Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Although I cite a written version of the poem, Keens-Douglas also regularly performs his poetry. So while I refer here to the reader, one can also think of a listening audience. 2. Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background, 2nd ed. (London: Heinemann, 1983), 4. 3. Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 8. 4. Rex Nettleford, “Introduction: The Fledgeling Years,” in Jamaica in Independence : Essays on the Early Years, ed. Rex Nettleford (Kingston: Heinemann Caribbean, 1989), 15. Nettleford and the contributors to the anthology capitalize independence, and I follow when quoting, but I utilize lowercase in my own text because (1) I discuss independence across several countries and (2) capitalization makes independence into the very event Nettleford’s anthology argues against. 5. Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 277. 6. As Franklin Knight describes the situation, “By the 1950s, the British West Indies had common regional participation in labor unions, trade and commerce, legal associations, a Civil Service Federation, cricket teams, the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture (situated in Trinidad but serving the entire British Empire), the West Indian Meteorological Service, and the University College of the West Indies. All these associations, while they did foster some regional consciousness , were weaker than their local units and portrayed less of a coherent view of the West Indies than their names and functions suggested. More often than not, they were out of touch with the masses locally and regionally” (ibid.). 7. Sir John Mordecai, Federation of the West Indies (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 12. 8. Norman Manley, quoted in Hugh W. Springer, Reflections on the Failure 166 Notes to Introduction of the First West Indian Federation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for International Affairs, 1962), 26. 9. Eric Williams, quoted in W. David McIntyre, British Decolonization, 1946–1997: When, Why, and How Did the British Empire Fall? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 54. 10. Barbados gained independence in 1966; Guyana, in 1966; Grenada, in 1974; Dominica, in 1978; St. Lucia, in 1979; St. Vincent, in 1979; Antigua, in 1981; and St. Kitts-Nevis, in 1983. 11. Ramchand, West Indian Novel, 4. 12. V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 206. 13. Ibid. 14. Michael Thorpe, “‘The Other Side’: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre,” in Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys, ed. Pierrette M. Frickey (Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1990), 180, originally published in Ariel 8, no. 3 (1977). 15. Michelle Cliff, The Store of a Million Items (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 59. 16. Even limiting one’s examination to the scientific community, with its investment in bounded definitions, ends in frustration and an inability to pinpoint the meaning of madness. The Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, the manual utilized by psychologists and psychiatrists (and increasingly by HMOs and private insurance companies) to identify mental illnesses, is now in its fifth edition since 1952. In between the editions, there are changes to definitions, symptoms, and inclusions. One of the most-cited changes is the dropping of homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973, a change that suggests the social nature of defining madness. 17. Erna Brodber, “Socio-Cultural Change in Jamaica,” in Nettleford, Jamaica in Independence, 58. 18. Ibid., 59, 62, 64. 19. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (A Norton Critical Edition), ed. Judith L. Raiskin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 94. 20. Evelyn O’Callaghan, Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 45. 21. Derek Walcott, “What the Twilight Says,” in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Noonday Books, 1970), 25. 22. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 17. 23. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 1989), 6. 24. See, for example, V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies; British, French, and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (New York: Vintage, 1981); and Walcott, “What the Twilight Says.” 25. Édouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981), 167 Notes to Introduction and Chapter 1 212, 359. These sections of Le...