A Few Words About Trauma

Anakana Schofield’s Bina, billed as a “novel in warnings,” explores the psychology of suffering and abuse.

- Rudrapriya Rathore

BINA (“that’s Bye-na, not Beena”) isn’t a woman who’s interested in “mithering,” “standing about,” or otherwise making small talk. The seventy-four-year-old from western Ireland is quick to note that she is a very busy woman — one who spent a week in prison and is now facing fourteen more years of incarceration for “aiding, abetting or counselling” in the deaths of an untold number of people. As she awaits her trial, Bina writes her story on envelopes, receipts, and other scraps of paper, intent on explaining how and why she got into this unfortunate position.

Bina’s entries are oblique and evasive. She can’t go into much detail lest it be used as evidence against her. Her notes can also be erratic, like her repeated warnings against certain days of the week (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays). But, as the fragments accumulate, they reveal that Bina was involved in an activist group that gave sick and elderly people assistance with suicide, and one of the deaths that she is now charged in relation to is that of her best friend, Philomena, or Phil — though responsibility for that particular killing is something that Bina is quick to deny.

Throughout the eponymous novel, written by Anakana Schofield, Bina predicts that the authorities and the courts will warp the story of her mercy killings, and she sees her notes as the only chance to preserve her own truth for whatever posterity might be afforded to it. She also appears to be losing her memory, so her entries about her past serve a practical function as well. More importantly, Bina sees her writings as a way to make herself useful to others. She compiles this memoir as a collection of “warnings” so other women won’t suffer as she has suffered: “I’ve made all these mistakes for you,” she writes.