned into something creative, a thousand broken pieces can be transformed from injury to seeds, you don’t lash out into anger and revenge you turn into a field of flowers.
With the many symptoms that come with C-PTSD (anxiety, suicidal ideation, flashbacks), mental health issues also affect what is going on inside your body, invisible diseases that people do not see and often do not acknowledge. In my case I had survived a tumour in my brain, pneumonia, and several viruses due to cortisol inflammation in the body from 3 years of survival mode induced by the entrapment inside an abusive cycle.

Having a beautiful community of friends and family helped to guide me and walk through moments of danger as well as getting professional support from medical doctors, therapists and psychologists, somatic and holistic healers, lawyers, police, the courts and public female protection organisations that accompany my process of exit and healing.

I built the willingness to overcome darkness through transformational justice; finding modes of healing through artistic practices, collective work and psychiatric-holistic education. I had to inform myself of what had happened to my mind and body, educate myself on the exposure of violence and its effects on the body, re-learn and curate new life routines, read and meet other survivors who suffered the same experience, allowing to feel and process the trauma. I had to trust the process and let go of the shame that most survivors carry.

I had to learn to embrace solitude to learn who I was again as well as not being alone to confront challenges that may crush expectations or things that you have slowly re-built for yourself. I also celebrated in knowing truths and learning to be ok with being the ‘villain’ in other peoples’ warped and controlled perceptions of me, I don’t have to force myself to speak the truth in order to guide them to the right path, neither do I need to save myself from them. Listening to survivors’ stories (listen to this podcast series from Dr. Ramani ‘Navigating Narcissism’ as an example) who had endured years of bullying, harm and false accusations by gang enablers who supported predators that undoubtedly affected their mental health and healing processes, it gave me the focus and the hope to better my world and embracing my mental health challenges into my new superpower.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I am a visual artist, ancestral healer and curator and I mediate my intersectional practice between education, community mentorship, somatic body healing, psychotherapy, radio and ancestral work to protect, guide accompany persons affected by mental health challenges from generational trauma & domestic and institutional abuse notably within BiPOC and queer communities. My artistic process is mixed media focusing on the historical erasures of Black feminist histories across the diaspora and create immersive spaces and visual forms to transform, empower and inspire the ways we make and remember our stories. In 20 years of my profession as artistic director where I organise and curate public cultural programmes and produce exhibitions and gatherings internationally as ways to educate and create intersectional practices between mental health, law and art, my hope is to protect more vulnerable populations, to re-imagine practices of reparation and restitution to re-connect with our ancestral cultures. In the process of building communities I practice ancestral healing, an intimate form of ritual to de-traumatise, heal the nervous system and create inner peace.

I use my experience of living with Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder transforming it from disability to a superpower. After experiencing abuse, I focus on ancestral healing and art-making to inform survivors and victims, families, friends and institutions to learn how to react and support persons who may need access to safety and self-help tools. To foster dialogue and encourage collectives and institutions to work together in the protection and recovery of mental health victims of abuse. Art exists outside institutional and commercial frameworks too and its worth to support more vulnerable communities to transform and build immersive spaces and de-traumatising our lived experiences and become tools for gathering, exchange and safety between affected persons can be monumental and restorative. This work is also aligned to political activism, which means centering on the care of community, working with lawyers on reparations and human rights, working with healing practioners on tools for resistance and repair, working with schools for communal activations, collaborating with institutions to create safer spaces and universities to activate decentralised knowledges and accompany students in their learning. These forms of exchanges happen in decolonial projects I curated such as “We Who Who Move The World Forward” based on mental health and activist experiences of African feminists in German’s forgotten migrant histories and “When The Jackal Leaves The Sun: Decentering Restitution, Pedagogies of Repossession” practicing empowerment & healing through practices of ecologies, urbanism, de-institutionalisation, spaces of inclusivity and exchange and embodied memory.
Following co-artistic direction of Nyabinghi Lab based in Berlin, a nomadic international platform for decolonial feminist education & liberation in the arts at the intersections of law, ecology and mental health, I founded a creative healing space at my family home in Gabon called “MbaLere” (formally known as Squat Museum 2009) meaning ‘healing shelter’ in my native language in Fang, that fosters international retreats and local community development through local arts and ancestral therapy.

