by Nicholas Hack, Psy.D.

KATATAKA? NANGWA, KATATAKA?

I’m in Northwest Province, Zambia and I’m trying, and failing, to ask a simple question.

One of the first things the Peace Corps instilled in our US-acculturated minds was that time worked differently in rural Zambia. Rather than strict linearity measured by dashes on a clock, time was a less rigid concept. It could move forward, backwards, or stand still. A specific time might be determined by an event – when the meeting starts, it will be 9am – and not the other way around.

As expected, this relationship with time was reflected in the language. Where I lived, the Kaonde had a single word – katataka – that in English we’d equate both for our ideas of “immediately” and “sometime soon.”

It also meant that I had more than a few interactions that went like this:

Me: Are we going to do that thing we talked about?

Very patient Zambian: Yes, let’s do it now/soon.

Me (trying to differentiate “this moment” from “sometime today” by waving my hands

around): Um... Do you mean now/soon, or now/soon? Katataka, nangwa katataka?

A meeting of minds it was not.

All these years later, I’ve come to think about my communication struggle as being about a gap. It wasn’t about language, about the specific words themselves. The gap was preverbal, in the lived and embodied experiences that later find form in words and culture. When the meeting starts, it will be 9am. Think about that.

I’ve begun to wonder about this type of gap when I find myself particularly challenged with a patient. Rest assured my psychoanalytic community, I do certainly see the fact that I’m struggling as important information on its own. Countertransference, projective identification, enactment: these ideas help me navigate in the storm. But what if when I say storm, I think of rain and you think of dust?

A client spends months exploring and increasingly understanding a pattern that leaves him repeatedly unsatisfied, and then very consciously makes the same decisions yet again. Once more he’s left disappointed and painfully wanting. He angrily reports about the outcome, as he did the first time, “It doesn’t make any sense!”

I struggle to meaningfully understand his choice to repeat and his bewilderment at the outcome. The force of his desire for things to change now is intense and visceral; we both feel it deeply. And yet in session and in practice, a very different chronology is playing out.

I’m left to wonder if despite the pressure, his wish for change “now” is closer to, or also contains, the idea of “sometime soon.” Perhaps in hearing only the desperation in “NOW,” I miss the deep-rooted culture of ambivalence or entanglement that whispers, “…or maybe in a little bit.”

Like in Zambia, maybe these moments of confusion reveal when I’m having difficulty acculturating to a patient’s world. Maybe I can learn to see them as moments to explore the foundations, the unspoken, so that we can not only speak the same language, but in the same tongue.

It feels like a daunting task, but hopefully one that I can begin learning soon. Or now. Or maybe both.