A Divine Madness: The Secret Language of Trauma in the Novels of Bessie Head and Calixthe Beyala

Contemporary feminist philosophers, literary critics, and social theorists have been the first to call attention to the existence of a fundamental alliance between "woman" and "madness." They have shown how women, within our dualistic systems of language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture, and mind. They have analyzed and illuminated a cultural tradition that represents "woman" as madness, and that uses images of the female body . . . to stand for irrationality in general. While the name of the symbolic female may change from one historical period to the next, the gender asymmetry of the representational system remains constant. Thus madness, even when experienced by men, is metaphorically and symbolically represented as feminine: a female malady.

—Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830 –1980

Psychiatry and its imperial counterpart, ethnopsychiatry, have long rested on particular narrative notions defined around the white, Western, male body as the healthy prototype. The coupling of blackness and pathology, although directly contradicting earlier claims of black lack of mental sensitivity, is integral to the very definition of blackness where the crazy, diseased black functions as Other to the sane, rational, universal, white subject.

—Hershini Bhana Young, Haunting Capital: Memory, Text, and the Black Diasporic Body

Here they are, returning, arriving over and again, because the unconscious is impregnable. They have wandered around in circles, confined to the narrow room in which they've been given a deadly brainwashing. You can incarcerate them, slow them down, get away with the old Apartheid routine, but for a time only. As soon as they begin to speak, at the same time as they're taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous. You can't see anything in the dark, you're afraid. . . . And so we have internalized this horror of the dark.

—Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"

The sexual life of adult women is "a dark continent" for psychology.

—Sigmund Freud, "The Question of Lay Analysis"

To be deemed mad is to be placed in a position of penultimate alterity, slipping from the category of human to subhuman, from the locus of reason to that of the irrational. It is of no small significance then that gender and racial status should play so crucial a role in contemporary theorizations of madness. To be insane is to become the symbolic woman or black, those fluid sites of ontological negation and social stigma in the Western discursive tradition. Yet, as both the Elaine Showalter and Hershini Bhana Young quotations suggest, these constructions have specific historical references that underscore their representational uses to regimes of control. Thus gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity—and certainly their transgression—all permit the construction of the mad other, as manifested in such maladies as hysteria, or the wandering womb; drapetomania, or the compulsion of slaves to escape bondage; and homosexuality, which until 1973 was considered a form of mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association and which continues to be perceived as psychologically, morally, and/or criminally deviant in a broad range of contexts. Conversely, apart from concrete pathological conditions bound to an actual body, the concept of the other serves as a metaphor of lack, loss, disorder, and dysfunction, a symbolic space of negation that permits the establishing of the parameters of normalcy through the articulation of its opposition.

It seems inevitable then that in her "The Laugh of the Medusa," Hélène Cixous conflates woman with Africa. Signifying on Sigmund Freud's earlier construction of feminine psychic opacity that relied on geographical and cultural connotations of African inscrutability, Cixous makes her own polemic a declaration of otherness that at once reveals the violence embedded in the Freudian/Western epistemological project and embraces woman/Africa as a space of radical difference. Yet even in her very impulse to claim it, Cixous reveals an ambivalence to...