Healers and therapist professionals need healing too, because we have lived those experiences and know the process and the language of survival & recovery. I think the work of connecting with people, being present and here to accompany support and help in all ways that you can, can also be a vulnerability, because empathetic people are easier targets. We understand endurance & patience, we understand forgiveness, we know love, we trust, we know hope, we know how to see the best in people, we create life and sometimes we push ourselves to deal and survive with those that can harm us, yet we believe firmly that we can save them because everyone deserves to live in light and in love. Healers are not saviours, ultimately we accompany and care for grief, release, process and ritual. But we may ourselves get trapped into cycles where there is no means of escape for quite awhile. C-PTSD is a direct result of living with prolonged exposure to trauma where there is no means of escape. Symptoms are many and are triggered by consistent stress and fear that affects the body psychologically, spiritually & somatically and in my case it nearly ended my life in hospital. There are struggles with experiencing panic attacks, suicidal ideations, extreme anxiety, affected motoric skills, trauma flashbacks, feelings of depression. I remembered when I got out, I had a lot of medical, clinical and legal support giving me instructions of what I had to do to survive once I got out, all of the decisions and actions in the way I had to live my life were prepared by professionals for me for my safety and those of my children. So I wanted to share those tools to my communities and implement healthy and safe survival skills and practice them in the creation of immersive art works as a form of care and community solidarity. I learned about the histories of mental health and the lack of accountability and understanding and how we can change this in the context of looking at Black and LGBTQ histories. Connecting with people all over the world, sharing and living their struggles, learning entire histories that would otherwise be erased.

Art practice is principally the tool for survival and transformational justice. When you are broken from enduring physical and psychological injuries overtime, look at what happens to an artist when they get hurt; they turn pain into something empowering and beautiful. This is what healing means to me and how I overcome the effects of mental health; I connect, I relate, I find safety, build boundaries as forms of intimacy & protection, build moments of joy, growth through learning, validate my experiences, and this is what I call Justice.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

A life of happiness is first a life of building inner peace and calm and there you will need to radically accept to let go of the things that were familiar, that you had and that you loved. Often the people or things we had loved we realised never existed after we leave, that it was just the potential of something we hoped for and imagined that never became reality, was never reality from the beginning, and this experience inside intimate relationships this can be deadly. In working through mental health challenges, notably all the complexities of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I had to remove people and things in my life that were not safe, I learned how to co-exist and transform the symptoms that mushroomed from violent experiences that I couldn’t runaway from and find inner peace in loosing the narrative but the truth is the root to clarity of vision. I was lucky that I had enough proof to make my own closure and not having to wait for someone else to do that to release me.

Looking back I can summarise that learning three skills supported my recovery;

