“Madness Is Rampant on This Island”: Writing Altered States in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Abstract

Two novels shortlisted in the fiction category for the 2017 NGM Bocas Literary Prize are explicitly concerned with madness and altered states of being. In Marcia Douglas's The Marvellous Equations of the Dread (2016), a witness observes of Jamaica that "[m]adness is rampant on this island. The mad dream dreams and have visions. They stand on street corners and tell it" (76, italics in original). Some of these visionaries, it transpires, are, in fact, temporarily embodied ancestral spirits returned to earth to intervene in their society's implosion. But as the witness also notes, "No one listens" (76, italics in original). In Kei Miller's overall prize-winning Augustown (2016), however, people do listen. They listen to the preacher, Bedward, who has the gift of flight but, as history records, ends up committed to a lunatic asylum. It is madness, of course, to think that the spirits of the dead can and do return to our material reality and communicate with humans, or that humans can fly. Or is it? How do we critically analyse representations of a Caribbean world, such as occur in these two texts, which matter-of-factly include possession, states of transformation, visions and warnings from unknown sources, communication with spirits, and the rising of bodies into the sky as part and parcel of everyday life? The Caribbean has, throughout its history, been represented as an exotic, odd, and somewhat suspect space whose "natives" believe and act in strange (that is, non-Western) ways. The cruelty of enslavement and colonialism that created the people of the region and its peculiar social structure in many ways warped those who inhabited the space, so that even supposedly civilized and rational Euro-Americans living there started to change: to go crazy, to "go native," to go mad. Early commentators blamed this instability on the climate, the culture, the purportedly degenerate Creoles and allegedly savage Africans, the heathen "Hindoos"; and yet it was likely something generated by the extraordinarily violent excesses

From the Traumas of the Caribbean to a Revival of Resistant Literature: A West Indian Discourse

“…He shows similarities between the African and Jewish experience and "tries to set up a dialogue among the victims of exclusion" (Ledent, 2017, p.209). Ledent et al (2018) conveyed the idea of how West Indian writers depicted, as well, the opposite made-up picture of the Caribbeans, which is inevitably a colonial creation saying the Caribbean "has, throughout its history, been represented as an exotic, odd place where "natives believe and act in strange non-Western ways"(p. 1).Such mental status is portrayed in narratives set during colonization and decolonization periods. In fact, the legacy of enslavement brought forth such traumas.…”

“…In fact, the legacy of enslavement brought forth such traumas. Ledent et al (2018) mentioned several allusions to insanity. They referred to Jean Rhys's, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), as a work that "has become iconic" in any discussions of literary works handling mental aberration (p. 2).…”