Writing Madness: borderlines of the body in African literature (review)

In a field where little criticism on the subject of madness exists, Flora Veit-Wild’s introductory collection of essays is a most welcome intervention. For Veit-Wild, the trope of madness in African literature is synonymous not only with suffering but also with ‘seeing’ – heightened perception and creative production.

In visual terms, this is a rich publication. Accompanying the narrative are French cartoons ridiculing ‘scientific’ men staring at Sarah Baartman (the ‘Hottentot Venus’); medieval satirical representations of walking vulvae and a penis; stills from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s film Kare Kare Zvako (about the survival of a butchered woman); and some extraordinary photographs of Wulf Sachs and John Chavafambira, Aimé Césaire, Dambudzo Marechera, Lesego Rampolokeng and Bessie Head. Unfortunately the paper and print quality do not quite do the photography justice, though this is a minor complaint.

Veit-Wild begins with colonial perceptions of madness, showing that whereas colonials (in the literary imagination of Conrad, Haggard and others) feared a ‘dark continent’ and ‘barbarous’ people, anti- and post-colonial ‘black writers have reversed the colonial gaze on the black body and mind’. Highlighting a disjunction between European and African social and belief systems, which has perpetuated misconceptions, she then reviews Wulf Sachs’s Black Hamlet, the seminal psychoanalytic study with traditional healer John Chavafambira. Veit-Wild criticizes Sachs’s ‘European gaze’, which ‘eventually emerges as untrustworthy’. These are by now familiar critiques, but nonetheless worth rehearsing in an introductory compilation of this sort.

She subsequently follows the trope of madness to the surrealist movement, tracing the effects of Breton and Césaire’s liaison in 1941, setting Rimbaud alongside Senghor, Césaire and the Congolese poet Tchicaya U Tam’si, and showing a symbiotic relationship between European and African surrealist sensibilities. In this thought-provoking chapter Veit-Wild concludes that ‘Surrealism should neither be sanctioned as neo-colonial nor mystified as essentially African.’ She aptly integrates Francophone poetry (alongside English translation), and her comparative approach to African literary studies across linguistic lines is a unique selling point for this book. Very few studies of this sort exist.

She picks up the thread of ‘writing madness’ in more detailed analyses of Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera, influenced to some extent by surrealism, who had ‘a gift to write madness into words’ and South African Lesego Rampolokeng, also an anti-realist, who ‘lashes out at the still prevailingly racist image of the African as the “monkey in the tree”’. She then draws comparisons with Congolese Sony Lebou Tansi’s work, focusing on an ‘intense engagement with questions of gender and of the female sex’. These author-based chapters follow a loosely defined trope of madness and explore bodily borderlines somewhat tangentially at times, but the gender focus is consistent and engaging.

In a fascinating chapter, ‘Wandering wombs: bodily boundaries in African oral culture’, Veit-Wild retells a folktale from Upper Guinea about a roaming vagina and a donkey. ‘[C]ollective fantasy,’ she observes, ‘has created amusing examples of vaginas that jump about on their own until the danger of independent female sexuality is eventually checked through male aggression’. This, she shows, reveals a misogynist fear but, taking a Bakhtinian view, Veit-Wild argues that ‘[p]eriods of permitted licentiousness bestow on women considerable power and liberty and contain a significant element of rebellion and reversal of gender roles’. Therefore, ‘writing madness’, she implies, is potentially liberating, an idea which informs her subsequent focus on women writers.

While deviant women are punished in folktales, unruly women seem driven to madness, Veit-Wild points out, in African women’s writing. Bessie Head’s A Question of Power is a prime example. Rebeka Njau’s Ripples in the Pool and Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Kare Kare Zvako are other instances of voicing or depicting gender violence (and resistance). The significance of ‘mad’ creative production, Veit-Wild optimistically suggests, is a possible ‘invocation of new gender roles’.

Veit-Wild strikes the right...