– EMPOWERMENT:
Educating myself through resources through collective groups and practices supported my medical and mental recovery. Empowerment is a place where you build a sense of freedom, safety and inner peace whilst going through the healing processes that can be very ugly and extremely painful and in its transformation can be beautifully restorative. Speaking with health professionals and going to trauma therapy; reading books from survivors and health professionals and meeting them in communal gatherings was a way to validate my experience rather than erase and silence it. Empowerment meant to find rituals and exercises to release and get free from the cycle and the trauma-bond which meant also being deeply spiritually connected to your inner self. Your fears break down overtime and manifest in spaces and the unconscious where you do not need to run any longer, because ‘no contact’ from someone that harmed you means you start a marathon somewhere to cross over a line very far away and this is exhausting.
Having a community of friends, family and witnesses who know you best for several years and see the changes of you inside such struggles to remind you who you are and telling you that you have ‘come back to us’ was something deeply moving to experience and to be reminded of how isolation is a form of abuse.
To experience the rapid physical transformation of a chronically ill body swollen up by the high amount of built cortisol from consistent fear and stress into a new warrior without diet or exercise also was a way to validate that abuse is toxic & complex but inevitably affects the body internally quietly and that if you are no longer connected to yourself (usually by lack of sleep) you will forget to listen to your body and therefore you become much more vulnerable to control through pseudo-care manifestos from someone you love and trust. The moment my body started to change, she felt happier, the organs were de-toxing, I could connect with her after years of not feeling her and she was flexible. I thanked her and acknowledged her and understood that this body did all the work it could to protect me, to communicate the dangers to me, and give me a way out at the risk of being too close to death in an environment where I significantly lost my autonomy, identity and intimacy. It wasn’t the routine SPA’s and massages that would heal me or teach me about self-care in that time I could not get out, it doesn’t erase the daily toxicity. I became empowered because this time I had control over my body and no one else could harm her. I controlled my foods and had the freedom of mobility.
Empowerment means finding your self-esteem and building new routines so that you become not the person who you were who carried you nonetheless over the other side of the mountain to protect you. I found that spending maximum time in nature and water gave me space to connect with the deepest parts of myself, but also that my wishes, desires and needs had entirely changed. You create a new story, rewrite your life, live new first time experiences and go through heartbreaks with those who cannot align with your truth and prefered the broken version of you.

– RESILIENCE:
Resilience is how every trauma endured can be turned into something creative, a thousand broken pieces can be transformed from injury to seeds, you don’t lash out into anger and revenge you turn into a field of flowers.
Resilience is the practice that people do not see because it is rooted in how you survive day by day. Giving time to heal your body and psyche through somatic body work with holistic practitioners, practising herbalism as alternative forms of medicines through collective group nature walks and decolonial yoga where I learned how to breathe and be present and grounded in the moment which helped dismantle my anxiety. I got to read the books I could never read and being deeply thankful to reconnect with life simply. With all this new knowledge and calming and balancing my nervous system, I became a new warrior. I could practice and share with my communities. I realised that most of us have absolutely no understanding as adults of how humans can be unless we have experienced the worst of them. Empathy is something that all of us have as foundation to human interaction, forgiveness, safety and love. That superpower can also be dismantled in what psychologist Dr. Vakhnin (expert in the studies of personality disorders) calls the ‘uncanny valley’, those who mimic and dismantle empathetic persons by performing like ‘soulmate’ twins and destroy them from within. Empathy is both a superpower and a vulnerability that can make us easy targets where we think we found our place in helping others in the world. So a few tips I learned helped be to be more resilient and have clearer vision.
Practising J.A.D.E: in healing from traumatic cycles creating pathways of exiting them can come to very high risks financially, socially, physically. Survivors often attempt many times to leave and any time that they try to ask for support, this may be punished, what comes after in their lives might be a situation of continuous psychological control. In therapy we learn about not reacting to predators; do not Justify, do not Argue, do not Defend and do not Engage (J.A.D.E) which means in a nutshell: ‘no contact’. This is the best way to recovery and reclaiming a sense of freedom and inner peace when dealing with predators who have personality disorders without being reactive to abuse or having to wait for closure. It also gives a better understanding of how our bodies react to smear campaigns, isolation, threat techniques used by perpetrators called DARVO (Deny Attack Reverse Victim-Offender roles). It’s a rule that made me aware of the power of not reacting, being ok with becoming the ‘villain’ inside the imagination of others who feed on the ‘breadcrumbs’ of predators, and how overtime the very reaction of self-defense and putting the truth out inside the cycle can make the body very sick with chronic illnesses that never heal.
Resilience is courage and sometimes silence is not something that may bury always as Zora Neale Hurston says “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it”, rather as Audre Lorde says “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.” Meeting other survivors was a key to my healing. You can hold silence as a form of grace and power that simultaneously breaks the silence by healing as loud as you can. In that way you don’t fall into the game of predators that will push you to react against them (‘reactive abuse’) out of fear to hold full control over you then they claim to have rights to attack you for denouncing them for who they really are and they play the victim. I find this very important when dealing with the exits and the stalking whether close or by proxy. I have experienced stalking for many years and often the legal systems fail in protecting victims and this can have permanent impacts on our health. Survivors who exit cycles of abuse are often punished through deliberate digital stalking and stalking by proxy through enablers, by predators controlling the victim’s professional networks, by manipulating and pushing strangers’ negative reactions against the victims, by financial and legal control and counterfeiting documents, by stealing victim’s identities especially in profession and sometimes ‘performing’ their ethnicities, targeting persons by proxy to the victim with false accusations to affect their professions, targeting new victims with similar profiles and maybe secretly travelling hours away to pull them into cycles of psychotic abuse in the guise of romance. Survivors need to heal in the middle of experiencing years of stalking abuse, refrain from ‘saving’ other targets and organise external professional support by archiving incidences, survivors must learn to transform their daily lives and focus on growth whilst co-existing with the symptoms of their mental health caused by this harm. Survivors don’t need to react and lash out into anger and revenge, we turn into fields of flowers with the scent of love. This form of non-reaction and healing as loud as possible builds a legacy of what love and health-care really embodies; truth.

