the culmination of all this bullshit

anna geneveive winham: my name sits atop this pile of papers not because i am some
kind of sole creator, some kind of origin, of the arrangement of the squiggles upon them,
but as a signal that, should you take objection to the said arrangement, i am volunteering
to take responsibility, to take the fall-out. if like the arrangement, or parts of it, i shall no
longer take responsibility. use it to subvert hegemonic power structures. this is not to say
that i have put no care or effort into these pages; indeed, i have spent many hours with
these letters and letters similar to them. it is to declare this no more my property than
yours; it is to implicate you.

What this structure of the signifying chain discloses is the possibility that I have, precisely
in so far as I have this language in common with other subjects, that is to say, in so far as
it exists as a language, to use it in order to signify something quite other than what it says.
(1135).
Jacques Lacan, The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious

i am rediscovering the power of destroying my own body.

i am rediscovering the power of destroying my own body.

does it disturb you because mine is a body you swore youd protect?
does it disturb you because mine is a body you told me was free?
does it disturb you because i am destroying your property?
when my mother tells me shell be happy
if i marry a man,
she is telling me my fingers are for shackling.
when politicians say french women
must not wear burkhas
they are telling me
their right to unveil me makes me free.
this body is imperial leather,
these veins rivers of patriarchy, genealogies of property,
political borders.
i am tearing them up.
i am ripping your maps to shreds.
i can starve to resist colonialism and men.
there is an unwritten history here.
when you have destroyed your paper skin
there is nothing left to write your stories on;
we must speak ourselves into resistance.
our scars, our charred marks, our bared bones
are our burning history books.
i have heard stories reminding me
my body is a revolution,
its destruction a traceless tradition.
i know a poem for a boy named quentin. in san quentin
imprisoned peoples are escaping their own bodies
from the inside out.
i found a poem hiding in a science journal:
page said: the prefrontal cortex allows tibetan monks to burn themselves alive:
it meant: the legacy of colonialism forces tibetan monks to burn themselves alive.
i heard a poem about the last name awkward.
poets ancestors broke their own bones
against masters who didnt even know they were resisting.
all slavery is murder.
you are killing me slowly
and often with soft hands.
refusing to let you kill me,
i am reclaiming this life,
speaking my revolution in blood ribbons and rib bones.

do i threaten you because

the logical conclusion of veganism
is suicide?
or do i threaten you because
the logical conclusion of veganism
is anticapitalist revolution?
do i threaten you because
if i can destroy me
i can destroy you?
because
this violence means i am unafraid
of yours
and you cannot put me back in line?
do i threaten you because
in destroying my body
i am making it mine?
are you mad
because i wont listen to your doctors
wont take your medicine
wont sit down and be quiet
listen to the wrong voices
am all outside the lines
are you mad because i laugh in the face of your maps
are you mad because
i am disorder
illogic, irrationality, disease
or are you mad?
only the sick can be well in a sick society.
the troubled are trouble:
do we disturb you?

Dat Shit Cray:

Scientific and Social Ideologies of Insanity, Deviance, Queerness, and
Orientalism
and
and
and

a script for social control:

diagnosis of mental (dis)order in the late 20th and early 21st century
and
schizoanalysis/schizosynthesis
unravelling
and
reravelling repeat
and
and
remix, create no originality
and
momentary subversion: the performance of madness in the academy
and
momentary subversion: the geographies of insanity
disorder
illogic
irrationality
disease
and
ARE YOU MAD
and
the trace of power tastes like metal
black boots on pregnant bellies
the liberal-democratic CON-CENSUS
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
one flew west
and

No Immaculate Conception:
Upon Structures of Madness and Finding a Way Out

WARNING
Perhaps there is little new to say about madness. Perhaps everything has already
been said, and we are standing at the end of history. Perhaps we exist as truly postmodern cyborgs, drifting with masked politics and without category. Let us reveal
ourselves in our surfaces; let us flip scripts and crack bones in resistance called clumsiness,
called disorder, called madness.
We will remix texts a la Barthes, and the power of this text will be in your reading
of it as one thing, as anthology. The newness is the amalgamation, the convalescence,
the presence of these words and the absences they invoke. The authors I know I have
stolen from are recorded in UPSIDE DOWN TAPESTRY MOSAIC HISTORY, but I
want us to begin thinking differently about authorship. Part of the madness I shall explore
is the transgression of boundaries, particularly those between self and world, self and
society, society and savagery, nation and Other, sanity and insanity. I want us to begin
from the outset1 imagining this boundary as fundamentally transgressable, though there
may be (polyvalent) consequences for this transgression. Still2, within the boundaries of
these pages at least, I can promise3 you that the transgression will be rewarding and,
perhaps, even revolutionary.
The journey in these pages will include extended interactions with a selection of
both literary and theoretical texts4 in order to articulate a politics of performance with
regards to madness. The category madness itself can be considered a site of polysemy,
itself an empty signifier devoid of meaning which only comes to have effect through
context, performance, play, and power. Thus, madness can play and can be played. We
can do it, and it can be difficult to distinguish between genuine and false iterations of
madness, madness done and madness done upon, madness performed to oppress and
madness performed to liberate.
On this stage, logic undoes itself. Revolutionary Marxism has lead us to class and
category, which in turn reveals to us the false emptiness of category used to mask
conservative apolitics. Christianity turns into Science as feudalism turns into capitalist
nationalism turns into neoliberal globalisation. We will watch the end revealed in the
beginning: things will always be the same. Time itself will no longer make (non)sense.
Every moment of power will contain possibility for authority and its subversion. We will
watch the medical establishment work as a tool of the state, casting authority upon its
enablers and discrediting dissent among those it colonises. We will verb our schizo and
dress it in medicine. This will be in harmony with new materialist feminism. This will be
nothing new.
This is just a field guide:

imagine beginning non-lineararly
let us destabilise stillness
3 I wonder what, exactly, you will do if you reach the end and find I have betrayed my promise.
4 especially Ahmed, Foucault, Butler, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Mifflin, Barthes, Baudrillard, Lacan,
iek, Carr, Le, Arendt, Anderson, Hassan, Alinsky, Heidegger
1
2

extend
thought to
madness, action
to revolution.
Have I imagined freedom
And did you ever imagine freedom
imagined
this way? (Reese 7)
dream of freedom; freedom dreams like free your mind from wakeful self. we are so sick.
so sick, of our selves! (Deleuze and Guattari xxi), lets schiz:
Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars of rainbows in the sky, alpine
machines all of them connected to those of his body. The continual whirr of machines.
He thought then that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the
profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take
into himself, as in a dream every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the
waxing and waning of the moon. To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at
least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others. Lenz has projected
himself back to a time before the man-nature dichotomy, before all the co-ordinates
based on this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down. He does not live nature as
nature, but as a process of production. There is no such thing as either man or nature
now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines
together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines,
all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any
meaning whatsoever. (Deleuze and Guattari 2)
manifesto of a tenured radical. empty the words of meaning. nothing outside the text.
empty the nothing outside of meaning. play it:
that I could be thrust into a galaxy
of metaphallic stars
metaphoric stars (Reese 7)
He had nearly very nearly as much.
She had very nearly as much as had had.
Had she.
She had.
Loose loosen, Loose losten to losten, to lose.
Many.
If a little if as little if as little as that.
If as little as that, if it is as little as that that is if it is very nearly all of it, her dear her
dear does not mention a ball at all.
Actually.
As to this.
Actually as to this.

High or do you do it.

Actually as to this high or do you do it.
Not how do you do it.
Actually as to this.
Not having been or not having been nor having been or not
having been.
Interrupted.
All of this makes it unanxiously.
Feel so. (Stein 57-76)
Schizophrenia is like love (Deleuze and Guattari 5)
ideology of boundaries is so pervasive that we have this inside-out/outside-in but Ahmed
is talking about emotions creating the boundaries and bridges (10) ... link to Lacan mirror
stage, thinking about language as a form of erasing the creation of emotion,
words/language as objects of emotion and/or vice versa psychologising and privatisation
of emotions (Ahmed 12).
so that I can live here and be sane
alive and in color and in sane
a metaphor
a meta
phor wholeness
alive and in color and in sane
at the mercy of the ritual
at the mercy of the ritual
reconcile
my meta
phor stars
alive and in color and in sane (Reese 7)
Society constructs its own delirium (Deleuze and Guattari 10)
There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be
fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and
death. (Arendt 444)
dead
we break bread
and
beneath the imagery
I scrub the dirt from the old ritual containers
piercing wholes into gems and hanging
my earlobes from them. (Reese 7)

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymos mad againe. (Eliot 430-431)

MAP OF THE CRAZED//MAP OF THE (UN)KNOWN WORLD

a kind of preface
the culmination of all this bullshit
implication
epigraph et
i am rediscovering the power of destroying my own body
titling
WARNING
MAP OF THE CRAZED//MAP OF THE (UN)KNOWN WORLD
KEY
TAXONOMY
1 cycle of crossing
2 my mother
dance the wall-paper
3 boundaries of global kinship
4 who lays claim to the borderlands?
5 unafraid of yours
6 technoculture and the rephrasing of the schizophrenic state
show me what democracy looks like
UPSIDE DOWN TAPESTRY MOSAIC HISTORY

KEY
I am writing. I am writing on me, I am writing on her. The story began to be written the
moment the present began. I am asking, how can I be simultaneously inside and outside?
I didnt even know this world existed, and I thought it existed only in my head, in my
dreams. And now here I am, an open book: Inside the book cover, chapters are chaotic
and confusing. The cover says more than the book. Chapter One is in fact the ending.
Chapter Two is missing. Chapter Three builds a reference to the unknown, and the rest
of the book is still in progress. Some paragraphs are written and re-written and some are
completely erased with the hope that they will never be read. Some are boldly typed to
stand out. Some pages are ripped out, some freshly cut. Paper cuts make the reader bleed
at times, reflecting the persona inside. Some chapters are written for me, by authors
known and unknown.
Take a person out of her cocoon and watch her quiver in confusion.
Holding onto ideas, sleeping (sometimes not) with a vision so real, so defined, a
vision of a perfect world. In the stress of confusion: an unnumbered chapter begins, and
ends.
A dialogue between reality and dream. Arguing, fighting, hope comes creeping in
silence, but forceful. The more you read, the more I recollect, the more I understand that
expectancy is a sharp blade tearing the pages and disrobing the soul. Sometimes it is
troublesome and painful. A chapter is obscured by absence and nothing could make it
radiant. Words written on paper thick enough for me to feel the blood flowing under the
skin, under the paper. Reading, I wonder, whether this is birth or suicide?
- Lalla Essaydi

To schiz: to waltz with time, transgress the border, dream a freedom, life a death
with the consequences. To schiz, to die (Baudrillard Forget Foucault 118), to suicide the self:
to write: to suicide the self (Baudrillard Forget Foucault 118, Barthes 875), then transcribe
our names on our tombstones (Foucault What is an Author? 906). To name: to
capitalise (Foucault What is an Author? 908-909). To name: to analyse. To name: to
die a long time.

TAXONOMY
madness holds its own border. sanitys opposite is insanity, orders disorder,
eases disease. these dichotomies with boundaries exist5 and we ought not ignore them, but
they, too, have limits. madness is distinctly not medicalised, resistant to diagnosis.
madness is not in the DSM6. madness harvests a history, a ship of fools, a hysterical
woman in the attic. madness has a bite to it, a fight to it. madness is filled with defiance
and rage, might murder you in your sleep or be the ghost to steal your bed. madness
might wander or lead you astray, might be your escape. your way out. an invisible stage.
to schiz, as above, to die. to schiz, to lie, to die to say whats new. to intrude. to
gertrude stein like modernism, like post-post modernism, like is the post- in post-modern
the post- in post-colonial, like, how can you tell whats a question? to schizoanalyse: to
place the schizo at the site of the psyche. to schizosynthesise: to disrupt linear time.
non-eurocentric is a disappointment, a return to its own origins, inescapably
what it seeks not to be, an invocation of what it would forget. there is no forgetting. The
past is never dead. Its not even past (Faulkner 230). there is only forgetting in the
nation: addicted to selective amnesia. Third World is colonial. post-colonial is a
misnomer. Global South is bound to the map. developing is anachronistic, a disruption in
linear time in an oppressive way.
power as the multiplicity of force relations immanent to the sphere in which
they operate and which constitute their own organization, the process which, through
ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them, the
support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system

5
6

though let us consider them Derridianly

the DSM, though, is madness.

or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one
another, the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional
crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the
various social hegemonies Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather
consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power
(Foucault History of Sexuality 1628-9).

cycle of crossing
Sophie carries violence in her skin. A child of rape, her very existence is a locus of
power and its abuse, invasion and its consequences, life in the aftermath. A daughter of
Haiti, she inherits the only successful slave revolution and its punishment, in the legacy of
continued global White Supremacy. Immigrant to the United States, she is naturalised
into disorder, forced into madness. In Edwidge Danticats 1994 novel Breath, Eyes, Memory,
written from Sophies perspective, forces of colonialism, hetero-patriarchy, and
immigration and border-crossing converge on four generations of Haitian women
(Sophie, her grandmother, her mother, and her daughter), erupting into madness. This
madness is devious. It slips onto their bodies and into their minds, polyvalent,
polysemous, polyphonous. The forces listed, each a system of power related to the others,
as well as the agency of the women, determine how, when, and by whom these women
are named mad, as well as the consequences of the diagnoses (or lack thereof). Neither
madness itself nor its diagnosis, as explored in Breath, Eyes, Memory, is inherently or always
either subversive or oppressive. The context of each situation, the surrounding systems of
power, forces the diagnosis or the performance to do different work. Essence seems to
pour out of action, and we are left with madness as a struggle of power.
As already outlined, colonialism, hetero-patriarchy, and immigration and bordercrossing converge as systems of power: each one affects the other. In order to gain some
understanding of how each affects the construction, performance, and diagnosis of
madness in Breath, Eyes, Memory, each merits its own analysis. The division of these topics
is, indeed, simplistic and replicates some of the problems we will later explore with the
very act of definition/analysis. However, as Saul Alinsky states in Rules for Radicals, to say

that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends
and principles (25). We have been born into a world of analysis, of category, of obsessive
taxonomy and science, and to deny ourselves these tools in the fight to end the oppression
that they are used to create and perpetuate is to imagine a non-existent immaculate
conception. This imagination can be used to suffocate dissent. The worst means are none
at all, and so, imperfectly, colonialism, hetero-patriarchy, and immigration and border
crossing each shall receive quasi-independent analysis. We will begin this way partially
precisely in order to eventually demonstrate how analysis itself is riddled with and
connected to the same downfalls as scientific, nationalist, patriarchal imperialist
capitalism ideology.
In Breath, Eyes, Memory, the legacy of European colonialism leaves its imprint on
how these Haitian women live and articulate their experiences. This legacy, however,
doesnt dispel the possibility of its resistance, if we continue to consider power in a
Foucauldian sense. Like Foucault, I am thoroughly uninterested in ascertaining as true
some universal truth. I am instead interested in examining the historical and political
modes and effects of the production of and belief in truth; I am interested in the
mechanisms through which truth is determined as a social construct. As Foucault insists,
truth isnt the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude; nor the
privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of
this world; it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it
induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its general
politics of truth; that is, the types of discourses which it accepts and makes
function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enables one to distinguish
true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques
and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who
are charged with saying what counts as true (Foucault The Foucault Reader 72-73).
The mechanisms through which truth is determined in European society, and thus the
ideologies which European colonialism exported and attempted to institute, are primarily,

now, scientific. If one can imbue ones opinion with the authority of Science, ones
opinion achieves the clout of truth (Foucault What is an Author? 908). Where Science
is the dominant discourse and only certain members of society, those given authority and
force by capitalism, have access to Science, other minority discourses are invalidated.
This is by no means the only problem with the hegemony of science as truth-telling
mechanism, however. Science becomes a truth regime, in which scientifically acceptable
statements govern each other such that they can be verified or falsified by scientific
procedures: the whole regime of science is internally constructed by itself and thus logical
to itself. The conductor of science seeks and places on himself this internally-consistent
and confirming mode of knowledge acquisition, seeking to become, as Haraway puts it in
Situated Knowledges, the fetishized perfect subject of oppositional history (Haraway
586), and thus a disappearing act. Furthermore, Science carries the illusion of neutrality,
allowing for it to become some kind of arbitrating discourse made ever more
necessary as society calls for a type of power and of knowledge that the sanctity of
science would render neutral (Foucault Power/Knowledge 107). This illusion of
neutrality furthers only the dominant force of hegemony, discrediting other truth-telling
mechanisms in the process.
As European colonists spread this ideology of science as the sole truth-telling
mechanism of society across their colonies, truth as determined in other modes became
constructed as relic and primitive, discredited and backward-ed. However, following or
investing in alternative modes of truth determination can be a form of resistance. When,
for example, Tante Atie, Sophies aunt, replies to Sophie about the possibility of dying
slowly of chagrin, she tells Sophie a story about a group of people in Guinea who carry
the sky on their heads (Danticat 25). These people, she says, are the people of Creation.

Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything (Danticat 25). Because of this
strength, the Maker has chosen them for this task, but they do not know so. Tante Atie
then asserts that, if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to
carry part of the sky on your head (Danticat 25). This explanation, a story coming out of
an oral tradition, offers an alternative theory of causality to that which science would
invoke: this explanation cannot involve observation or experiment. Tante Aties
explanation in fact rejects observable facts about the real world, the basis of scientific
enquiry, an act often characterised as mad (Greenfeld 19). Tante Aties storytelling,
Haitian to Haitian, is not read as madness, however. It is understood as folk knowledge,
but somehow it does not hold as much sway as real knowledge. In Remembering
Haiti, Ethan Casey writes how Danticat herself considers that the voices of the Haitian
women who came before her can speak through her, but the reception her voice receives
is still subject to the divides between folk and real knowledge, and Casey regards her
contributions to Haitis national memory as necessary though not sufficient (525). Still,
Tante Aties explanation performs a resistance to the internalisation of the coloniser,
demonstrates a refusal to be colonised in mind, despite the possibility of being read as mad.
Part of the resistance here is covert: the story is told Haitian to Haitian, and thus the
threat of the consequences for madness is less present. Furthermore, the chagrin of which
she speaks seems an alternative interpretation of depression, resisting the Europeancentric urge to medicalise. Thinking of story-telling as a Haitian tradition that can return
voices of ancestors to the present, Yolanda Pierce writes regarding Restless Spirits in
Breath Eyes Memory,
These spiritual beliefs are African in origin and Haitian in practice. But these
beliefs are also mitigated by the constant presence of the New World; a distinctly

American spiritual sensibility that interrupts and disrupts traditional religious

beliefs and practices in the novel. (68)
The alternative traditions of the text are thoroughly hybrid and situated in the New
World, even if they are from Africa. Considering the audience as part of the context,
resistance or madness through alternative knowledges and practices can be the
transformation into non-European modes of understanding, even if this exists outside of
the European gaze.
However, Breath, Eyes, Memory does not wholeheartedly depict a cheery outlook on
the state of dissent in the post-colonial mindset. When discussing her mothers
pregnancy following her rape, Sophie paints the charity of a well-off mulatto family: Even
though my mother was pregnant and half insane, the family took her in anyway because
my grandmother had cooked and cleaned in their house for years, before she married my
grandfather (Danticat 139). Key to this discussion is the explicitness of the hybridity of
the mulatto family. This is actually a bit of a misnomer. The description of this family is
not particularly hybrid, for example, in the way that Stuart Hall conceptualises hybridity:
The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by
the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of identity
which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are
those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through
transformation and difference (Hall 235). The categorisation of mulatto is part of a
complex racial hierarchy brought by scientific racism to the Americas (Somerville 256),
materialising in varying permutations in different American social contexts. The
definition of this family as mulatto demonstrates an incorporation of European scientific
racial taxonomy into the social organisation of Haiti. The darker Haitians, Sophies

family, work for this mulatto family, but still the mulatto family is explicitly marked and
categorised. The charity this mulatto family is able to demonstrate is highly reminiscent of
the false benevolence invoked in Freires Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This family is able to
instate themselves as superior through their charity to this mad, pregnant woman. This
particular kind of charity, charity to the mad, Foucault describes in detail in History of
Madness, when discussing the travelling ship of fools providing momentary opportunity for
the wealthy city-dwellers to demonstrate their Christian charity in giving insubstantial aid
to the mad without changing the structure that systematically excludes them from society.
In this passage, Danticat demonstrates that even after a slave rebellion and the institution
of government run by post-slavery, post-colonial people, the legacies of colonialism and
White Supremacy live on and can be perpetuated by people of colour, that indeed some
people of colour stand to, in some ways, benefit from these systems. Danticat, through the
figure of Sophies mad mother, additionally demonstrates how the body of the
traumatised, mad woman becomes a site of further exploitation through a system of false
benevolence. Furthermore, Danticats positioning of rape by a macoute, especially, as the
initial trauma for this maddened woman turns the act of rape into a genealogical cycle of
echoes of that violence: the trauma of the rape doesnt end. Clearly, a destruction of the
colonial society through building up the nation (Fanon 219) is inadequate; the third
world woman is told her liberation will come later (Jawardena 259). As Simone
Alexander performs a feminist reading of the nation in Breath, Eyes, Memory, she writes,
womens bodies undergo a form of dehumanization as they become subject to
militaristic scrutiny by the nationalist regime over which men preside (374). She details
that the rape of Haitian women by uniformed macoutes was systematic assault used to
terrorise society to the point that citizens would not resist the Duvalier dictatorship as well

as ceasing the action of womens movements. Rape leads to after-effects for the raped
woman, larger society, and the child born of the rape. Following her rape, Sophies
mother, tore her sheets and bit off pieces of her own flesh when she had nightmares
(Danticat 139). The violence done against her becomes self-perpetuated and selfannihilative; it turns in on itself. This is highly reminiscent of the practice of testing, where
a mother uses her fingers to test if her daughters hymen has broken, to see if she is still
pure. Through Sophies narration of the trauma testing involves for her, we see that men
are not required to perpetuate the violence and trauma of patriarchy. Men are not
necessary to drive women to madness. However, men are pictured as the source of
womens madness, even if the source of the colonised mens rage is the history of
perceived emasculation through colonialism, which Kimmel details in Globalization and
its (Male)contents. Mens position as the source of madness is clearly demonstrated in the
aftermath of Martines death:
Marc was waiting in the house in Brooklyn when I got there. Somehow I expected
there to be detectives, and flashing cameras, but this was New York after all.
People killed themselves every day. Besides, he was a lawyer. Her knew people in
power. He simply had to tell them that my mother was crazy. (Danticat 225)
Marcs position as an American man, a well-connected American man, allows him to take
control of the narrative about Sophies mothers death when she literally cannot speak.
Although we hear that Sophies mother killed herself, we hear this only through Marc.
Even though Marc has seemed trustworthy until this point, Sophie is suspicious because
she understands his ability to completely control the narrative, especially through
discrediting his wife by calling her mad. This means that even in Martines death, any
story she could have told is stripped of credibility through Marcs calling her crazy. If we
examine Sophies relationship with Joseph her husband as he counsels her through her

bulimia, we can notice similar trends in how the power that patriarchy grants to men
increases Josephs power to name Sophies madness through multiple routes. Sophie
begins,
You know my problems.
The therapy, thats helping you.
I dont think it is.
Youll have to start over, but youre okay.
I dont feel okay.
Youre a beautiful woman. Its natural. Youre desirable. Nothing is wrong
with that. (Danticat 184)
Here Sophies husband has power through his position as a man, and Sophie loses power
not only because of her position as a woman, but also through her already existent
diagnosis. Sophie is already positioned as mad, and thus not to be believed and unable to
make her own decisions, control her own body. Joseph keeps telling her that she is okay,
while Sophie continues to insist she is unwell. Joseph keeps telling her that her therapy is
working, while Sophie continues to insist that it isnt. Joseph tries to comfort her by
assuring her that shes desirable, a topic which Sophie hasnt mentioned. Joseph uses his
power and his gaze to discredit Sophies own experience, a kind of secondary,
metaphorical rape.
This secondary rape becomes even more real through Sophies sexual
interactions with her husband. However, in order to understand why Sophie feels so
traumatised by having sex with her husband, we have to understand her experience with
testing and doubling. Regarding testing, in her adulthood Sophie confronts her
grandmother. Her grandmother tested her mother, and her mother tested her, so this
conversation reveals a genealogical cycle of patriarchal violence inflicted by women. Her
grandmother asks, Your mother? Did she ever test you? You can call it that. That is
what we have always called it. I call it humiliation, I said. I hate my body. I am

ashamed to show it to anybody(Danticat 123). The actions of these women, along

generational lines, create shame and guilt surrounding female sexuality, leading Sophie to
a position of self-loathing and humiliation. She becomes secretive, wishing to hide herself.
Even after giving birth, she almost refused to let Joseph take pictures of me with her
child, and was too ashamed of the stiches on [her] stomach and the flabs of fat all over
[her] body (Danticat 129). This shame and wish to hide, understandably, complicates
her experience of sex; she explains,
I learned I had to double while being tested. There were many cases in our
history where our ancestors had doubled. Following the vandou tradition, most of
our presidents were actually one body split in two: part flesh and part shadow.
That was the only way they could murder and rape so many people and still go
home to play with their children and make love to their wives. After my marriage,
whenever Joseph and I were together I doubled. (Danticat 155-6)
The testing process is traumatic for Sophie, and so she splits herself, both literally
and figuratively. She learns first to dissociate herself from her present circumstances, leave
her body by escaping with her mind. This split in self is often associated with madness.
Here Sophie is using a madness to escape her trauma. However, she also discusses how
doubling, her escape from a violent, patriarchal action (testing), situated in the vandou
tradition, a magic, non-European, non-Scientific tradition, can be and is used
oppressively by the dictators and macoutes. Doubling, splitting the self, dissociating presence
and absence, can be used to commit awful deeds or to escape them. Sophie is aware of
the possible polyvalence of madness, doubling. Sophie so much associates her sexual life
with testing and doubling that even when she is married to the man she loves and trusts, she
practices doubling. Lying next to Joseph, she says, He reached over and pulled my body
towards his. I closed my eyes and thought of the Marassa, the doubling. I was lying there
on that bed and my clothes were being peeled off my body, but really I was somewhere

else (Danticat 200). Even in a most intimate moment with her husband, the violence
Martine inflicted upon Sophie through the testing, because of the testing and the rape that
stopped it upon her own body, returns in the body of her husband, who is transformed
into a rapist. The violence works in cycles, pushing these women to desperate means,
dissociations from their situations. The subversive aspects of this act do not eliminate the
tragedy. Sophies dissociation returns her to her mother, and she feels that, I had a
chance to console my mother again. I was lying in bed with my mother. I was holding her
and fighting off that man, keeping those images out of her head (Danticat 200). Sophie,
the daughter of her mothers rape, becomes her mothers protector, years later, in the
moment she feels her own rape. The protection she provides is the assurance that her
mothers new child is not a demon, is not the product of another rape. The violence of
rape collapses generationally. As Sophie doubles the theme of madness also returns: during
her doubling she tells her mother that I would never let anyone put her away in a mental
hospital (Danticat 200). Martine has a fear of the mental hospital, a prison for the
crazed, so large that she would rather die; Sophies fear is so large that she would rather
double. After having sex, Sophie asks Joseph is they can visit her mother, and they
exchange words that demonstrate clearly different, and differential, interpretations of the
preceding act: he says, whatever you want. He was panting. You were very good,
(Danticat 200), while she replies, I kept my eyes closed so the tears wouldnt slip out
(Danticat 200). Sex, the act during which Sophie doubles, schizes as an escape, becomes
polysemous too Joseph has found the experience wonderful, while Sophie has
experienced it as a genealogical rape. After this conversation she says, I waited for him
to fall asleep, then went to the kitchen. I ate every scrap of the dinner leftovers, then went
to the bathroom, locked the door, and purged all the food out of my body (Danticat

200). This sexual experience, which Joseph seems to find so fulfilling, becomes the cause
of another madness: not only does Sophie double, but she also takes in all the food she
can and then expels it miserably, the way her mother cannot expel the child, the way
Sophie cannot expel the cycle of trauma, rape, and madness. Sophie makes this
genealogical rendering of violence and madness explicit when she says, I woke up in a
cold sweat wondering if my mothers anxiety was somehow hereditary or if it was
something I had caught from living with her dreaming about the same thing: a man
with no face, pounding a life into a helpless young girl (Danticat 93). Sophies
wonderings mean that we cannot define madness as disease: she wonders if she could
have caught the anxiety, as one catches a disease, but even was we read this, we know
that it isnt contagious in the traditional medical sense. The anxiety becomes a metaphor,
standing as an echo of the ongoing violence upon these womens bodies. Sophie continues
the genealogical, generational analysis, saying of her daughter, the fact that she could
sleep meant that she had no nightmares, and maybe, would never become a frightened
insomniac like my mother and me (Danticat 193). This passage provides a glimmer of
hope, perhaps even a way out. Sophie hopes that somehow her daughter has managed to
escape the madness of her family, even though the madness itself has been an escape for
Sophie.
Children and childbirth are complicated and polysemous in Breath, Eyes, Memory.
We have already seen Sophies shame at her post-pregnant body, her mothers madness
at carrying a child of rape, and Sophies attempt to convince her mother that her next
child need not be a cause of trauma for her. Sophie feels highly conflicted even in her
own existence, mediating her appearance as an echo of her invisible fathers with
becoming her mothers protector. When Martine is pregnant again, she panics, becomes

anxious, and worries that she will be sent to a mental hospital. In an effort to calm her,
Sophie says, at least this child will know its father (Danticat 192), a reflection on her
own rootlessness as well as the violence done upon her mother to bring her into being.
Martine replies, I will have it at the expense of my sanity. They will take it out of me one
day and put me away the next (Danticat 192), a prediction which comes true in a
macabre way. For these women, their ability to give birth, the ability that society
prescribes as the centre of their womanness becomes a force that drives them mad. For
these women, the prisons of their bodies, their very selves, become violent and drive them
mad. It is not just that they are treated as women, but their very womanness, which drives
them to insanity.
While patriarchy and discourses of power through science interact and play a
large role in the generational madness Danticat explores in her text, immigration and
border crossing also help to complicate and construct insanity. For example, the chagrin
Tante Atie discusses towards the beginning could easily be described as depression, but
Tante Atie interprets it differently, non-medically. She has an alternative and anticolonial explanation for its existence. Similarly, Sophies bulimia changes meanings and
contexts on different sides of the Amerikkka/Haiti border between national imaginaries.
Back in Haiti, she and her mother are able to have a frank discussion:
After I got married, I found out I had something called bulimia, I said.
What is that?
Its when you dont eat at all and then eat a whole lot bingeing.
How does that happen? she said. You are so tiny, so very petite. Why would
you do that? I have never heard of a Haitian woman getting anything like that.
Food, it was so rare when we were growing up. We could not waste it.
You are blaming me for it, I said. That is part of the problem.
You have become very American, she said. (Danticat 179)

