Fighting Madness, Making Caribbeanness: Kelly Baker Josephs's Disturbers of The Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature
" Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol. 12 : Iss. 2
Baker Josephs's Disturbers of Th e Peace: Fighting Madness, Making Caribbeanness: Kelly Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean
Sheri-Marie L. Harrison
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium Recommended Citation
-
Literature
Kelly Baker Josephs, Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in
Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2013), 191pp.
The proliferation of mad characters in Caribbean fiction at large makes it puzzling that we were a decade into the twenty-first century before the publication of a critical study dedicated entirely to this ubiquitous literary trope, in its own right, as a distinctively Caribbean literary aesthetic. The force of Kelly Baker
Josephs’ Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone
Caribbean Literature comes first from this identification of madness as a major,
recurring preoccupation of Caribbean writing. Other strengths of this book
include the flexible and multifaceted way Josephs treats and analyzes various
literary manifestations of madness, her balanced reliance on Caribbean criticism
to illuminate the region’s texts, and the methodological example she sets for
approaching representations of madness in Caribbean fiction beyond the bounds
of her own book’s focus.
Disturbers of the Peace begins by citing Paul Keens-Douglas’ poem “Jus’
Like Dat” as a touchstone for establishing the varied and fluid ways in which
Josephs will treat representations of madness. Of the poem’s arrangement of the
word “mad,” Josephs asks, “is mad the same as mad mad and mad mad mad?” (1).
The answer is no; “throughout the poem, Douglass 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” (1). Josephs in turn likens these slippages to the larger variation among
the representations of madness and mad characters in Caribbean literature.
Josephs identifies the “ubiquity of madmen and madwomen” in
Anglophone Caribbean literature written between 1959 and 1980 as one of that
period’s “distinguishing features.” She argues, moreover, that this feature
connects the period’s literature to the concurrent shift from colonial to
postcolonial status also taking place in the region, and that the engagement of
madness “serves as both a social critique and a form of literary innovation in these
texts” (2). The prevalence of iconic and mad characters like Rhys’
Antoinette/Annette, Naipaul’s Man-man, Wynter’s Moses Barton, and others begs
the book’s organizing questions: “[w]hat function(s) do these figures serve for the
writer and the represented” and how does madness figure in the varying interests
inherent in decolonization (2)? In answering these questions, Josephs offers the
following as “a major premise of Disturbers of the Peace”:
… the slow but relatively condensed decolonization of the
Anglophone islands during the 1960s and 1970s makes literature
written in English during this time – what Mary Lou Emery
describes as “the closing of the era of empire” – especially rich for
an examination of the function of madness in literary critiques of
colonialism and the Caribbean project of nation making. (3)
An additional feature that makes “the closing of the era of empire” a rich location
for examining the role of madness in critiquing colonialism and nation building is
the proliferation of theoretical writing that “began experimenting with routes to
social and mental decolonization” in this period (10). Disturbers of the Peace
situates its readings of literary texts within these contemporary critical discourses,
where possible reading primary texts alongside their authors’ critical writing.
Chapter One reads Miguel Street and Naipaul’s fiction generally in the framework
provided by his criticism; Chapter Two places Wynter’s novel The Hills of
Hebron alongside her vast body of critical work; Chapter Three’s discussion of
Wide Sargasso Sea utilizes the authorial logic offered by Rhys herself in her
letters; Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Jean Paul Sartre’s preface to
that text are contrapuntally pivotal to parsing the schizophrenic delirium of
Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain in Chapter Four; and Fanon’s Black Skin,
White Masks animates Chapter Five’s discussion of Brodber’s Jane and Louisa
Will Soon Come Home. As Josephs rightly asserts, it is fortunate to be able to
“turn directly to the authors of the fictional text under consideration for
complimentary critical material” (11). But her deliberate pairing of creative and
critical works bears additional fruit in the context of representations of madness,
illustrating her contention that the “approach to Caribbean narratives of madness
facilitates an enhanced synergism between fictional texts on madness and critical
writ (...truncated)