– COMMUNAL RESTORATION;
Restoration meant I had to stay in my truth and learn tools to protect myself. It was important for me to reconnect with family, meeting my half older brother for the first time in my life when it wasn’t sure if I would have much longer life to live after the first surgery, reconnecting with friends I wasn’t allowed to speak to, being part of collective activities with people who often were on their grief journey, trying to live life as if I had to prepare for the last days in enormously uncertain times especially with dealing with threats, and most important being present in my childrens’ lives and re-building a sense of normalcy whilst they also received support in therapy. There were big communal efforts from the neighbourhood, work colleagues, families and friends. This practice also centers ancestral work, being able to connect to love and making peace with those you could never save.
Inner peace became restorative also because it was communal, I was not alone and I was held in different ways. It made it easier to letting go, to accept those that could not understand, to have more patience with survivors that could not heal yet, to let go of peoples’ gossips, to build trust in others by learning that boundaries was the way to best love yourself and those around you. We restore when we understand that boundaries are not a threat but an offer of intimacy and when those are broken it affects us somatically and this is how it nearly ended my life in hospital with life-threatening surgeries. I passed my boundaries when I no longer fitted into my authentic self. I can follow my purpose or be in a reactive mode that performs externally to the world but doesn’t align with my true self.
You shift from resisting control to practice self-care by slowing down and accept to miss out in the world, this overtime gives the space for self-forgiveness and empowerment. Inside the abusive cycle I learned that boundaries do not harm others but can be appropriated wrongly against you in practice to control peoples’ realities. Self-care means to bend, to re-orientate and reclaim what Audre Lorde calls the ‘erotic’, an authentic version of your deepest self. It is not your job to fix and save others because like the advice of the coastal guard when you try to save someone from drowning, they will drown you first out of panic or betrayal before you can rescue them. This is why abuse becomes addictive; survivors may often fall back into new relationships, environments or situations and be pulled back inside, thinking they are adaptive and can dismiss the same ‘red flags’ to assist those in need because of its familiarity; they trust, love and desire to help others around them and denying that they fall victim again. And therefore miss on the authentic self that demands to be restored away from meeting the needs of others and reacting out of pity. You can walk up every morning with someone telling you they love you and ending the day with the same person trying to scare you. You please and ease in the hope they will not project their suffering and rage against you and you agree to their needs and desires not because they align to your own but because giving in can prevent further abuse. Allowing things that scare you and throw you into doubt inevitably puts you into very dangerous situations where all forms of consent when it comes to intimacy are broken. And giving in is a huge risk because it allows predators to lie more, affect higher forms of physical violence, to manufacture ‘victim’ narratives, to perform forced sexual desires without consent and gives them the power of violence where overtime there is less self-control and higher forms of external public manipulation in image and words to the outside world, that is how survivors get trapped and it takes several attempts to exit.