In this passage, Martine calls medicalised madness, and those who experience it,
American. Mental disorders become bound up with Americanness and inimical to being
Haitian. Martine cannot understand the disorder because it runs so counter to her
Haitianness. While it seems that Sophie finds this an invalidation of her lived experience,
Danticat is setting up an unresolvable tensions. The question here isnt really about the
truth of Sophie experience, so much as what that experience does, who it turns her into,
and how it constructs a border between her and her mother. The national/state border,
then, becomes a metaphorical though still real border between Sophie and her
mother. Sophie articulates the strangeness of this border when she first meets her mother
after having crossed the border into the US:
She did not look like the picture Tante Atie had on her night table. Her face was
long and hollow. Her hair had a blunt cut and she had long spindly legs. She had
dark circles under her eyes and, as she smiled, lines of wrinkles tightened her
expression. Her fingers were scarred and sunburned. It was as though she never
stopped working in the cane fields after all. (Danticat 42)
On the one hand, Sophie helps to constructs the US as a place of disease. On the other
side of that border, everyone seems unhealthy, diseased, disordered. Over there, chagrin
becomes depression, child becomes cancer, doubling becomes bulimia. In the US, things
are not as they seem in Haiti. Her mother has become old, thin, wrinkled, and obsessed
with bleaching her skin. Even as a young girl, Sophie notices this. However, the last
sentence of this passage complicates the otherwise simple construction of the border. The
understanding that she never really stopped working in the sugar fields shows a global
system at play. Though the border has real material consequences, it is also a disguise for
what is the same. Her mother in the US is still the heir of a colonial legacy; she still works
as though she is a slave. This understanding of the border shows its nature as a social
construction, but it also shows how this social construction is used sometimes to create

difference and sometimes to disguise it. These two passages show the national/state
border at play in the book as the same kind of real imaginary border between names and
other words. Naming, writing, science, hegemony, and borders all become linked and all
become tools that can be used to distinguish and to disguise, especially as they travel
through the site of madness.
The Letter of Christopher Columbus on the Discovery of America
demonstrates the power of naming and borders, especially when the one naming has the
power of empire behind him. He writes,
I came to the Indian sea, where I found many islands inhabited by men without
number, of all which I took possession for our most fortunate king, with
proclaiming heralds and flying standards, no one objecting. To the first of these I
gave the name of the blessed Saviour, on whose aid relying I had reached this as
well as the other islands. But the Indians call it Guanahany. I also called each one
of the others by a new name. For I ordered one island to be called Santa Maria of
the Conception, another Fernandina, another Isabella, another Juana, and so on
with the rest. (18)
This letter shows how the impulse to name, and rename, goes hand in hand with
imperialism. The power one demonstrates one has when one draws a border, when one
casts a name, increases the reach of that power. As earlier we have seen, the ability of
powerful men to call women mad actually increases their power, while decreasing the
womens. However, as with womens ability to perpetuate patriarchy, the oppressed can
enable hegemony. When Sophie and Tante Atie discuss the pig Louise has given them,
they have the following exchange:
Is it male or female? I asked.
What difference does it make to the pig? she asked.
I want to give it a name.
Call it Paul or Paulette, Jean or Jeanne. The pig will not protest. You do not
have to name something to make it any more yours. (Danticat 135-6).

Sophie, returned from the Amerikkka, seeks to name the pig. Tante Atie, still
steeped in her Haitian ways, never having left, rejects Sophies naming process. Tante
Atie does here what Sophies earlier mention of sugarcane fields does for the
Amerikkka/Haiti border between national imaginaries. Tante Atie reveals the naming
process as ultimately empty, but she also manages to point out that Sophies drive to
name the pig comes from an urge to claim the pig. However, as we have seen with
madness and especially with the doubling throughout the text, even naming can be used
multiply, depending upon context, for liberation or for oppression. An example of
liberation comes when Sophies grandmother wants to register the ownership of her land.
By writing down and by naming her land, she will indeed lose some authentic Haitianness,
wrapped up in oral traditions. However, she will also ensure that the land remains in her
family, that it will not fall into the hands of imperialists or macoutes. While this involves
some investment in the rule of post-imperial, post-colonial law, some buy-in to the
hegemonic European way of thinking, Sophies grandmother is actually using the script
she has been given to increase the power she can wield. This imperialist naming process
becomes a way to resist the imperialism that continues in their lives.
The book ends in horror, with Martine violently killing her unborn child and
herself and Sophies uncontrolled reaction after the funeral. Part of why readers read
Martines act as violent is because of the widely held belief that childbearing is the essence
of womanhood and that not to bear a child therefore is the absolute failing of a woman.
However, in the case of Martine, this violence, this moment of madness, ultimately frees
her from the hell of her life. Marc, in conversation with the mistrustful Sophie, describes
her death:
In blood. She was lying there in blood.

Did she slip and fall?

It was very hard to see.
What was very hard to see?
She had a mountain of sheets on the floor. She had prepared this.
What?
She stabbed her stomach with an old rusty knife. I counted, and they
counted again at the hospital. Seventeen times. (Danticat 224)
Danticat is unremitting in her depiction of the horror. She makes us feel the pain and the
violence, but she does so in a way that reveals the larger violence of the imperialist
patriarchy. This suicide is Martines main schiz she escapes the cycle of violence
through a moment of violent madness. This moment, too, is polysemous. While Marc
remains to tell the story, a master narrative, a hegemony, we see Sophie doubt it. We see
Sophie continue. In Haiti after the funeral, Sophie also experiences an outburst of
madness:
I ran through the field, attacking the cane. I took of my shoes and began to
bean a can stalk. I pounded it until it began to lean over. I pushed over the cane
stalk. It snapped back, striking my shoulder. I pulled at it, yanking it from the
ground. My palm was bleeding.
The cane cutters stared at me as though I was possessed. The funeral
crowd was now standing between the stalks, watching me beat and pound the
cane. My grandmother held back the priest as he tried to come for me.
From where she was standing, my grandmother shouted like the women
from the market place, Ou libr? Are you free?
Tante Atie echoed her cry, her voice quivering with her sobs.
Ou libr! (Danticat 233)
In this passage, Sophie provides herself with an escape from her grief. Madness again
becomes an escape, though Sophies mad escape does not include her death. The
experience or performance of madness becomes her freedom, with her grandmother
asking her if she is free, while her Aunt confirms that she is. These words, even in the text
obstinately not written in English, become yet another site where multiple interpretations
are possible. The women in this text shout to each other in the market place, asking each
other if they are free when they put down their burdens, testing to see if they are unhurt.

Through this question, there is a kind of resistance to patriarchal White Supremacy no

matter who practices it. Applying this question to Sophie experiencing the long pain of
her mothers unjust suffering and death, feeling the ramifications of patriarchy and
imperialism, intimates that these Haitian women all understand this experience as they
speak in a code that the men around them do not understand. Attacking the cane, Sophie
attacks the vehicle of slavery and imperialism. Her attack we understand as futile in terms
of ending imperialism, but it acts as part of her own liberation. These futile irrationalities,
these madnesses, allow for the possibility of resistance. They create a space for alternative
understandings and traditions which dominant powers do not understand and may not
even be able to see. Influenced by patriarchy, imperialism, and border-crossings,
experiences and performances of different madnesses allow the Haitian women in Breath,
Eyes, Memory to create spaces and communities of resistance. Even if these resistances fail
to completely dismantle entire systems of oppression, they continue in the creation of a
tradition of dissent.

my mother
The casting of madness onto the bodies

the woman trapped behind the yellow

of women of colour, as in Breath, Eyes

wall-paper is my mother. we are

Memory, should serve to alarm white

perpetually

women. The oppression of women of

ourselves into desire and control. we are

colour, Kimberl Crenshaw notes, is a

creeping behind the ink on this paper.

more

we are this paper. we are the tree,

extreme

articulation

of

the

sleepless

and

and

reformed.

thinning

boundaries of womanhood for white

toppled

through

women. White women receive material,

observing the patriarchy at work in my

tangible privilege from their whiteness,

white, wealthy family i have been

but White Supremacy does not save

coming to understand how people could

them; this is similar to the idea that men

be White Feminists. through observing

receive privilege from patriarchy, but

White Supremacy at work in my white,

patriarchy still works to restrict men.

wealthy family, i cannot understand why

Thus, in The Yellow Wallpaper, we

people can be white feminists. i tell my

see a middle-class white woman creep

friends, the feminine mystique IS my mother. i

into madness, influenced by the very

tell my friends, i cannot tell you everything. i

same forces (colonialism, patriarchy,

tell my friends, i am alive because i love my

borders, hegemonic discourse of science)

mother. we have inherited imperialism,

as were the Haitian women in Breath,

and it courses through our veins. we

Eyes, Memory. For example, the house the

have inherited imperialism, and we live

young family has rented for the summer

in the house built of White Supremacy:

is,
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate. (Stetson 647)
There are two sites of madness here: the

there are two sites of madness here: the

womans body and the colonial mansion.

womans body and the colonial mansion.

In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock

her body is the colonial mansion; it

discusses the parallel formation of the

wraps around inside itself. the mansion is

domestic sphere of the nation and the

inside itself. the mansion is the nation.

public sphere. The nation is built upon a

the mansion is the woman is the body of

patriarchal family structure, the necessity

the nation. my father has complete

of separating a public realm of politics

economic control over the body of the

and a private realm for domestics.

nation. my father is a businessman. my

Women come to represent the nation

mother does the finances. my mother is a

through their bodies; they are metonymy

colonial mansion. my father comes home

for the nation while men rule over it.

with a sports car: we laugh at him. my

Marriage, then, must be read not only as

mother is home with grey hair and

union between man and woman, but as

deeper wrinkles:

a subjugating of nation to man:

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage. (Stetson 647)
The

womans

expectation

of

her

my mother hardly ever laughs. when she

husbands pointed laughter demonstrates

laughs i sometimes think she is crying.

a normalisation of invalidation and

when she laughs i sometimes think i am

oppression, through which Stetson writes

crying. in our english household we are

against the womens gothic tradition

oft-unspoken supports, beams in a

(Delamotte 4): patriarchal colonialism

colonial mansion trying to break it, our

doesnt even need male colonists to

resistance coded in whispers. my father

continue it when women can internalise

believes in rational debate, so we discuss

oppression through an internalisation of

the new physics of the universe over

the male gaze, as W. E. B. Dubois

dinner (which my mother cooked). when

discusses the internalisation of the White

i point out the hegemony of science, he

gaze. In this way, the protagonist of

scoffs and points out my classism. he tells

The Yellow Wallpaper, whose name

me he has the talking stick; i tell him hes

we, significantly, never learn, helps to

racist. we fight discourse with discourse,

perpetuate her own oppression. Though

but always on patriarchal terms. all of

she lives in a world of alternative logics,

our arguments have the same winner.

she invalidates them herself, saying,

authority

was

never

question:

John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of
superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put
down in figures. (Stetson 647)
Her own modes of understanding, faith

golden

and superstition, her husband does not

chemistry and mountains, climbs rocks

value and, as above, openly laughs at.

and declares herself king, cries when her

His laughter invalidates her mechanisms

mother wont let her play in that dress,

of

truth

cries when her father tells her to come

discourses, while she simply labels him

back when shes calmed down. she

practical. She does, however, hold a

refuses to calm down, then:

determining

truth,

her

daughter

is

son-like,

likes

quiet critique:
John is a physician, and perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You
see, he does not believe I am sick! (Stetson 647)
While she understands herself as sick,

still refuses to calm down, no longer

her husband, a physician, the very

believes in calm, never believed in calm.

symbol of the medical establishment,

cries and calls it calm. says shes calm

does not determine her to be so. Indeed,

then cries, then cries out, then refuses to

she even goes so far as to name him as

talk. especially refuses to talk when

perhaps the cause of the continuation of

relatives are visiting. ah, yes, thatll show

her sickness. Her emphasis on his belief

him. doesnt notice her mothers sad

regarding

her

face. notices her mothers sad face and

understanding of his power; because he

stops. golden daughter other daughter.

holds the power, what she can convince

anorexia other golden disease, symptom

him of becomes her power. However,

of anxiety or depression, third therapist

convincing him is difficult. He does not

tells us. we diagnose society. our father

know she is sick, she writes, because he

plays along. our mother wants us to use

cannot determine why she is sick: he does

knives for our pizza. neither one of them

not know the cause:

knows where they went wrong.

her

sickness

shows

John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and

that satisfies him. (Stetson 649).

Once again, her own discourse of truth is

what do i want? i ask myself. at least i

dissatisfactory to her husband for it does

have an answer. what do i want? she asks

not contain causality that he can read,

herself, and it doesnt matter. this is

and thus this discourse is invalid in his

heavy/unbearably light. she no longer

and societys eyes. Because he holds the

even cares for my mother. i cannot

authority in their relationship, though,

understand. she wants escape, and she

his reading is definitive. Though the

has to play them to get it. shell get it;

narrator uses these alternative, and

shell show them: shes better; shes

perhaps non-causal, logical discourses,

willing. shes well; shes obedient; shes a

she has an interest in using the script of

nice white woman with a healthy

her husbands discourse. She continues,

outlook on life:

If a physician is of high standing, and ones own husband, assures friends and relatives
that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression a
slight hysterical tendency what is one to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.
(Stetson 648)
Here she clearly ties the power of the

it is simple enough to play: eat three

medical establishment to men in her

meals a day. when there are resources

family. Her society reads their word as

like this best not to question where they

more invalidating her own, and she thus

come from, else youll be locked up like

ponders what her options in a world

the rest of them. when there are

where her voice does not hold credence.

resources like this best not to question

However, the reader only receives her

where they come from. resources, dont

pondering and is left bereft of an answer.

question your resources. dont question:

The narrator only continues her story

theyll lock you up. what do you want?

granting no relief from answerlessness.

want escape? dont let them know youre

Having arrived at the house, the

asking questions. dont let them know

colonial mansion, the narrator makes

t/what youre thinking. or theyll lock

observations, a process that begins

you up lock you up. escape through a

relatively unassumingly. She says,

corporation; call it a college:

there is something strange about the house I can feel it. (Stetson 648)
While the house feels immediately

there is nothing strange about this

strange to the narrator, we readers are

corporation,

not yet squirming in our seats about this

selling education. nothing strange about

strangeness. The narrator moves into the

a manicured bourgeoisie, just enough

nursery in the third floor attic of the

people of colour to make the brochures

house. Throughout the story, then, this

look good. there is nothing strange about

womans move into madness, hysteria, is

dutch colonial buildings. nothing strange

thoroughly linked to children. This link,

about mansions full of white men and

though, is not hopeful: the room

beer and power. no outcry because this

becomes sinister and, as in Breath, Eyes,

is business as usual: this is just a business.

