Writing Madness: Borderlines of the Body in African Literature (review)

What is the psychology of "natives" of the postcolony, of those who are either partially or completely outside of Western modernity? For too long this question has been elided by Western psychology's understanding of the psyche as an autochthonous realm, similar for all people for most of history, which has condemned the indigenous inhabitants of unmodernized peripheries to the subsidiary role of representatives of the primitive unconscious. Moreover, Western psychology has tended to be nuclear family-normative, sexually obsessed, and culturally insensitive, which has made it inevitably judgmental of native cultures, a judgmentalism that has subtly continued into the postcolonial era. However, this is set to change with the introduction of a postcolonial critical psychology, one that perhaps has its roots not only in the psychologies and practices of traditional non-Western cultures, but also in the critiques of Freud and Jung that have probably been most articulate in the work of Melanie Klein. Her critiques of Freud's Western, phallocratic, and nuclear family-normative writing echo in the work of Fanon, Ian Parker, and the critical psychology unit at the University of Kwazulu-Natal-Durban, combining to bring the emergence of a new concept and field into focus. Flora Veit-Wild's new book addresses this field through the prism of African literature.

In the introduction, Veit-Wild states that this book "reflects my own infatuation with those writers and topics that touch on the extreme, on the thin line between sanity and insanity" (1), an infatuation that has borne fruit for Africa and African literature, for the field of postcolonial psychology has remained nascent and largely unexplored, especially in relation to literature, and this book contributes in a major way to such an exploration. The first point that Veit-Wild clarifies is that in/sanity is culturally relative, so that what might be understood in the West as madness is often understood as the altered consciousness of spirit possession in Africa. Secondly, Veit-Wild emphasizes that in/sanity is not just "a figuration of the mind. It intimates a mental realm where the borderlines between body and mind blur" (3). This is the central idea of the book: that "the troubled mind speaks through the body and thus transforms the body into a text" (131), though the philosophical underpinnings of this idea and its ramifications remain opaque. So the writers concerned embody an imaginative recounting of extreme mental and physical states in "literary texts that are cries of anguish, of rage, and more often than not, of violent obscenity" (4). For Veit-Wild, the sociopolitical significance of these texts lies in the "potential of subversion" and "element of resistance [. . .] against the colonial and patriarchal order. This rebellion must remain abortive as long as the national agenda for solving the gender question is not set" (6).

Veit-Wild's exploration of in/sanity begins with the tales and reports of early travelers and explorers who "warded off" the fear of Africa "through figurations of exclusion and projection" (7): the tropes of the simian black common in phrenology, craniology, and popular exoticism. Colonial psychiatry developed "[t]he general view [. . .] that the African tended to be psychotic rather than neurotic, with a tendency towards schizophrenia rather than depressive disorders [. . .] manic-depression required a 'strong sense of personal responsibility, a quality originating in European culture' " (13). This view is manifested in literature from Conrad to Lessing, in which condescendingly feminized, eroticized, and schizoid natives, especially women, were nevertheless threatening, particularly to white women who needed protection from them. Nevertheless, indigenous versions of psychology existed and their major principle "is that a disease is perceived not so much as a disorder within an individual but as a disturbance within the community [. . .]. In addition, mental illness is sometimes regarded as a form of possession and is often a phase of initiation in the life of a person who is elected by the ancestral spirits to become a healer" (23–25). Veit-Wild finds the key example of this conflict between...