Communal restoration also requires friends, including ourselves, to research these complexities, how we can support without becoming enablers, or ‘flying monkeys’ as termed by psychologist Dr. Ramani. We should check in regularly, ask how we feel, if we need a safe space, research resources for exiting safely, be ready with local protection helplines, watch out for changes in behaviours, in the body and on the skin, in facial expressions and reactions to noise and people notably.
Be vigilant against smear campaigns on social media, over the phone, on emails and gossips. Whilst survivors’s reactions can sometimes lack sense it may be their last call to escape, protect themselves and others notably if they have a post-diagnosis after the effects of abuse. For predators it is skillfully manipulated, through lack of empathy and mission to revenge and destroy by any means, most of the time in secret, through false accusations and tempered evidence that pull a web of confusion and dis-belief between people who want to care but instead fall prey into collective divisions against one another, peoples’ reactions are purposely extracted sometimes through funds, people may feel rage against someone they do not know or never met. Persons targeted to participate into the smear campaigns may not understand and deny that they participate in enabling violence and even be pulled into situations to perform yet not understanding that their perception is already highly distorted by the perpetrator and the confusion forces the enabler to take the side of the predator. Enablers are often good-hearted people who can stay loyal, but they would be too embarrassed to confront the possibility that someone they think they know, that entertained them and sent ‘breadcrumb’ validations and that they trusted could also harm people decades later out of the public eye. A clear indication of this is when perpetrators make it their mission for many years to destroy survivors by physical and digital stalking, through private harrassements online, through public humiliation and claims of defamation, intruding into their victim’s networks, home and jobs, digital spyware hacking, secret court cases and holding on to a victim narrative whilst continuing abuse to someone else and somewhere else. In the docu-series “I am Stalker” we learn that predators who receive police and court restraining orders break those boundaries entirely and there isn’t enough legal protection to deter them from continuing their criminal sociopathic patterns from victim to victim. They could no longer receive the supply, possess nor control their primary victim into ‘petted’ obedience and blind loyalty, so they will feed from other peoples’ reactions and incite rage to feel credited which enables a sense of power for them to become a false victim and block any feelings of shame, pain or regret. It also pushes real victims to react and defend themselves which feeds predators and gives them a hightened sense of sadistic control and connection which is called ‘trauma-bond’. Over the years I have seen survivors’ identities being stolen by their perpetrators in professions, being abandoned by others, survivors were being punished in speaking their truth, loosing friends and family who they fought they could trust, being isolated and at times choosing suicide. This happens because most of us have a lack of education on these complexities and life seems much easier in forms of denial and distance because we all live with our own traumas.
Telling your truth comes at huge costs and risks for your entire life and sometimes this is how we get stuck inside the cycle in the hope it will stop, in the hope for a better ending. Yet we must learn that the best endings are how we survive and get out, wether we could die inside the abusive cycle or outside of it, even if this is not entirely the story we choose or can control, remember how much love there is still in this world for you out there.

Who has been most helpful in helping you overcome challenges or build and develop the essential skills, qualities or knowledge you needed to be successful?