Memory, we can read social fusion of

these bricks are cemented in the ground.

childbearing and womanness as a source

my fingernails break more easily. they

of madness. The longer the narrator

teach these men how to break you easily

spends in the nursery attic of the colonial

here, then warn you not to be broken so

mansion, the centre of womanhood

easily. they tell you to become a CEO

within the domestic sphere of the

and start a non-profit. they tell you this is

imperialist nation-state, the more she

the amerikkkan way and there is no way

begins to notice a particular aspect of the

out, leave you scrambling at the granite

decoration: the yellow wall-paper:

with

your

nothing

broken

strange

about

fingernails:

The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother
they must have had perseverance as well as hatred. (Stetson 650)
This passage begins a device Stetson

i wonder why there are not more

(Gilman) uses throughout the story: she

arsonists, then recall that i am not one. i

writes this womans observations of the

merely feel self-righteous about my

room as though they are plain, yet in

broken fingernails, self-righteous sleeping

order for the narrator to know that the

in a tent. wonder if these mansions exist

wallpaper sticks firmly to the wall, she

solely so i can yell at these men and

must have already attempted to peel it

change nothing. wonder if my father

off. She writes soon after:

exists so i can rebel and change nothing.

I dwell here on this great immovable bed it is nailed down I believe (Stetson 650).
In order for her to believe it is nailed

it sometimes feels impossible to resist. i

down, she must have tried to move it.

sometimes feel my every transgression

Already she seems to be succumbing to

has

the seduction of the wall-paper, and the

demonstrate the liberal nature of our

ambiguity that develops throughout the

totalitarian society. in a senior society i

story is born: at once many women and

said, I DO NOT THINK THIS PLACE

one woman seem to have been kept in

ENCOURAGES DISSENT. and everyone

this attic on the rest cure; the woman in

said, oh look, youre dissenting, as though i

the wallpaper seems at once to be the

had proven their point. its a con, and

protagonist and to be her predecessors;

ive been knowing its a con since i met

the protagonist seems not to know things

my family. ive been figuring out the

she has already done yet has an

oxymoron of dissent in a society that

understanding of things that have not

touts itself as liberal-democratic. how

happened yet. For example, later on she

can i resist a cloak of resistance, worn by

writes,

the same White Men?

been

preemptively

coopted

to

How those children did tear about here! This bedstead is fairly gnawed! (Stetson
655)
Only a few lines later to write,

Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?

I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner (Stetson 655)
Readers can no longer read this story

i am biting them off at the corners,

from a vantage point of linear time: we

chunks of their fingernails they wont

learn one piece of information and later

notice till too late. i am a backwards

must change our evaluation of it.

needle

Towards the end of the story she writes,

unthreading the seams and dissolving

pointed

into

the

past,

I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window

would be an admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong to even try. (Stetson 655-6)
Once again, though we havent learned

the borders. how can i know the strength

about the strength of the bars prior to

of the seams without ripping them? i am

this moment, she suddenly reveals when

tearing your maps to shreds. i can starve

it becomes salient that she has already

to resist colonialism and men. it is

tested their strength. Perhaps she has

difficult to distinguish between genuine

already tried to jump out of the window.

and false iterations of madness but only

Our knowledge of reality becomes

if you are eyeless. only if you are loud

unstable, as does our trust in the

and always in the light. golden daughter

narrator, yet this narrator is the only

is son-like but hides her secrets in the

window we have into the story itself.

nighttime.

Instability becomes our only chance for

barefoot and unseen. sits under starlight

knowledge, yet the story makes this

to be alone. feels the irony of all out here

knowledge itself unstable.

to be alone. does not particularly care

pads

around

the

house

Using the storys own word, it

whether or not she is in company. in

gets really creepy when the protagonist

whisperless night she welcomes silent

articulates her wall-paper companion,

company, lightless company, into her

another point of ambiguity:

darkness.

But in places where [the wall-paper] isnt faded and when the sun is just so I can see a
strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and
conspicuous front design. (Stetson 650)
The protagonist dismisses the wall-paper

only the sick can be well in a sick society,

as silly, but it continues to obsess her,

she (un)reasons and packs her secrets

drawing her in and showing her

into

a(nOther)

figure

considers zizek and masks that reveal

hidden, skulking behind it. The front

what they would hide. tries to double-

design is also conspicuous, making her

cross zizek. wonders if its possible to

observation of the figure a kind of deep

double-cross dissimulation like when she

reading of the wall-paper. The figure is

wonders if its possible to transgress

like the protagonists truth-

anything at all. wonders why shes so

murky,

nameless

pages,

hides

behind

scripts.

discourse; she is about the unseen and

obsessed with transgression: diagnoses

the unseeable. The tension between the

herself again. has tracked the history of

many

hypochondria in the DSM; doesnt

figures

and

the

one

figure

increases, as the narrator writes,

believe in it. a culmination of all this bullshit,

Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same
shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about
behind that pattern (Stetson 652).
Her murky, shapeless thoughts begin to

were all in the DSM, she thinks. the

take form in a reflection of herself. The

DSM is the colonial mansion, the

shape is the same shape and woman-like

colonial project, the imperialist scalpel, i

and

This

tell my father. look its not just all

ambiguity creates ambivalence regarding

about my daddy issues. everyone has

the figure. This kind of ambivalence

daddy issues, i think. its the patriarchy, i

science would eschew in favour of

think. even my daddys daddy issues.

coherence, in favour of a logical

even my daddys mummy issues. even

causality. However, the narrator holds

the reason i dont call dad daddy. i have

these contradictions with apparent ease.

female friends and male acquaintances. i

Though she is becoming mad, she

think it is important for me to have and

continues

alternative,

to be able to have white friends. i have

contradictory discourse of truth. As her

white women friends, and we can be

obsession persists, the protagonist begins

terrifying. we have all broken our

making observations about the actions of

fingernails, and nice men keep offering

this woman creeping in behind the

to help us lift the bags into the overhead

pattern:

compartments.

yet

very

to

numerous.

assert

an

The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get
out. I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move, and when I came back.
John was awake. What is it, little girl? he said (Stetson 652).
We see the woman in the wall-paper

one time i missed the bus. they saw me

seeking escape, a reflection of this very

running and brought a second bus and

woman narrator. We also observe Johns

took me all the way to boston. i had

infantalisation of the narrator. Little

long hair again and was just beginning to

girl here isnt strictly invalidating, but

recall the benefits of white womanhood.

actually legally equating women as

a man helped me carry my bags up from

children invalidates them in the same

the T station. it was nice. they were

way (MacPike 287): painting women as

heavy. a boy i briefly dated held open

infants discredits their experiences as

the door for me. briefly. it felt like femme

unwise or unschooled. Additionally, this

privilege, but i knew there wasnt such

making

children

thing, and it was cis-hetero-privilege all

complicates the socialised link between

along, and i was mystified how the

childrearing

the

patriarchy had convinced me femme

infantilisation of women should make

privilege was somehow a thing and i felt

them unsuitable to raise infants, yet this

like a victim blamer, and now people

contradiction in the predominant logic

were nicer to me because something so

goes mostly invisible. Thus it becomes

simple as short hair on a white female

not the truth about a dominant logic that

body wasnt a threat to the stability of

matters, and instead what people believe to

their

be the truth. Furthermore this casting of

supremacist capitalist society any longer

childlikeness onto women makes the

because my hair was long again. all the

rejection of childbearing further sinister:

while i was white and in amerikkka and

the rejection of childbearing becomes a

female. i told my friends, there is benevolent

rejection of the self something a sane

sexism. i have been experiencing benevolent

or well or reasonable person would

sexism. they said, your sample size is too

not do. Additionally, the protagonists

small. maybe people are just being nice. why are

obsession with the wall-paper deepens,

you so cynical? SCIENCE YOUR LIFE, they

and we know that she has begun

said. and also, WHY DO YOU HATE

physically touching it.

NEUROSCIENCE? and i did not find it

of

women
and

into

womanness:

cis-hetero-patriarchal

white

As the attic becomes a prison for

useful to answer them. i found it useful to

the protagonist, she begins noticing the

sit in this corporations presidents office

same trend for the woman behind the

for two days. i found it useful to live in a

wall-paper. These parallel developments

tent. i found it useful to contain myself. i

serve not strictly to blur the border, but

found it useful to lock

more to explore it, transgress it, make

myself in my room of my own for three

the

days and hold my breath for nothing.

border

itself

ambivalent

and

polysemous. The narrator writes:

it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it as plain as can
be (Stetson 653).
As the bars become more obviously

the strangest part was they were me,

cage-like, the figure becomes more

somehow, too, and i wondered why i

obviously woman-like. The wall-paper

found it so much easier to talk to books

seems to conform to the narrators needs

than

as much as she conforms to its. The wall-

whether books werent just humans

paper gains a kind of agency even as the

bereft of traditional bodies, and i became

narrator seems to relinquish hers by not

acknowledging

becomes

daughter. son-like nighttime. my friend

possessive and secretive, even in how

touched my painting and got mad when

much information she reveals to the

i told her not to touch it. its just a painting,

reader. She writes in private. She

she said, and i read another book.

it.

She

humans

vegan.

and

golden

wondered

daughter

also

other

watches in private. She says,

I caught Jennie with her hand on [the wall-paper] once. She didnt know I was in the
room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most restrained
manner possible, what she was doing with the paper she turned around as if she had
been caught stealing, and looked quite angry asked me why I should frighten her so!
Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow
smooches on all my clothes (Stetson 653)
The protagonist has become frightening,

i read another book and another book

though she doesnt perceive herself as

and another book and pretty soon i

such. She considers herself secretive, yet

could only talk to books and in them.

she hasnt noticed the yellow the wall-

this is deemed ok by universe physics

paper has left on her clothes. We begin

father and mother who cooks and golden

seeing through multiple eyes, as we note

other sister who became a vegan and

that the narrator cant see all that other

well-adjusted brother. it is ok to prefer

characters can, while she sees things other

books to people and my sister prefers

characters cannot. The discontinuity of

paints to people, which is deemed less ok

the narrative voice, as noted above,

but still sometimes ok as long as you

shows us when the narrator does not

dont bite off anyones fingernails, so we

know things that have already happened

bite their fingernails in secret and

but sometimes has prior knowledge of

pretend to be a reader and painter

things that have not yet happened. For

instead of the backwards needles we are,

example, in the passage above she knows

and no one even knows what a

that Jennie has noticed the yellow on her

backwards needle is we are so good at

clothes, but only in the passage below

this. no white man is worried about his

does she note that,

cloak, least of all our father, who doesnt

even know he is wearing a cloak.

There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that
runs around the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long,
straight, even smooch (Stetson 654)
Here she uses the very same word Jennie

we are well enough for a while. i

used, smooch, but she doesnt directly

especially seem so well that no one

relate the two through causation. We are

worries. the trouble is the wellness is just

left with ellipses and gaps, and we cannot

a part of a dissimulation, the walls of

know

and

which always surround me now, even

accidental, genuine and false. The

the walls of the library and my friend

smooch on the wall must have occurred

who touched the painting and is very

at

the

anxious now. look, what i want is to

smooches on her clothing, but the

leave that house and so i have left it, but

narrator does not explicitly state the

these are my new houses now. it is odd

temporal

how they are all the same. it is odd how

what

least

is

intentional

simultaneously

connection.

with

The

word

smooch itself becomes a link but as

all these white women are me. are there

with the actions of the narrator and the

not shades of darkness woven in our

wall-paper, the border between the

skin? is our white-womanness not part of

clothes and the wallpaper, the smooch

the big con HA-HA-HA that in fact

itself, becomes polyvalent. Causality is

THERE ARE NO WHITE WOMEN?

split and multiple.

this is silly we are the white women,

The narrator continues creating

polyvalence

through

and we are. we think really what

ambiguity,

baudrillard is saying makes little sense

discussing the multiple and few women

and is grounded in the western academy.

behind

we think really it is important to join

the

wall-paper.

While

she

confirms that,

sororities.

The front pattern does move and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
(Stetson 164)
we already question her interactions with

i question already their interactions with

the wall-paper: is it the woman in the

history. dont let them know you are

wall-paper or is it herself? Furthering our

asking questions again. just join a

questioning, she writes,

sorority:

Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and
she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. (Stetson 654)
Because we already know about the

really, when i think of my family i

smooches on her clothes and the smooch

understand White Feminism. i think of

across the wall, we continue wondering if

all the women in my family crawling

this woman crawling fast in the wall-

behind wall-paper, crawling through

paper is not the same as the woman

these mansions. really, when i think of

writing about this woman, yet the

my family, cannot understand White

narrator simultaneously confronts us

Feminism at all. and i read another book

with the possibility that there are many

and another book and search the DSM

women.

becomes

for the name of a disorder the symptoms

fragmented;

of which include reading books in the

dislocatedly

face of terror, and i creep through the

Subjectivity

multiplicitously
womanhood

becomes

united. She continues,

pages,

mounting

perpetual

search:

It is the same woman, I know for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep
by daylight. (Stetson 654)
and we are curious about her comment

it depends if you use III, IV, or V. not

about most women can she still be

for this though. for this i havent found a

talking about the many women in the

name yet, though i feel it is hiding

wall-paper? Which women does she

behind the non-masks of the pages.

know who do not creep by daylight and

where am i skulking unnamed, i wonder,

therefore creep by night?

and my friends (who are me) too?

I dont blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by

daylight! I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I cant do it at night, for I know
John would suspect something at once. (Stetson 654)
Here we learn that the narrator does not

i no longer care where i skulk and book

even creep at night, though she would,

after book after book disembodied

for fear of her husbands suspicion. She

electrocute me like a yearning for

reminds us of the power held by men

dismemberment, a body without organs.

and the need for secrecy, though as she

book for nation. i have come to see

has already demonstrated, her ability to

libraries as odes to capitalism and i

keep

is

cannot even escape my escape now.

compromised. We begin to wonder also

should have been more suspicious of

why the main activity of these women is

escapes cloaked figures approved of. my

creeping. Creeping is by nature a secret,

escape

and so to be caught creeping is to be

nationalism. my escape is the nation. my

caught keeping secrets. However, the

mothers body is the nation. my mothers

keeping of these secrets seems necessary

body is a building block. i am alive because

for

The

i love my mother. sometimes i think this is

protagonist is wrapped in layers of

the biggest con of all. i have come to

secrets to the extent that we cannot

question my ability to question: i have

determine when we can trust her

come to question the source of my

account and when we cannot. Even as

questioning.

we

protagonists

trustworthy narrator of my own life. i

trustworthiness and sanity, and even as

cannot remember where i hid the truth

she reminds us of the importance of

or the map to find it. i cannot remember

hiding her madness from her husband

the violence of the map. i cannot

secrets

these

about

womens

question

the

herself

survival.

is

the

building

am

no

block

longer

of

(she simultaneously reveals it), she writes,

remember the map. i said to my mother,

Still, I dont wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months (Stetson
655).
Even as we question her sanity, and

and without saying anything i meant at

therefore trustworthiness, doing what

all we knew what i meant, and i

society does to people it characterises as

questioned

mad, the protagonist forces us to

satisfyingly spherical, and understood

question the vantage point from which

this as a spatialisation of a concept, and

we are determining her (in)sanity: her

felt my father in my consonants and

husbands behaviour, which this society

couldnt tell if i was grateful to know how

would not question, she writes as influenced

to access a language of power as i

by the wall-paper. Still, she maintains the

inevitably tumbled into a language of

tension between her own invalidated

power as i remained white and in

vantage

amerikkka. and i wondered again about

point

and

her

husbands

powerful one, writing,

my

questions

but

felt

the arsonists.

