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5 “Claims to Social Identity” Madness and Subject Formation in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home In a manner similar to Jean Rhys’s brief last section of Wide Sargasso Sea, Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home represents madness from a tangled first-person perspective. It seeks to speak from the inside, rather than to merely represent from a distance, the madness of a dissociated Jamaican woman. The resulting text is a densely layered account of the colonial mentality still evident in Jamaican society at least up to 1980, when Jane and Louisa was published. Brodber’s text also emphasizes the difficulty of representing madness within standard generic divisions—as manifested in Rhys’s novel and Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain. Unlike the previous writers, Brodber bypasses the difficulty of speaking about the alienation of the colonial subject; instead, she directly tackles the project of speaking from and through this space of alienation. In interviews , Brodber refers to her main character as an example of a “dissociated identity,” but she never utilizes such diagnostic terms in her text. The protagonist, Nellie, narrates her own story and does not mark herself as mad in her narrative. Indeed, aside from her own imagination of her neighbors’ thoughts, she is also not marked as mad by others. Relying on symbols such as the kumbla, the “spying glass,” and the kaleidoscope to convey Nellie’s spiraling thoughts, Brodber explores the problematics of social mobility and role expectations predicated on colonial values. In this chapter, I examine how Brodber grapples with the effects of these expectations on mental health as well as how she imaginatively tackles the difficulty of describing madness with the “language of reason” within commonly recognized generic literary boundaries and from a first-person perspective. 120 “Claims to Social Identity” “Go eena kumbla”: The Dangers of Security Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home presents verbal snapshots of Nellie Richmond’s life, including information about her family members and ancestors. Although these snapshots are not in chronological order, most of the major events in Nellie’s life are detailed—at least, she details the events she considers important. Nothing generally related in autobiographical narratives is included: no individual accounts of Nellie ’s birth, graduations, migration, or return to Jamaica, although her narrative indicates that these events have occurred. At best, tracking time in Jane and Louisa is difficult, both in the protagonist’s life and in periods of Jamaican history. Within Nellie’s fragmented and jumbled narrative, there are few historical signposts. Her description of past generations of her family, for example, includes the information that her maternal grandfather was in the Boer War and that her paternal great grandfather was born soon after the crowning of Queen Victoria and the end of slavery in the West Indies. But even with these very specific historical indications for her ancestors’ lives, Nellie’s own birth remains unremarked and her siblings are merely names in a repeated list. Nellie describes significant moments in her life, indicating her age at the time— eight, eleven, sixteen—but she does not connect these ages to dates or historically specific events, such as Jamaican independence. In fact, that momentous event goes unnoticed in her narrative, even though it occurs during her late teenage years.1 There are rarely straightforward statements in the text about temporality; the reader has to piece this information together from various clues. Even determining which pieces of the narrative are part of the “current moment” and which are part of Nellie’s memories is difficult. Ironically , the only sustained narrative section of Jane and Louisa is Nellie ’s recounting of the events immediately before and during her mental breakdown. It is the least “loopy” section of the text, the only section that does not double back on itself in the spiral that Brodber’s words create . At this point, Nellie seems to be thirty-six years old and has accomplished advanced schooling both in Jamaica and abroad. Earlier, one of the “Still Life” word portraits in section 1 indicates that she achieved the title of doctor, practicing at an American institution. The linear narrative style of this “To Waltz with You” section (notable given the disjointed sequences in other chapters), along with Nellie’s description of her bizarre behavior as having “put on a show,” calls the appropriateness of the term madness into question.2 In a text that actively demands at [18.224.149.242] Project...

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