The courage to ask for help and to say that you are not ok was frightening because it was already drummed in my psyche that there would be punishments if I asked for help. In stories of survivors, their perpetrators would control the narrative to say that organisations would be too ‘homophobic’ or ‘racist’ to assist with help. Helpline services often forget that there is also risks for victims in using their phones because those can be forcibly confiscated and the lack of privacy means that stories around the world are not accounted for. A victim will most definately believe anything their abuser say because their entire world is controlled and abusive episodes paralyse you in fear before it switches to the love-bombing stage as another form of control & deception. I remember strangers in public spaces defending me or trying to help and observing the situation until they were sent away notably when I was experiencing a panic attack or work colleagues trying to ease the tension. I had friends who accompanied me in my journey and building boundaries with and for me so that I would feel safer. I had friends who could and saw the shakes in my body and instead of judging they would hold me tightly and cry with me for hours to remind me that they loved me. Some of them helped me to find exits to leave, and make sure I can be in public spaces without being monitored or followed. It seemed that my friends and family had already noticed that things were not good from the beginning and they were loosing me. It also shows how difficult it is for loved ones to help quickly and effectively when it comes to domestic cases because it also comes at risk to the safety of the victim and their loved ones and most people lack the knowledge. I was becoming a different version of myself that people had difficulty to recognise or to accept especially when those friendships are decades long already. Predators tend to pull you away from the people you love through isolation, dominating conversations, through secret and non-consensual digital communication, controlling your work communication and production, controlling how you are in front of people by forcing you to perform uncomfortable acts of possession, forcing victims to formulate acts of defense against their loved ones to prove loyalty to the abuser who also controls your schedule and mobility.
The love of my friends, their patience, trust and observation persisted painfully through all the manipulations and helped me to overcome those challenges before I got professional support from several womens’ protection services. They never gave up on me and had to learn just like me, all the tools of recognition and self-protection, adjusting our behaviours in dealing with predators to keep them away and for not triggering further abusive reactions to our community even though for the most part we cannot protect everyone.
After the surgeries to remove the brain tumour, my somatic body therapist was significant in my recovery in healing my body physically but also connecting on a spiritual level to have self-awareness. In healing my body she saved my life, I learned about co-existing with fears and breaking them, I learned about the language of how the body works, I learned another way of engaging with ancestral energy, ghosts and hosts, and I learned how to experience life inside my body fully grounded and present rather than dis-assotiated from the amount of fear, hyper-vigilence and uncertainty I had to endure. I learned to let go and didn’t feel the same pain because I had to accept some persons could never be saved no matter how good your heart is, it was no longer my responsibility and I was proud to still be able to love at my fullest capacity even when it was painful and dark. My grief I understood as a deep sense of love. As author Stephanie Foo writes in her book “What My Bones Know”, C-PTSD can transform into a superpower rather than stay a disability.
All this new knowledge helped me to empower myself and came in parallel with trauma therapy, psychotherapy, counselling and nature activities. Even though I was extremely fragile and traumatised especially at the beginning of this process, my friends supported me every single painful and ugly step of the way fully without judgement, and this love I received was infinite. I learned that someone saying they ‘love you’ everyday and the promise of a future together and to take care of you is not love necessarily. But those who can share love in very different ways that heal, transport, transform and bring you back to life with a total sense of inner peace by living their own truth unmasked.
An important book that supported my recovery was Carmen Maria Machado’s “In The Dream House”. It charts the complexities of abuse between the author and her ex-partner and the historical erasure inside the court systems of the recognition of violence in queer relationships. The book has numerous sequences in poetry, fiction, court data, mental health research, short stories as well as a historical guide contextualising the missing archives of the the LGBTQ experience through different authors. It is powerful in depicting the quiet nuances of abuse and the process of getting out and what happens after. The book carries you in this seemingly dream relationship in a dream home, yet this curated paradise is in fact a prison of the mind and of the body, how violence is formed as a nucleus and grows deadly in everyday routines, from familiarity to isolation, which is similarly charted in the Netflix series called ‘You’. The book discusses what is considered evidence, testimony and legibility and gives credibility to survivors’ experiences.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://bikoro-curator.net/
• Instagram: nze_bikoro
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nyabinghilab/videos
• Other: https://refugeworldwide.com/artists/we-who-move-the-world-forward
  

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Image Credits

Black and white portrait image: Yero Adugna Eticha

1. panel discussion at “We Who Move The World Forward”, image by Monika Karczmarczyk
2. photography artwork by Anguezomo Mba Bikoro
3. photography artwork by Anguezomo Mba Bikoro
4. Obeah exhibition Vila Sul Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia Brazil, courtesy Vila Sul Goethe-Institut
5. Nyabinghi Lab at HAU
6. Hospitalisation
7. Anguezomo Mba Bikoro
8. courtesy of KINDL Gallery