I know well enough a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued (Stetson
656)
This attention to the possibility that her

and i felt my language of power and my

actions may be misconstrued demonstrates

reading of books and i felt like a thirteen-

her knowledge of an audience whose

dimensional set of coordinates or a

power and also reading are different and

hammer, and suddenly i was composed

differential from her own. Here she

entirely of signs which ran away from

acknowledges the polyinterpretability of

their meanings but couldnt escape their

her actions, but her concern about their

attics, and all this seemed full of radical

misconstrual is her acknowledgement of

possibility and hope and i watched the

the material power the reader, society,

body of the book depart from its self.

has over her.

remaining by choice becomes an act of

Her

actions

become

threatening when she begins

more

defiance when we are locked into our

bodies and told we must stay. it becomes

disregarding

this

power

differential,

possible to stay while not really staying at

taking control of her own imprisonment.

all. it becomes possible for that body to

She,

be she who
lock[s] the door and throw[s] the key down into the front path (Stetson 655)

Through this action she makes herself

i found it entirely possible to watch my

her own captor, taking over control of

body disintegrate (itself), as though

her body and the attic. She has now

taking power of disappearance mitigated

chosen to be the mad-woman in the attic.

the silence. i close my eyes and

She is now playing out the script of her

disintegrate my whole body. does it

own volition, even the circumstances

disturb you because mine is a body you

that led her to this moment of rebellion

swore youd protect? you are killing me

were not of her own choosing.

It

slowly and often with soft hands. refusing

becomes, as Baudrillard writes in The

to let you kill me, i am reclaiming this

Precession of Simulacra, impossible to

life. am i your property? is this your

distinguish between her real madness

property? silence has power when it is

and a dissemblance of madness: I am

speech/silence has power when it holds

thus not asserting that the act of locking

secrets. who has told me i have the

herself in the attic is a dissemblance, just

right to it, and how can someone have

that there is the possibility of it. This

kept from me what was mine all along?

possibility is a new space: this possibility

im wondering what can be mine when

allows the existence for rebellion.

everything i am/own is stolen. i am

After having locked herself in the

rediscovering the power of destroying

the

to

my own body. does it disturb you

develop the polyvalence of agency she

because mine is a body you told me was

has been tending throughout the story.

free?

attic,

protagonist

continues

She writes,
Ive got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out,
and tries to get away, I can tie her! (Stetson 655)

The narrator has already become her

when my mother tells me shell be happy

own captor, so the ambiguity as to

if i marry a man, she is telling me my

whether this woman within the wall-

fingers

paper is the narrator or not becomes

politicians say french women must not

reflected in the rope she plans to catch

wear burkhas they are telling me their

her with. Jennie clearly has tried to keep

right to unveil me makes me free. have i

ropes away from the narrator, a fact

imagined freedom? did you ever imagine

which demonstrates a fear of what the

freedom (imagined this way)? dream of

narrator would do with a rope. Because

freedom; freedom dreams like free your

suicide is considered mad, and many

mind of wakeful self. we are so sick. SO

people labeled mad commit suicide, it is

SICK OF OURSELVES. my vision,

likely that Jennies fear is that the

from the constantly passing bars, has

narrator will hang herself. The tying of

grown so weary that it cannot hold

the woman in the wall-paper is sinister,

anything else. there are a thousand bars,

in

narrators

and behind the bars, no world. cramped

insinuation that she would like to jump

rectangles, over and over, the movement

out of the window, because it hints at a

of my pattering footsteps, a ritual dance,

suicide on the border of intentionality. If

around a centre, a mighty will paralysed.

the narrator did hang herself, it would be

only at times, the curtain of my pupils

ambiguous whether she had caught the

lifts, quietly. an image enters in, rushes

woman as she wished, whether she had

down through the tensed, arrested

escaped or caught herself in death, or

muscles, plunges into my heart and. and.

whether this were some kind of tragic

and. the trace of power tastes like metal.

accident as it would likely be read by

black boots on pregnant bellies. where

her husband the physician. Increasing

have i heard these things before?

ambiguity at this site, that of the border

paralysed, a ritual dance. fingers for

between captivity and freedom, our

shackling, a thousand bars, so sick of

narrator writes,

ourselves

conjunction

with

the

are

for

shackling.

rediscovering

the

when

power:

I dont like to look out of the windows even there are so many of those creeping
women... I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?
But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope you dont get me out in the road
there! I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that
is hard! It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!

(Stetson 656)
This passage relieves the earlier tension

this is just a field guide free of the fields,

of the possibility of suicide as it heightens

if only i could reach england, visit

the

and

england on an afternoon for a long

captivity. The windows, which might

while, then, then i would get better. shall

have been considered portals into the

i at least set my lands in order? alive and

wider world, become disturbing because

in colour and in sane. these fragments. i

they reveal women who creep outside

have shored against my ruinswhy then

them. Women outside the attic are the

ile fit you hieronymos mad: againe. i

ones

sane, yet the

find it entirely (im)possible to wake up,

protagonist views them as she views

eat, go to class, do my homework, go to

herself, creeping as she pleases. By

sleep, wake up, eat, go to class, do my

labeling the women in the outside free

homework, go to sleep, wake up, eat, go

world as just like herself, she connects

to class, do my homework, go to sleep,

the very construction of womanness to

wake up, eat, go to class, do my

madness. The rope she has caught

homework, go to sleep, wake up, eat, go

herself with binds her to the woman in

to class, do my homework, go to sleep.

the wall-paper; indeed, in her own telling

will you keep reading this just to check

she has completely become that woman:

that i actually say the same thing? is the

she has crept out of the wall-paper. This

possibility of discrepancy really worth

rope, which might have been considered

your time reading through the waking

a binding force of captivity, has become

up and sleeping? i find it entirely possible

her tether to freedom, the only thing that

to consider this kind of monotony relief (i

allows her to continue creeping in the attic

find almost anything entirely impossible).

as freely as she pleases. The attic, then,

i find it entirely possible that this

has transformed from a place where she

repetition is the (in)sanest thing i could

is held captive to a place she has claimed

do. little boxes on the hillside will save

for herself for her freedom. Even in the

you, like miniature colonial mansions,

midst of this glorious proclamation, she

like attics, like,

tension

society

between

deems

freedom

writes,
here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch

around the wall, so I cannot lose my way (Stetson 656)

so that just as we would like to

this is the most important component of

congratulate her on her escape from a

the attic-asylum: it convinces us that

maddening

we

what lies outside it is not mad. it is there

cannot quite whole-heartedly do so. She

to demonstrate the ultimate sanity of the

is tracing the same smooch with her

colonial

shoulder; she remains bound to this one

partitions itself it can hold all your

path,

The

criticisms and continue: you shout, you

tension builds again can she find

are mad, colonial mansion! and he says, no,

freedom in this constriction; is this

just the woman in the attic. you shout, you are

constriction a greater source of freedom

unjust, colonial mansion! and he says, no, just

than the madness of the rest of the free

the hearth. the attic is a way of containing

world?

your

patriarchal

repeating

Once

ad

again

society,

infinitum.

it

becomes

mansion.

critique:

if

the

this

mansion

mansion

can

impossible to distinguish genuine and

simultaneously admit and dismiss it. the

false

and

mansion is the map; the mansion is the

freedom. When her husband, the symbol

mapped. the mansion holds its own

of the patriarchal medical establishment,

border, engenders the foundation it

opens the door having found the key in

crushes, presupposes its own Other. the

the garden, he faints, and the narrator

mansion cleaves at its seams, but i am

wonders,

still a backwards needle.

iterations

of

madness

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the
wall, so that I had to creep over him every time! (Stetson 656)
This final line of the story leaves us with

to cleave, to seem, to undo redo reravel

the harrowing, indeed creepy, image of

repeat no originality. to schiz, to die, to

this woman creeping ceaselessly over her

backwards needle, to undo the colonial

husbands limp body. In the context of

mansion with closed eyes. the colonial

the tensions between and reversals of the

mansion has closed eyes, a gut, a belly

freedom and captivity of the attic as well

full of women, a woman full of attics, an

as the madness of the sane world, Johns

arsenal of slaves. the colonial mansion is

fainting works to feminise him. The

contradictions invisibilised, the head of a

narrator and her husband seem to have

man, a staircase to nowhere, full of

switched roles, as she creeps over him

thresholds, full of border crossings,

without regard for his opinion on her

transgressions, rewritings. the colonial

behaviour, and he lies speechless and

mansion is the home of the man, but he

actionless, silenced, diseased. Because

needs his colonies to home himself. he

the final scene has no resolution or

needs his women to man himself. he is

ending, we cannot know how long this

defined by their madness; their madness

creeping continues or how the pressure

becomes his own. his man-ness is built

of her movement affects the material of

upon collecting these women, these

his body. We cannot know what happens

colonies. his man-ness requires their

if he wakes up, if the world rights itself

madness. their madness is his property:

and John reinstalls himself as ruler of the

read this doubly. my father is mad

household, ruler of the colonial mansion

because he owns my mother. i am mad

and the woman whose body he walked

in refusing to be owned, yet still owned,

on. Thus, Stetson leaves the space open

yet still attic, yet still wall-paper. my

as an ambiguity. She creates a lingering

father becomes inescapably my mother. i

literary space of ambiguity through this

am the inception of their bothness. my

inversion of norms and the ambivalence

body

created through it. Madness has become

disintegrate. i let my body disintegrate,

possible to purposefully take on, and she

turn it into wall-paper, turn it into the

shows the possibility for dissent through

nation: the attic is a synecdoche for the

the playing of scripts intended to

nation, madness for the woman, the

oppress.

woman for my body.

holds

his

mansion;

let

it

dance the wall-paper

anna

ITCH

Young white woman, black

Your existence hurts me.

dress, stage dark. Lights up.

Flowers, woman caresses
flowers, caresses face with
flowers. Chair and desk. Sits
at desk. Plays with flowers
on desk. Stands on chair.
Sits on chair. Criss-crosses
flowers on desk. Stands on
chair.
Stamps

Stands
on

on

desk.
flowers.

Squashes flowers. Sits on

chair.

Contemplates

flowers. Rips one flower to

shreds. Eats flower. Rips
more flowers. Feels like skin.
Rips skin to shreds. Pulls

I had hearing problems

growing up have always
Your existence hurts me
had trouble reading and
because it hurts too much. I writing, but the greatest
challenge for me has always
dont know what I would do been expressing myself in
words. Luckily I found
without you but I sort of
dance at a young age, and
wish you were gone so I
soon that became the
greatest way for me to
wouldnt have to think
express myself and mostly
about it anymore. I
to calm the anxiety inside
wouldnt have to worry. Or me, because I also struggle
deeply with a heightened
maybe its me I wish were sense of anxiety, which is
then linked to a lot of other
gone whatevers easier.
things, like depression,
hypochondria, paranoia,
But uh, its too late now.
OCD, and PTSD When
Now I just have to keep
I dance, my brain turns off.
Im not thinking about
moving. Ah, but you see,
anything else but that
Im stuck As much as I moment when my body is
moving. Once my body
would like to believe that
stops, however, it all starts
fate brought us together, as up again. I often say, dance
much as Id like to believe is my way of keeping sane
were not together because
fate pre-determined it
wasnt going to work out,
Im not sure I believe in

dress off shoulder. Puts

fate. So thats making this

dress back on shoulder.

hard. Oh how I wish you

Pours broken flower petals

Genevieve

would just talk to me.

But I actually just think Im

I knew almost immediately

what book I would use
Yellow Wallpaper by
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I
had read it in high school
and it really spoke to me
then it was the time when
I was dealing with a very
dark period of depression
that I really saw no end
to this series of gestures
began to grow, in part from
the text, but also just from

on face. Caresses face with

crazy. We were just sitting,

flower petals. Casts flowers

there just sitting there. I

aside. Stage dark. Moves

chair. Lights up. Talks to
chair. Caresses chair. Sits
on chair. Moves around
chair.

Caresses

chair.

Crawls under chair. Walks

around chair. Rips off dress.
Moves chair. Stands on
chair. Moves arms rapidly.
Scrapes legs. Beats chest.
Scrapes legs. Beats chest.
Throws arms to side. Beats
chest. Stage dark. Moves
table. Puts four cylinders on
table. Lights up. Puts hand
inside one cylinder. Red
paint

on

index

finger.

Stripes paint across right

mean, there was some

talking, some of our typical
talking, but in my mind I

Thats where the itch comes

in. My piece in high school
talk I wanted to actually was about itching to get out
of your skin. Some time my
talk. But I couldnt find the junior year, I was
words. And I didnt know contemplating my
depression and thinking a
how I felt. So I finally got lot about suicide. Not that I
wanted to kill myself, but I
up the courage to actually
always wondering why
talk, and I said some of the people chose to kill
themselves, and I felt like I
things on my mind, but Im could [empathise] because
not the best talker. I dont there were all these times
when I just wanted to press
think I said all the things,
pause. Its not that I wanted
and I didnt say them in the to be gone forever, I just
wanted to be gone for a
right way. I felt good
little while not to have to
live through this part. In
afterwards and then
large part, because I felt
progressively bad. All these trapped in my town,
trapped in this high school
thoughts, many bad
and there was no way of
thoughts. Because thats just getting out. I felt similarly
when I joined a sorority, I
what I do! Thats just how
felt trapped in a system at
my mind works. Why cant a time when I felt trapped
at Dartmouth.
I show my whole self? Why
was just waiting to not just

cant I be my whole self?

Why do we hide? Oh, that

cheek. Caresses face with

sounds so clich! Oh,

hand/paint. Dips finger in

annoying. You must think

second cylinder. Caresses

my own life. It became my

sign language. My way of
communicating speaking
to others. But they also
werent getting it. They
would never get it

Im so annoying, just being

here, bothering you. Uh,

how monotonous our

lives become. How all I long
to do is break the cycleI
feel like Im suffocating.
the piece is about the
experiences of a woman. I
am a woman. The material
came from me. I didnt
think I loved myself, and

face with blue paint/hand. maybe it would be easier if I that informed the piece
Dips

finger

in

third

cylinder. Caresses face and

neck and chest with green
paint/hand. Dips finger in
fourth

cylinder.

Casts

yellow paint across stage.

Casts green paint across
stage.

Casts

blue

paint

across stage. Casts red paint

across

stage.

Flowers

covered in paint. Dress

covered in paint. Woman
collapses in paint. Woman
covers self in paint, caresses
self with paint. Scrapes legs.
Beats chest. Throws arm to
side. Beats chest. Woman
covered in paint. Paint is no
longer colour. Woman is no
longer white. Woman is still
white. Woman is covered in
paint. Dark stage.

werent around to bother

My internal narrative I
you. You know, I I think I suppose has a lot to do with
this arch of going mad
might love you, but Im not going mad because Im
trying to show something to
sure. I think I might love
people but I inherently
you, but, you know, like I
cannot do that thing I
said, it hurts. But I cant heard from people saying
they thought I was like
just leave this place without Ophelia with the flowers
you knowing. And I cant
leave this place and never
see you again. So here it is,
I think I might love you.

