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Introduction Madness, Caribbeanness, and the Process of Nation Building Yesterday Ah was mad mad, mad mad, Mad mad, mad mad mad, mad mad, Mad mad, mad! Stark ravin’ mad! —Paul Keens-Douglas, “Jus’ Like Dat” MAD MAD, MAD mad mad, mad mad . . . Paul Keens-Douglas’s rhythmic repetition illustrates both the complexity and the consistency with which literary artists appropriate madness to represent Caribbean life. The poem reveals the ambiguity of the term mad as each repetition confuses rather than enlightens the reader.1 The poet leaves his audience to ask not only why the speaker was mad but also what he means by mad. Is mad the same as mad mad and mad mad mad? By the end of the piece the reader can infer that the speaker was temporarily insane during the bacchanal of carnival and has now come to his senses. Throughout the poem, Douglas repeatedly plays with the performative aspects of “losing one’s mind,” using the slippages between insanity, anger, and excessive gaiety to recreate the physical and mental experience of carnival. On a larger scale, Caribbean literature repeats the use of mad characters in the same way Keens-Douglas repeats the word: constantly changing intensity and meaning. The bulk of Disturbers of the Peace traces this repetition of madness in Caribbean literature written in English between 1959 and 1980. During these politically turbulent years in the anglophone Caribbean, writers in the region consciously attempted to make their literary tradition as independent from British literature as they hoped to be from England. One of the distinguishing features of literature produced during this period of upheaval is the ubiquity of madmen and madwomen. While representations of madness were prevalent in Caribbean literature across the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone traditions throughout the twentieth century, they increased markedly in anglophone writings during the latter half of the century. I connect this increase to 2 Introduction the concurrent shift from colonial to postcolonial status. In contrast to the Spanish, French, and Dutch islands, the British islands experienced a relatively homogeneous struggle to establish their collective and individual independence from England. The theme of madness—whether central, as in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain, and Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, or seemingly supplemental, as in V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street and Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron—permeates literature from the Caribbean and serves as both a social critique and a form of literary innovation in these texts. Despite the preponderance of “mad” characters populating the Caribbean literary canon, little attention has been paid to their presence. Literary and historical scholarship on writing and madness, though extensive and long-standing, has focused primarily on European writers. This scholarship has recently begun to include francophone Caribbean and African literature, expanding and enriching the field with insights from postcolonial and race theorists. The result, however, has been a collapsing of Caribbean representations of madness into a larger postcolonial discourse . Although criticism on individual texts sometimes includes attention to the characters’ mental disorders, madness has not been examined as a significant element in the anglophone Caribbean literary tradition. With mad figures frequently appearing in Caribbean literature from the French, Spanish, and English traditions—in roles that range from bit parts to first-person narrators—madness should be regarded as a significant part of the West Indian literary aesthetic. This prevalence raises the question , What function(s) do these figures serve for the writer and the represented communities? If, as Kenneth Ramchand writes in his study of the West Indian novel, Caribbean writers were especially concerned with representing “the social and economic deprivation of the majority; the pervasive consciousness of race and colour; the cynicism and uncertainty of the native bourgeoisie in power after independence; the lack of a history to be proud of; and the absence of traditional or settled values,” then how does madness figure in these varied interests?2 My object in the following chapters is to answer these questions by drawing connections between the writers’ representations—and repetitions—of madness and the issues inherent in decolonization, including those noted by Ramchand above. In asking what madness does for these writers and these texts, I find the repeated representations of madness at the juncture of creative expression and political and social commentary. Mad figures (whether marginal or central to the text itself) work as plot devices and creative gambits not [3.141.31.209] Project MUSE...

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