“Yu Haffi Meet Yuself at Last”

The madwoman is a monster. She appears in the literary canon as errant, uncontrollable, and dangerous. When Rochester from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) locks his Jamaican wife, Bertha Antoinetta Mason, in the attic, it is for the safety of everyone. Bertha sets his bed on fire.

In 1966, Caribbean writer Jean Rhys creates a new history for Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea, her prequel to Jane Eyre. This revisionist narrative explores Bertha’s early life. Rhys renames her Antoinette Cosway. But her English husband, Rochester, is able to declare her mad because she is a Creole and a woman, both of which justify her systematic dehumanization. Rochester has affairs with other women in front of Antoinette, and he renames her Bertha.

Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) is named after Bertha, who spends her final years in the attic of Rochester’s English mansion. Gilbert and Gubar argue that historically literature has offered two archetypes for women: the angel and the monster. They quote Virginia Woolf, who urges women writers to ‘kill’ the “angel in the house.” Likewise, Gilbert and Gubar encourage women writers to “kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been ‘killed’ into art.”

In her fifth poetry collection, Madwoman (Alice James Books, 2017), Shara McCallum collapses the binary definition of woman as either angel or monster, reclaiming the madwoman as a mythic force: “the madwoman now being all women.” She is wildly complex, ferociously ambiguous.

Memory is elusive, like grief, particularly as it relates to McCallum’s own Jamaican ancestry. In “To Red,” she writes, “Maybe / like you I am a liar. Or memory / is a story I keep telling myself. / But I understand, being as you are / from a long line of women / who regard facts as suggestion, / who know what it is to burn / inside the closet of the night.” This fire traps the speaker in an eternal present, warping her narrative. Like Bertha, her past is now in danger of being appropriated.

The madwoman is not remembered for her own narrative, but rather she is exoticized until she becomes the ghost of herself, a shadowy figure in someone else’s imagination. In “Madwoman to Her Deliverer,” McCallum writes, “I see I have always been for you / a smattering of stars you fix // in your gaze, a constellation you view / as a distant notion.”

In “Lucea, Jamaica,” when the speaker remembers her girlhood, she sees a person who is unrecognizable as herself: “another girl with braided hair / waved each morning I arrived.”

There is a punishment for looking back. Like Lot, the madwoman turns to salt.

But McCallum won’t settle for this alienation. To avoid it, the speaker becomes a multiplicity because as she writes in “The Parable of John Crow”: “courage or not, yu haffi meet yuself at last.”

McCallum interrogates the self with a polyphony of voices and personas. “Madwoman Apocrypha” includes a Q&A with the madwoman. The interviewer inquires, “What created you?” The madwoman responds, “A breach in the self.” The speaker travels into this breach as if she were Orpheus descending into the underworld. She returns to meet herself, but also not-herself: “I’ve come to believe all stories are self-referential. Or else none of them are.”

In her ghazal “Invention,” McCallum writes, “Despite evidence to the contrary, I continue believing in myth. / Shara, you are the most fleeting of my inventions.” This paradox allows the speaker to exist.

Repetitive forms, like the ghazal and pantoum, as well as anaphora, and parallel syntactical structures allow the speaker to forge a personal history, a place where she can become her many selves simultaneously. The madwoman is now partially reconstructed, and although there is no remedy for the suffering of the past—for colonialism, loss of loved ones, loss of place—she is able to inhabit the poetry.