[words] fall [short] in

expression and they lead us
to this madness because
often theyre all we can rely
on.

And as much as I would like The going mad section was

to say its you who missed really all about hitting this
breaking point of finding
your chance, I think its
a balance between having
actually me. We were just my face on and trying to
express something
sitting there, and I dont
internally. I could sense
remember what I said, and from the audience that they
were uncomfortable. That is
I really dont remember
the point. To break down
this wall I dont think you
what you said, as much as I
really needed to know the
try. I want to keep talking to words to know where this
deep place of internal
you. But all I can think
isolation comes from
about is how I feel, sitting
What are they all thinking
there, sitting there. I wish
of me
we could stop sitting there There are people here

and move! Preferably

Not getting it
Crazed
forward, and only back if

we can change the past.

I often fear I will go mad
(Mifflin)

(Mifflin)

boundaries of global kinship

Determining someone mad, calling them into existence as mad, undoes their
credibility according to a hegemonic cis-hetero-patriarchal white supremacist imperialist
capitalist structure of power, as we have seen through Breath, Eyes, Memory and The
Yellow Wallpaper. Countering this, we have observed ways that double-voicing and
double-reading create spaces for resistance and subversion through strategic differential
visibility and inversion of social roles. The same forces are at play in Jean Rhyss 1966
novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which, set in post-colonial Jamaica, discusses the story of Jane
Eyres Bertha before she became Bertha. This analysis, however, will focus on the ways in
which Rhyss text complicates the previous discussion through examining the patriarchalimperialist power structures with regard to (Creole) whiteness, the ways in which
genealogical story-telling among Caribbean women applies and does not apply to white
Creole women, the ways in which double-voicing and double-reading open new spaces
for resistance and non-Euro-centric/non-Scientific understandings and truth-telling
mechanisms, and then how these spaces problematise and make visible the construction
of nation and the border. Wide Sargasso Sea demonstrates the sometime possibility and
sometime futility of resistance, the pain of madness and its nature as a site of power, how
being driven to madness is not all fun and games, but also how madness can be used as
resistance. Rhys lets us see how being perceived as mad can be helpful for hiding or being
invisible to certain eyes and how being mad can be a refusal to interpret or be interpreted.
The primary structures of power we see acting on and through madness are, as in
Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Yellow Wall-paper, interlinked patriarchy and White

Supremacy, both in dialectic relationship with colonialism. We will consider colonialism

here the way Fanon does in Black Skin, White Masks when he says,
the Malagasy can perfectly well tolerate the fact of not being a white man. A
Malagasy is a Malagasy; or, rather, no, not he is a Malagasy but, rather, in an
absolute sense he lives his Malagasyhood. If he is a Malagasy, it is because the
white man has come, and if at a certain stage he has been led to ask himself
whether he is indeed a man, it is because his reality as a man has been
challenged. In other words, I begin to suffer from not being a white man to the
degree that the white man imposes discrimination on me, makes me a colonized
native, robs me of all worth, all individuality, tells me that I am a parasite on the
world, that I must bring myself as quickly as possible into step with the white
world, that I am a brute beast, that my people and I are like a walking dungheap that disgustingly fertilizes sweet sugar cane and silky cotton, that I have no
use in the world. Then I will quite simply try to make myself white: that is, I will
compel the white man to acknowledge that I am human. (73)
The advent of colonialism in a society fundamentally changes that society, drawing new
distinction between colonist and colonised. The colonist inscribes a hierarchy onto the
society such that even when he has left, a colonial mindset is never completely eradicable.
In the same way that women can continue patriarchy, members of a post-colonial society
can continue the violence of colonialism. Thus, when we consider post-colonial Jamaica,
we cannot consider a Jamaica fully without colonialism, as if colonialism never happened.
We must consider Jamaica a place of ambivalence one which resists and resisted
colonialism, but also one that also carries in the fabric of its society the ongoing legacy of
colonialism. Though the Jamaica of Wide Sargasso Sea is no longer a British colony, we
observe hierarchies of race and traditions of gender, as well as their resistance, leftover
from as well as reinforced by British influence. Though racial and gender-based
oppression are intertwined throughout the book, we will begin, for claritys sake, by
examining the two separately.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys shows how the patriarchal power differential invests in
men the power to laugh at womens experiences and thus dismiss them, gamble with

womens lives and thus commodify them, and label women as mad and thus further
invalidate them. White men make these dismissals, commodifications, and invalidations,
but they are able to make them across and through race as well as gender. Mens
validation of their own sanity is the clearest demonstration of the power of gender as a
determining factor in making these classifications. For example, Rochester blames his
foolish engagement to Antoinette, whom he calls Bertha, on his earlier illness, saying, I
have had fever. I am not myself yet (Rhys 61), yet neither his authority nor his ability to
make decisions is called into question. He says of himself, all the mad conflicting
emotions had gone and left me wearied and empty. Sane (Rhys 155). Though he
describes his own experiences as punctuated with a kind of madness and fever, he retains
the power to validate himself, to call himself sane. And, when he does, no one questions
his ability to do so; no one stops trusting his rationality. Furthermore, his characterisation
of his own sanity as empty of these mad conflicting emotions paints his usual state of
being as blank or neutral, similar to the way Foucault describes the discourse of Science:
he paints his own perception and cognition as the type of power and knowledge that the
sanctity of science would render neutral (Foucault Power/Knowledge 107). His ability
to give himself this neutrality demonstrates the power and authority he already holds, and
the neutrality he has granted himself then gives him further power to make neutral
judgments of other people, granting his diagnosis of madness authority and credibility,
even though he is not a physician. This fact demonstrates the ties of Whiteness and
maleness to the scientific medical establishment, even when these ties are not made
explicit. For example, when Rochester tells Antoinette that they will discuss her halfbrother Daniels story, Only if [she] promise[s] to be reasonable (Rhys 117), he is using
the neutrality with which he has painted himself and his ability to discern what kind of

discourse is reasonable in order to invalidate objections she may raise in the form of
policing her mode of discourse. Though the other white men in the book do not explicitly
cast themselves as sane, neutral figures, Rochesters ability to label himself such
demonstrates the power that white men hold in this society and thus the authority they
speak with when they invalidate women.
The white men in Wide Sargasso Sea use laughter to dismiss and madness to
invalidate the women they seek to control. From an early age, Antoinette understands the
power of male laughter, writing, Mr. Mason would laugh if he knew how frightened I
had been. He would laugh even louder than he did when my mother told him she wished
to leave Coulibri (Rhys 28). Here Mr. Masons laughter has the power to dismiss
Antoinettes and her mothers fears, even when attending to these fears would have
beneficial material consequences, such as not being attacked by the angry, mistreated
black Jamaicans who Annette knows resent them, as former slave-owning white Creoles.
Because it is so easy for men to dismiss them, through laughter, womens ability to speak
back is severely limited, as they are painted as irrational, emotional, biased, and raving
mad throughout the book, and thus every legible critique of society they make can be
dismissed as such. For example, during the attack on their house, and after her son dies in
the fire, Annette, a white Creole woman from a former slave-owning family, screams
abuse at her new white husband, Mr. Mason calling him a fool, a cruel stupid fool,
saying,
I told you, she said, I told you what would happen again and again. Her
voice broke, but still she screamed, You would not listen, you sneered at me, you
grinning hypocrite, you ought not to live either, you know so much, dont you?
Why dont you go out and ask them to let you go? Say how innocent you are. Say
you have always trusted them. (Rhys 36)

Annette calls the neutrality of the white male mind into question with this mockery of her
husbands trust and innocence. She insinuates that everyone else understood the
relationship between the white and black Creoles, understood the hatred and mistrust,
understood the guilt. This insinuation undermines Mr. Masons authority and neutral
knowledge, revealing ways of knowing that better anticipated events of the world than his
own way. However, instead of toppling the patriarchy, this series of events, including the
demonstration of the impotence of Mr. Masons knowledge, leads only to more stringent
oppression of Annette and Antoinette. Antoinettes Aunt Cora says to her, Your mother
is in the country. Resting. Getting well again, (Rhys 42), when in reality Annette is
hidden in the country going mad, and being, we are later told, raped repeatedly by her
caretakers. Antoinette meanwhile is sent to a strict school run by nuns, and while she
finds some escape in this, her routine and her thoughts are strictly monitored. When Mr.
Mason visits several years later, he says to her, You cant be hidden away all your life.
(Rhys 53), to which she says nothing aloud but thinks, Why not? (Rhys 53). This series
of events demonstrates that womens overt criticism of mens authority leads them to even
greater levels of oppression. Antoinettes small resistance, illegible to her step-father,
however, goes unquestioned.
As Antoinette comes of age, and the whole island seems to be discussing her mad
mother, Mr. Mason decides to marry her off to a second son from England, Mr.
Rochester, who stands to inherit little and thus is in need of money. A friend remarks to
Mr. Mason, who defends his choice to marry Antoinette to a man he barely knows by
saying he would trust Mr. Rochester with his life, You are trusting him with her life, not
yours (Rhys 104). The friend mounts a critique of Mr. Masons practices of
commodification, but the woman is unquestionably an object of possession. This mans

critique isnt so much Mr. Masons ownership of Antoinette, but the carelessness with
which he treats his possessions. While patriarchy and imperialism/White Supremacy are
certainly different structures of oppression, there are ways in which they act similarly and
interconnectedly, robbing agency and the ownership of ones own body from women and
native peoples/people of colour, respectively, and acting doubly forcefully on women of
colour, native women, transgender women, etc. Here, Antoinette does not own her own
body, though she still has the privilege not to work afforded to her by a legacy of slavery
and imperialism. This lack of ownership, however, does not provide a ground for
solidarity between black Jamaicans and white women, and instead Antoinette feels
offended at any indication that she is similar to the black Jamaicans and the black
Jamaicans, rightfully, resent her privileged status. Antoinettes whiteness, even if it is
Creole whiteness, leads her to exclude black women from her feeling of victimhood. This
act of exclusion of women of colour by white women as well as the centring of white
women in feminism, allowing them to accumulate power at the expense of women of
colour, are the kinds of act Barbara Smith, Toni Morrison, and Barbara Christian write
against; this white feminism and the power differentials inherent in it makes it difficult for
white women and women of colour to form alliances against patriarchy. Patriarchy and
imperialism/White Supremacy pit the subjects of their oppression against each other such
that solidarity for collective resistance becomes almost impossible.
Indeed, in the same way that women become a metonymy for the nation, which
fact Anne McClintock argues in Imperial Leather, women become not only property in and
of themselves but also come to represent capital property, in terms of the dowries they bring
with them. Christophine, Annettes main maidservant who stays with Antoinette even
after the storming of the hosue, coming to Antoinettes defense, says threateningly to

Rochester, You think you fool me? You want her money but you dont want her. It is in
your mind to pretend she is mad. I know it. The doctors say what you tell them to say
(Rhys 145). Christophine articulates Rochesters use of Antoinette as a means of
accumulating capital, while she also shows the connection of his authority to the medical
establishments power. Christophine knows Rochester is able to get the doctors to say
whatever he wishes them to, and he wishes for them to diagnose Antoinette as mad and
thus invalid. Through a diagnosis, he makes her silent (by invalidating her speech) as well
as poor (by taking her money and making her into a kind of currency herself).
In addition to commodifying women, in Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys demonstrates
white mens exercise of power through the labeling of women as mad. Even after they
possess these women, these women resist. For example, at one point, Antoinette calls on
Christophine to use vandou to kill her husband, and later it is ambiguous whether
Antoinette has attempted to poison him. In order to further control these women when
they speak out, as explored above in Annettes case, mens ability to label women mad
leads to an increase in physical oppression as well as further invalidation of the discourse
these women produce. For example, after learning of Antoinettes affair with her halfbrother, whom she calls cousin Sandi, and after retaliating by sleeping with his black
Jamaican servant7, Rochester declares his wife mad and thus sexually available in a way
no reasonable woman would be: Shell loosen her black hair, and laugh and coax and
flatter (a mad girl. Shell not care who shes loving). Shell moan and cry and give herself
as no sane woman would or could. Or could. A lunatic who always knows the time.
But never does (Rhys 149). In this passage, Rochester paints Antoinette in similar terms
as her mother, who also was locked away and made available to her caretakers sexual

7

and goodness, could we get into the politics of consent here

whims, creating a kind of alternative genealogy through which the violence of the past
repeats itself on Antoinettes body. Rochester explains Antoinettes behaviour from his
neutral, sane standpoint as absolutely mad, instead of seeking other explanations that
might reveal her dissent against his authority: for example, she is refusing to be his
property, flouting his sexual claim over her by sleeping with another man. By explaining
her behaviour through a diagnosis of madness, he implies that she has no will over her
own body, saying, shell not care who shes loving. This ideology of availability,
through a state of perpetual consent constructed by her husband, is built on a patriarchal
rape culture that often plays out on the bodies of women of colour, as Siobhan
Somverville argues in Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body.
Within a White Supremacist, European science, the medical establishment constructs
women of colour as always already sexually available and thus impossible to rape. In this
passage, Rochester uses the same medicalisation to turn his white Creole wife into a madwoman always already sexually available and impossible to rape. Despite Antoinettes
wish to distance herself from black Jamaicans, her new status as a madwoman associates
her with women of colour through this construction of perpetual sexual availability.
Furthermore, he constructs womens enjoyment of their sexuality as insane, once again
turning woman-ness itself into madness, and he additionally ties madness to the
destruction of linear time, saying his wife knows the time but never does. Tying madness
to linear time here is key: as Liah Greenfeld argues in Mind, Modernity, Madness, the
ideology that makes monotheistic religion possible relies on coherence and the dominance
of one logic to the exclusion of all others; this coherence and this specific kind of logic rely
on the monolithising force of linear time, the ideology behind and which itself are
necessary to European Science. Thus, Antoinettes knowledge of time but exclusion of it

is key to her madness: madness is disorder; the disruption of linear time is disorder.
However, Rochester struggles back against Antoinettes resistance of linear time and,
when he describes Antoinette as, my lunatic. Shes mad but mine, mine (Rhys 150)
demonstrating an obsession with his property (like capitalism, like imperialism, like
masculinity)8. Rochesters obsession with his wife as his property through yet despite her
madness shows a commodity model of womanhood as well as sex, as detailed above. As
detailed above, the sexuality of women of colour is constructed as always already
available and always already deviant; in this way, the sexuality of women of colour is
constructed by cis-hetero-patriarchal White Supremacist capitalism as always already
queer. It seems that a similar thing is occurring here with regard to madness and
property: while Rochester constructs his wife as mad, he concurrently reclaims her as his
property. When the white woman goes mad, she suddenly enters into the realm of sexual
availability/deviance/queerness, which women of colour are constructed to always
already inhabit. It thus seems that while a white woman has some capability to exist
outside the realm of queerness, deviance, and perpetual sexual availability, the woman of
colour is also constructed as always already mad, always already invalid and silent. The
but Rochester uses to connect the madness of Antoinette with is possession of her reeks
of an ideology of damaged goods.
To explore this theme, I turn to Thomas Macaulay Millars Toward a
Performance Model of Sex, in which he articulates the violent and dominant commodity
model of sex, here employed by Rochester, as well as a possible way out of rape culture
through a performance model of sex. In this commodity model, he says, sex is like a
ticket; women have it and men try to get it. Women may give it away or may trade it for

