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

Epilogue

Epilogue Madness and Migration in the New Millennium Yesterday Ah was mad mad, mad mad, Mad mad, mad mad mad, mad mad, Mad mad, mad! Stark ravin’ mad. Yesterday was Monday . . . Yesterday was Tuesday . . . Today is Wednesday . . . Ash Wednesday, Jus’ like dat . . . O’ God! —Paul Keens-Douglas, “Jus’ Like Dat” In ending, I return to where I began, with Paul KeensDouglas ’s “Jus’ Like Dat.” But here I turn to the closing stanza of the poem, which repeats the beginning of the opening stanza but takes the speaker and his audience in a new direction. This repetition of words, phrases, and in this case the opening lines of the poem primarily contributes to the performative aspect of the poem, but it also makes and remakes the meaning of the speaker’s madness. He has been celebrating carnival, he has lost track of time, and now suddenly—“Jus’ like dat”— it is time to leave the madness behind and return to reality and respectability . The speaker’s “O’ God!” can only hint at the massive change in behavior now required for Ash Wednesday church services. Yesterday was women, wine, and wining “down de place.” Today . . . today is Ash Wednesday. Keens-Douglas’s ellipses, the pauses I imagine present in his performance of the poem, represent the unbridgeable gap between the carnival and the church, between Caribbeanized celebrations and colonial conceptions of respectability. Dramatized in these lines, in the elliptical spaces between words, is the schizophrenic split Frantz Fanon describes in The Wretched of the Earth. Derek Walcott, Sylvia Wynter, and V. S. Naipaul also dramatize this connection between religion and alienation. Across the chapters in Disturbers of the Peace, religion plays a large part in the madness of the 144 Epilogue characters. In chapters 1, 2, and 4 we encounter characters who are described as mad because they imagine themselves as leaders granted power by their gods. Their schizophrenic dreams of power are cited by unspecified official authorities as evidence of their madness, but their followers treat their prophecies as the solution to the madness—the anger, despair, and absurdity—of colonial life. Gender and privilege separate these megalomaniac men and the female protagonists I examine in chapters 3 and 5. That Antoinette and Nellie do not turn to religion to identify themselves as powerful may be due to the patriarchal structure of most religions, even those in which women hold high positions. It may also be due to their social privilege. Both Antoinette’s and Nellie ’s psychic alienation stem, not from the self-destructive effects of poverty singled out by Corporal Lestrade (and Walcott, and Fanon) as the inspiration for religious delusions, but from their inability to meet the expectations of their social class. Given these sometimes stark differences between the main characters above, and between their respective insanities, my collective readings in this project situate such figurations of madness at the center of the texts’ grappling with larger questions of Caribbean subjectivity. In particular, madness provided Caribbean writers with a language for exploring the shifts in subjectivity that necessarily accompanied independence. The images and metaphors of this language—messiahs, dreams, schizophrenias—repeat throughout the texts published in the mid-twentieth century as writers map the internal psychic landscape of the colonized and recently decolonized Caribbean subject. But these images and metaphors also reappear in Caribbean texts published more recently. Though I chose to focus this study specifically on the period most concerned with the problematics of independence, my motivation to begin this project was the larger notion of madness as one of the identifying factors of anglophone Caribbean literature overall. Connections between madness and other concerns—such as racial communities, geographic fragmentation, gender roles—repeatedly surface in Caribbean literatures. To demonstrate some of the ways these connections continue in contemporary Caribbean literature, I close Disturbers of the Peace with a look at twenty-first-century narratives from diasporic writers, focusing on three recent first novels by writers from the ever-growing Caribbean diaspora— David Chariandy, Marie-Elena John, and Zadie Smith. In Soucouyant (2007), David Chariandy turns to an intimate portrayal of presenile dementia to explore the fragility of personal and cultural memory for Caribbean immigrants in Canada, where immigration 145 Epilogue laws encourage forgetting. Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable (2006), set primarily in Dominica, and concerned with the too easily assigned title of “madwoman” as well as with madness as an inherited method of selfdefense...