8

REF that essay we read in Colonial and Post-colonial masculinities

something valuable, but either way its a transaction. This puts women in the position of
not only seller, but also guardian or gatekeeper (Millar 29). Womens virginity, their
possession of a commodity, is their primary source of power. So, when a woman of colour
is constructed as always already sexually available, she is stripped of the power she might
have been able to wield. When a white woman is diagnosed as mad and thus perpetually
sexually available she is robbed of this power. Both women become unrapable through
the construction of their sluthood, though women of colour experience this alwaysalready while white women experience this through a diagnosis of madness. Millar
discusses the construction of virginity and chastity in relation to the construction of the
slut, saying that the commodity model and specifically sexual conservatism within the
commodity model also has a model for sluthood: a woman whose commodity is used up
and worn out, whose commodity nobody would want except as a cheap alternative at a
low price (Millar 31). This construction of sluthood, of nothing worth guarding or nothing
imperative to guard it enables rape culture: Millar writes without the notion of the slut,
many rapists lose their license to operate the notion exists only within a model of sex
that analogizes it to property or, more specifically, to a commodity, (29) and writes
further, entitled men who believe that sex is a commodity and that they have been
denied it wrongfully see rape as repossession (Millar 35). This is Mr. Rochester.
Furthermore, if we extend the misanalogy of sex as commodity to a larger sense of
property and entitlement, colonialism itself becomes a massive and extended rape of
entire continents and all the people within them.
Rochesters sense of possession towards Antoinette extends through this colonial
possession-through-rape. Since his arrival in the Caribbean he has been obsessed with the
secret of the land, along with its strangeness, and he writes of his mad wife,

Very soon shell join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or
cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be
recognised. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter. The
way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh
back at them. Yes, theyve got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to
kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, its a long, long
line. Shes one of them. I too can wait for the day when she is only a memory to
be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie. . . . (Rhys 156)
In this passage Mr. Rochester conflates the island with all the people who live on it, even
though there are significant disparities not only between the island and people but also
among the people on the island. He is suspicious of his wifes madness as something other
than entirely helpless: he suspects that she knows something that she wont tell him, yet
even as he thinks this, he also wonders if she is unable or ignorant: he cannot fully grant
her the possibility of agency. He describes those who know the secret, as mad, that is, as
not legible to him. And yet he feels that they must be watched, setting up a culture of
surveillance and observation, one in which his gaze is supreme, state-endorsed, and
scientific. He also assesses the islands inhabitants as ultimately repeatable, constructing his
wife as simply one of many. In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson writes about the
effects of the census as administered to colonised populations by colonist nations, saying:
It tried carefully to count the objects of its feverish imagining. Given the exclusive
nature of the classificatory system, and the logic of quantification itself, a CochinChinese had to be understood as one digit in an aggregable series of replicable
Cochin-Chinese within, of course, the states domain. The new demographic
topography put down deep social and institutional roots as the colonial state
multiplied its size and functions. Guided by its imagined map it organized the new
educational, juridical, public-health, police, and immigration bureaucracies it was
building on the principle of ethno-racial hierarchies which were, however, always
understood in terms of parallel series. The flow of subject populations through the
mesh of differential schools, courts, clinics, police stations and immigration offices
created traffic-habits which in time gave real social life to the states earlier
fantasies. (169)
Rochester has transformed Antoinette into one of these objects of the colonial nations
feverish imagining, one digit in an aggregable series of replicable islanders, conflating her

with the rest of the islands secret population, always looming and ready to kill.
Rochester is ready for her to become a myth, a legend, a trope of mad woman in the
attic, as she becomes irrelevant through invalidation, mad, or dead, much like the
colonial project waits9 for the subjects of its colonisation to become irrelevant through
invalidation, mad, or dead. Rhys here shows Rochesters awareness of the construction of
history: as soon as no one is left to speak his wifes story, her history, as soon as she
becomes legend, everything about her becomes falsifiable. Similarly, as soon as no one
can speak their objections to the colonial project, any history of objection becomes
falsifiable. Thus, one facet of dissent becomes merely proving that dissent is possible,
keeping a tradition of dissent alive. If the only way to maintain this tradition is to keep it
hidden from the understanding of the colonist/oppressor, the oppressor who ceaselessly
gazes, then it must be double-voiced.
Thinking back to The Yellow Wall-paper and the ways in which Wide Sargasso
Sea complicates narratives of white womens madness, Antoinettes position as a white
Creole woman going mad and moving to England becomes rich for multiple readings.
For example, in prediction of their move to England and in an echo of The Yellow
Wall-paper, Rochester drew a house surrounded by trees. A large house. [He] divided
the third floor into rooms and in one room [he] drew a standing woman (Rhys 148).
This passage is oddly reminiscent of the colonial mansion, but the colonial mansion is in
England, not in the colony. He also draws the womans figure, captured in the nursery, a
prediction of Antoinettes future. However, as explored in the previous chapter, the attic,
a site of repression, becomes a haven of sanity, a site of liberation, for the madwoman.
The colonial mansion in England, a symbol of colonialism, could become a haven of

9

it doesnt exactly wait in a passive sense, however: it wages a war of attrition.

resistance for the white Creole woman, a product of that colonialism. Indeed, when in
England, Antoinette, or Bertha, as she has come to be known, finds some kinds of escape,
through amnesia, dreams, and nighttime explorations of the house which holds the room
of her imprisonment. Her escapes are so wild and unpalatable that after her own cousin
comes to visit her, her nurse tells her that she attacked him violently, to the point that,
the gentleman fainted (Rhys 168). This mans fainting when faced with the unbridled
madwoman is reminiscent of Johns fainting in The Yellow Wall-paper. Madness seems
to work multiply: on one hand, because of their madness both women are confined to
single rooms, literally physically oppressed, yet through their madness both are able to
feminise the men who observe them. The patriarchal gaze itself, which forces these
women to double voice in the first place, also allows their resistance to take more concrete
form in the inversion of the gender roles prescribed by the patriarchy. As mentioned in
the previous chapter, this inversion becomes not just a defiance of the border between the
genders, but a use of its construction and power against the people who drew the border.
Patriarchy and White Supremacy certainly interact in Wide Sargasso Sea, inscribing
power relations in complex patterns onto different people. For example, when coloured,
or black Jamaican, Daniel claims that he is Antoinettes half-brother and that madness
courses through both their veins, but Antoinette claims that his story is composed of lies,
Rochester does not known whom to believe, the black Jamaican man, or the white Creole
woman, and ends up mistrusting both. However, the main racial dynamic Wide Sargasso
Sea explores is the hierarchicalising of white English, white Creole, and black Jamaican.
Characters in the novel frequently contest the strict hierarchy inscribed by White
Supremacy; particularly, white Creole Antoinette questions the supremacy of the English,

while black Jamaicans place themselves above white niggers.10 These struggles, like
struggles over gender, take place in ways both visible and invisible to those granted power
by White Supremacist colonialism. Rhys includes typical/obvious forms of White
Supremacist racism, such as when one black Jamaican, Young Bull, says of another black
Jamaican to Rochester, He dont know how old he is, he dont think about it. I tell you
sir, these people are not civilized (Rhys 62). Rhys includes the colonized mindset
explained by Fanon above as part of the history of White Supremacy and colonialism,
labeling an alternative mode of being as not civilized. Rhys also discusses colonialism in
economic terms, saying of Mr. Rochester, He didnt come to the West Indies to dance
he came to make money as they all do (Rhys 27). She makes the economic exploitation
involved in colonialism plain and evident, demonstrating how this economic exploitation
continues even after colonialisms official end. Rhys explores the colonizing gaze in
terms of the White Supremacist belief that black people are inferior, but also in terms of
the belief that these provincial, oversees white people somehow lose the trappings of
their whiteness when separated from civilisation. Rochester, our example of an English
man, does not consider white people in the Caribbean fully white. He says of Antoinette,
Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either
(Rhys 61). Rochester sets up the traditional mode of European determination of race,
blood lines/blood quantum, but also uses his power to shift the definition, so that mere
exposure to a wild place and to uncivilised people can have a decivilising power, as
though to be of colour is contagious, a plague. Christophine, on the other hand, has a

I explicity use the word nigger rather than shrinking away from a confrontation with the White
Supremacy that enables it to do violence. If I hid from the word and what it means in this paper, I would be
reinscribing racism in the racism without racists manner, in the I dont see the colour of your skin and
also the rates of incarceration of black and Latin@ people in the US are just a coincidence and/or because
those people just commit more crimes way. I want to confront White Supremacy head on.
10

different interpretation of Antoinettes white Creole status, stating, She is a Creole girl,
and she have the sun in her (Rhys 143). This interpellation feels more inclusive and
communal, a welcome of hybridity. However, in interpreting Christophines affection for
Antoinette, we must not forget the power differentials of whiteness: through Christophine
and Antoinette are both outcasts from Jamaican society, Antoinette remains an outcast of
European descent, and Christophine remains an outcast of African descent, and
Antoinettes servant.
Other black Caribbeans do not accept Antoinette so kindly, remaining suspicious
of what they, too construct as her whiteness specifically distinct from Englishness. Her
black childhood friend, Tia, calls Antoinette a white nigger after Antoinette calls her a
nigger. Her coloured half brother resents her (Creole) whiteness, saying of her mother
Annette, and soon the madness that is in her, and in all these white Creoles, come out
(Rhys 88). Daniel uses the construction of white Creole, of which Rochester is already
suspicious, to his advantage, making the imperfection of Antoinettes whiteness a point of
doubt for Rochesters belief in her. Daniel continues, She shut herself away, laughing,
and talking to nobody as many can bear witness. As for the little girl, Antoinetta, as soon
as she can walk she hide herself if she see anybody (Rhys 88). He thus continues to
employ European causality, bloodlines, against the contestably white half-sister he
resents. As explored above, a diagnosis of madness can be used to oppress white women
in ways that women of colour are always already oppressed, always already mad. By
highlighting Antoinettes not-quite-whiteness, he constructs her as vulnerable to this alwaysalready madness characteristic of the construction of women of colour.

Antoinette understands that she is neither fully Jamaican nor European, especially
after the end of her friendship with Tia and the storming of her house by the black
Jamaicans seeking retribution. She says of herself,
a white cockroach. Thats me. Thats what they call all of us who were here before
their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And Ive heard English
women call us white niggers. So between you and me I often wonder who I am
and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all.
(Rhys 93)
Antoinette is in a crisis of hybridity, feeling herself a victim of diaspora and yet still a
beneficiary of it, still a white cockroach, not just a cockroach, still a white nigger, not just a
nigger. She sounds aloof, saying of Jamaicans of African descent, before their own people
sold them to the slave traders [my italics], as though to blame black Africans for their
enslavement, as though to escape her familys history of slave ownership. The not-quitewhiteness that both black Jamaicans and white English people interpret in her white
Creole-ness she interprets as a mar, a clash of identities, a lack of a home. Still, though,
when faced with English-ness, she manages to embrace the Creole part of her identity.
When Mr. Mason lectures her on Christophines behaviour, None of you understand
about us, [she] thought (Rhys 27). Similarly to her thought about remaining hidden
away, this resistance is just a thought, but it is a kind of resistance Mr. Mason cannot
detect. Antoinette constructs an us, though it is unclear whether the us includes black
Jamaicans or not, in opposition to the English you. She resents Mr. Masons not
understanding, while she embraces her own different understanding with relation to a
group: she isnt just saying he the individual doesnt understand her the individual; she is
asserting a difference in understanding and identity; she is again inverting the border.
Another example of her subtle resistance and identity construction includes her response
to Mr. Masons attitude towards her brother Pierre. She writes,

He was so thin I could lift him easily. Mr Mason had promised to take him to
England later on, there he would be cured, made like other people. And how will
you like that, I thought, as I kissed him How will you like being made exactly like
other people?(Rhys 33)
Antoinettes interpretation of cured by the medical establishment is wrought with
suspicion. She questions whether her brothers being made like other people, other
white European people, will be something he likes. The question she raises isnt whether
this experience would be in some way an ultimate or objective good, but instead her
frame of reference is subjective and specific to Pierre: would Pierre like to assimilate to
European culture and thus be cured? Her implied answer is no, and once again, Mr.
Mason cannot read her resistance. Another ambivalent resistance to the European gaze
occurs when Rochester says to Antoinette, You talk of St Pierre as though it were Paris
(Rhys 72). She responds, But it is the Paris of the West Indies (Rhys 72). Under one
consideration, Antoinettes analysis of the Caribbean is highly Euro-centric: why must St
Pierre be the Paris of the West Indies rather than simply St Pierre? However, a closer
inspection reveals Antoinettes subversion: when she asserts St Pierre is the Paris of the
West Indies, she uses the word but to contrast to Rochesters clearly condescending
opinion of St Pierre. When she says of the West Indies, she fundamentally changes the
kind of city she discusses, changing it from an abstraction of Paris to a situated cultural
centre in the Caribbean. She equates St Pierre with Paris, rather than demeaning it, by
using the word but to disagree with her husbands negative appraisal. Antoinette uses
Rochesters own Euro-centric framework against him, to assert that this city he would
look down upon, and these people he would look down upon for finding the city exciting,
actually is equivalent to the city he finds exciting, thus equalising a coloniser/colonised,
civilised/uncivilised power differential. When Rochester eventually admits, I was tired of

these people. I disliked their laughter and their tears, their flattery and envy, conceit and
deceit (Rhys 156), he shows that he has some knowledge that hidden understandings of
the Jamaicans, both black and white, exist and are kept beyond his ken, but no knowledge
of what these understandings are. These people have ultimately defeated him, causing
him to leave their country; they create again a post-coloniality.
Rochesters colonial impulse and power is accompanied and reinforced by an
obsession with re-naming Antoinette. As explored above, imperialism and science, both,
are tied to the act of (re)naming, and Rochester is no exception. As explored earlier in this
chapter, Antoinette as a white Creole woman becomes a site at which the white woman
can be diagnosed (named) as mad and then subjected to the same invalidation women of
colour already experience. Rochesters power to rename Antoinette functions similarly:
when he renames her, giving her an identity/role he would prefer for her to have/play,
he robs her of self-determination. When Antoinette first asks him, My name is not
Bertha; why do you call me Bertha? (Rhys 122), his answer contains no real explanation.
Only his power and his fancy determine what her identity/role shall be. He says,
Because it is a name Im particularly fond of. I think of you as Bertha (Rhys 122). If he
considers that she may prefer Antoinette, he doesnt acknowledge this consideration when
he decides what she shall be called. When she pushes him further, saying, Not Bertha
tonight (Rhys 123), he replies without consideration for her wishes, Of course, on this
of all nights, you must be Bertha (Rhys 123). His (re)naming her demonstrates the power
he holds over her and her body/self. She doesnt even have power over her own naming,
a kind of rape, and a restaging of colonialism. Her response, As you wish, (Rhys 123), is
reminiscent of Sophies doubling during sex with her husband in Breath, Eyes, Memory. This
response looks like submission but provides opportunity for escape. Antoinette says,

Names matter, like when he wouldnt call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinette drifting
out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking-glass (Rhys 162).
This moment of (re)naming is the opportunity for Antoinette to leave her body, separate
herself from her situation. Antoinette leaves the site of imprisonment through this false
name, and that body becomes Bertha. She says, Bertha is not my name. You are trying
to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, thats obeah too
(Rhys 133), and by calling this (re)naming obeah, a Caribbean religious/mystical/magical
system, she performs a similar act to when she calls St Pierre the Paris of the West Indies:
she equates the power of colonialism with the power of obeah, disrupting the paradigm of
differentials, in which the colonist always comes out on top. In identifying the obeah, and
identifying his (re)naming as an attempt she sets up its failure. She, Antoinette, leaves, floats
out of the window and is free, while Bertha remains, ghostlike in her own body, and
haunts the family with her madness for the rest of her (and their) lives.
Though Antoinette stages this final escape through her madness, as in Breath, Eyes,
Memory, the genealogy among women becomes highly significant, though this time the
genealogy becomes the inheritance of madness among white Creole women, these inbetween women who are neither European nor Caribbean. There is a folk
understanding, among the black Jamaicans, of the hereditary nature of madness,
especially among women. Christophine says to Rochester, If you forsake her they will
tear her in pieces like they did her mother (Rhys 143). Other white Creoles, smooth
smiling people (Rhys 25) whisper at Annettes wedding, As for those two children the
boy an idiot kept out of sight and mind and the girl going the same way in my opinion
(Rhys 26). Children tease Antoinette, Look the crazy girl, you crazy like your mother
(Rhys 45), and Daniel reports to Rochester that There is madness in that family. (Rhys

87). The common understanding among Jamaican characters in the book is that this
madness is genealogical, not necessarily genetic, but a phenomenon travelling in cycles
through generations. However, there seems to be a transformation of this phenomenon
when Antoinette/Bertha crosses the ocean/border to England. There, she is locked in
one room in this country house, and when she finally escapes to walk around the rest of
the house at night, she did not want to see that ghost of a woman who they say haunts
this place (Rhys 168). As in The Yellow Wall-paper, it feels as though this has
happened before, and there isnt total recognition that the ghost, this haunting woman, is
the Antoinette/Bertha herself, or whether this is the ghost of genealogy, the ghost of
madwomen in the attic. The ghostwoman, madwoman becomes haunted and haunting, a
spectre of herself, an ambivalence. When she turns to a mirror, It was then that [she]
saw her the ghost. The woman with streaming hair. She was surrounded by a gilt frame
but [she] knew her (Rhys 169). In this passage Antoinettes conflation between the ghost
and the self is stretched to its most strenuous ambivalence: though the ghost in the gilt
frame, in the mirror, is Antoinette, it is also fundamentally not her. The reflection in the
mirror is a repetition, and thus, fundamentally, different: one thing can never be the same
thing twice. The reflection thus is a ghost, at once separate from and bound to Antoinette,
questionably/ambivalently still living. Antoinette is haunted by her own reflection, and
her destruction of the mirror, of the means through which the reflection haunts her, is
what leads her to the destruction of the whole house. Though Antoinette already
escaped during the moment in which Rochester called her Bertha, this seems to be a
secondary escape, a repeated escape. Antoinette flees her own ghost, and in the process
escapes from her own life.

The ambivalences indicated in the genealogical understanding of madness,

especially when Antoinette crosses border to England, as well as the double-voicing of
resistance with regards to gender roles and racial categories, repeat11 themselves with
regards to language and performance. Particularly salient is the use of Patois to resist
understanding. The use of Patois differs from the earlier instances of double-voiced
resistance in that it is clearly a code-switch, a purposeful choice. However, as Peter
Woods writes regarding the use of Gullah among slaves,
Quite apart from any white reluctances, the slaves had serious reservations of
their own about the acquisition of English... To cultivate a dialect few whites
could understand and to be able to adopt a stance of incomprehension toward
their masters' speech proved effectual elements of resistance. (187-188)
Patois, along with other Creole languages, has a history of being regarded as inferior, as
pidgin, and as bad by white European powers. However, this very presumption of its
inadequacy allows its use to be resistant. Rochester cannot understand Patois, and so
when he questions Baptistes sentiments towards his commands, he writes, I couldnt tell,
for he muttered in patois (Rhys 129). Spoken word poet Cam Awkwards poem
Awkward, in which he speaks a history of secret, double-voiced slave resistance
articulates this phenomenon. He describes the story of his ancestors: only a stubborn
slave, only a ladder, only the insistent lie of gravity, he would climb up, dad said, only to
crash down, a great clumsy bird, and this was his way of refusing to do work. And then
his last name: you are not named after the family that owned our bodies but after their
inability to see when theyd been owned. This inability to see resistance, this presumed
stupidity, presumed inferiority, which can be so destructive, can be used as a tool by the
innovative resister, by the stubborn slave. Even Awkwards teacher, would rather I told a

11

with the understanding of actual repetition (without change) as impossible

story about the whip about anything but the loopholes, about the way if we fling our
bodies hard enough against the ground the walls tremble. The oppressor does not want
the oppressed to be able to resist, and so, as mentioned above, it becomes necessary to
demonstrate to ones comrades the possibility of resistance. In this way, Patois, often
considered inferior, or bad, though an obvious code-switch still can be used to
communicate the possibility of resistance away from the sight of the colonist. For
example, when Christophine, began to mutter to herself. Not in patois. I knew the sound
of patois now (Rhys 146), Rochester thinks to himself, Shes as mad as the other, I
thought, and turned to the window (Rhys 146). The presumption of madness disguises
Christophines resistance, her actual use of obeah.
Other double-voiced ambivalences come from two-faced-ness: instead of using the
script of presumed stupidity, those seeking to liberate themselves can use sweet-talk and
two-faced-ness to trick the colonist, who presumes innocence and lack of guile among
the oppressed, leading him into a false sense of security. Daniel discusses his almost-whitepassing half brother in this context, revealing to Rochester that,
Because [his half-brother] prosper he is two-faced, he wont speak against white
people. Christophine is a bad woman and she will lie to you worse than your
wife. Your own wife she talks sweet talk and she lies. His [Alexanders, half
brothers] son Sandi is like a white man, but more handsome than any white man,
and received by many white people they say. Your wife know Sandi since long
time. Ask her and she tell you. But not everything I think. Oh no, not
everything. I see them when they think nobody see them. I see her when she . . .
You going eh? (Rhys 113)
Daniel mentions several instances of this sweet-talking, two-facedness that can be a threat
to the authority of the affable, arrogant colonist. Daniels revealing of these instances
could be seen as a betrayal of his people to the colonist, but there is an alternative
reading. By revealing to Rochester the possibility that he is being played, he is instilling a

sense of doubt in the colonist, allowing Rochester to thing that subversion is everywhere,
creating the possibility for a larger, more insipient, and more mysterious resistance than
actually exists. The introduction of the possibility of double-voicing and double-reading to
any hegemonic power forces that powers insecurity and fear, both of which also become
powerful tools that can be used against that hegemony. Christophine even says to
Antoinette,
Speak to your husband calm and cool, tell him about your mother and all what
happened at Coulibri and why she get sick and what they do to her. Dont bawl at
the man and dont make crazy faces. Dont cry either. Crying no good with him.
Speak nice and make him understand. (Rhys 105)
Here Christophine relays clear instructions to Antoinette on how to mount the kind of
sweet-talking resistance, how to use the scripts of the hegemony against the hegemony
itself. As with the genealogical nature of madness, there is a folk understanding that, as
Aunt Cora says, it is a Great mistake to go by looks one way or the other. (Rhys 33).
This particular kind of understanding is lacking in the European community.
The folk understanding among the Caribbeans of the possibility of resistance
through double-voicing is only one example of a counter-knowledge to the hegemonic,
Enlightenment Scientific knowledge perpetuated by the European colonists in Wide
Sargasso Sea. Caribbean characters demonstrate an active suspicion of and alternatives to
bio-medicine, disruptions of causality and linear time, and a belief in and use of obeah.
Antoinette begins to notice Christophines use of obeah in dreams: she dreams about a
rooster and a dead mans hand. This is at once macabre and intriguing to the young
Antoinette, and she remembers it, so that later in her life, when she is desperate with hate
for Rochester, she reaches out to Christophine to help her with obeah. When
Christophine says, When they get like that, she said, first they must cry, then they must

sleep. Dont talk to me about doctor, I know more than any doctor (Rhys 137), she
explicitly places her mode of knowledge above the bio-medical mode of knowledge.
When she says, That doctor an old-time doctor. These new ones I dont like them. First
word in their mouth is police. Police thats something I dont like (Rhys 138), she
directly links the medical establishment to law enforcement, madness to containment: as
detailed in History of Madness, there is indeed a long European and colonial history of the
containment of those diagnosed mad by the police, the tools of the state (REF
FOUCAULT). Christophine also draws a distinction between old-time and new
doctors, indicating that the knowledge and methods of the old-time doctors, those who
worked before European doctors did, hold equal authority in their name as doctor, but
the older, non-European doctors once again were superior. Antoinette also directly
contrasts her non-European modes of knowledge with European ones, saying of her
childhood conception of the world: All this was long ago, when I was still babyish and
sure that everything was alive, not only the river or the rain, but chairs, looking-glasses,
cups, saucers, everything (Rhys 34). When she was young and before she was forced to
assimilate to Englishness, Antoinette lived in a more animate world, one in which objects
had agency and couldnt simply be ruled by the scrutiny of a categorising Science. But
Rochester pushes her to change her mind, countering her animate world by questioning
its reality. To this she replies, But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?
(Rhys 73), demonstrating a certainty in her understanding of the world, but he replies,
And how can millions of people, their houses and the streets be unreal? (Rhys 73),
expecting that he has logically defeated her argument. However, she replies, More
easily much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream (Rhys 73). While
Rochester cannot believe in her island and asserts that it is a dream, Antoinettes counter

directly opposes his assertion of knowledge, his connection to reality. She questions his
interpretation of reality, really the very basis of his sanity, yet because of his power to
neutralise himself, he retains the power to diagnose himself sane. However, the
alternative knowledges begin to work their magic on Rochester, causing him to become
uneasy and look up their meanings in a book he has in Antoinettes house. He reads from
a chapter on obeah,
A zombi can also be the spirit of a place, usually malignant but sometimes to be
propitiated with sacrifices or offerings of flowers and fruit. ... negroes as a rule
refuse to discuss the black magic in which so many believe. Voodoo as it is called
in Haiti Obeah in some of the islands, another name in South America. They
confuse matters by telling lies if pressed. The white people, sometimes credulous,
pretend to dismiss the whole thing as nonsense. Cases of sudden or mysterious
death are attributed to a poison known to the negroes which cannot be traced.
(Rhys 97)
This passage becomes particularly salient, given the ghostlike nature of Antoinette/Bertha
later in the book. Antoinette, a white Creole, becomes almost the embodiment of a
zombi, yet it isi the black Jamaicans who will not discuss their magic. This book passage
demonstrates the European understanding that the Caribbean people are hiding
something from them, though they do not know what. This passage creates an aura of
fear, the knowledge of resistance but the lack of knowledge of its form. It appears that
Rochester and the other Europeans are aware of a double-voiced knowledge, a
knowledge thus hidden from their gaze, of the Caribbeans, and this knowledge takes the
form of a threat, though they do not know how to address it.
Contained within these alternative forms of knowledge is a disruption of linear
time. Antoinette seems to know things she couldnt already know if time were linear, and
even we as readers experience Rhyss foreshadowing in ways we couldnt experience if the
book were entirely linear. When Antoinettes house is burning and her family must flee,

everyone was looking up and pointing at Coco on the glacis railings with his feathers
alight. He made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed him and he fell
screeching. He was all on fire (Rhys 37). This scene is so dramatic, and the
foreshadowing so intense, that it remains branded on the readers mind throughout the
book and until Antoinette burns herself and the house in which she has been contained,
so that when this final happens, we feel as though we already had this knowledge.
Similarly, when Antoinette considers England, she thinks, I must know more than I
know already. For I know that house where I will be cold and not belonging, the bed I
shall lie in has red curtains and I have slept there many times before, long ago (Rhys
101). There is no way that she could have this knowledge if her understanding of the
world were bounded by linear time: she seems to know things it would be impossible to
know within a scientific, European, hegemonic conception of knowledge and time.
Particularly regarding time, she writes from her room in the house in England, only I
know how long I have been here. Nights and days and days and nights, hundreds of them
slipping through my fingers. But that does not matter. Time has no meaning. But
something you can touch and hold like my red dress, that has a meaning (Rhys 166).
Here she explicitly articulates her alternative knowledge, favouring her concrete
understandings over abstract ones, relegating her experience of linear time to a disruptive
meaninglessness. She asserts at once that only she knows how long she has been there,
then she promptly defies even herself by constructing a time devoid of meaning. As with
the inversions of the attic and of gender roles in The Yellow Wall-paper, the tension
Antoinette sets up between her supreme understanding of time and the meaninglessness
of time she also understands doesnt deny the existence of time (or the attic or gender

roles); it instead takes the power inscribed in understanding time, and she uses it to her
advantage.
During and after the move to England, these alternative versions of knowledge
take on new significance: the non-European modes of understanding are travelling to
Europe, and the Europeans must figure out how to (en)counter them. Antoinette,
meanwhile, must figure out ways to continue resisting, even as her identity is reconstituted
by the crossing of the border. Additionally, within England there are fractally recursive
borders: England, the house within England, her room within the house. Antoinette
writes, the house is big and safe, a shelter from the world outside which, say what you
like, can be a black and a cruel world to a woman (Rhys 160). We seem to have retuned
to the colonial mansion, and once again there is ambiguity as to whether the inside or the
outside is the real site of madness, the real site of cruelty. The truth of this does not
particularly matter here so much as the ambivalence. The ambivalence of madnesses and
liberations defies the force of science, which has a drive towards the definitive. Antoinette
has a supreme doubt of the England she is entering. As above, she doubts the reality of
cities and all those within them, and she questions: They tell me I am in England but I
dont believe them. We lost our way to England. When? Where? I dont remember, but
we lost it (Rhys 162). Her doubt regarding what people tell her is a key beginning of
dissent, a defiance of hegemony through questioning the truth purported by the
powerful. Her doubt of the veracity of the England they tell her she is in reveals the
constructed nature of the nation, the imagined nature of the community. This doesnt
make the nation any less real; it simply becomes and England of the mind. When she says
to her nurse, Grace, When we went to England (Rhys 165), Grace replies, You fool
this is England (Rhys 165). The England in Graces mind is firm, but she still feels it

necessary to impress the firmness of the reality of England onto Antoinette, calling her a
fool, invalidating her, for not believing it. As Sara Ahmed says in The Cultural Politics of
Emotion, it must be presumed that things are not secure, in and of themselves, in order to
justify the imperative to make things secure it is through announcing a crisis in security
that new forms of security, border policing and surveillance become justified (76). Grace,
by no means the greatest beneficiary of the nation, still acts as its border police,
reconstructing the border through Antoinettes potential transgression: The
transgression of the border is required in order for it to be secured as a border in the first
place (Ahmed 76). Antoinettes doubt of England as natural reality demonstrates
Graces ability to confirm it. Still, Antoinette thinks to herself, using the tactic for
resistance that has been successful in her life,
(That afternoon we went to England. There was grass and olive-green water and
tall trees looking into the water. This, I thought, is England. If I could be here Id
get well again and the sound in my head would stop. Let me stay a little longer, I
said, and she sat down under a tree and went to sleep. A little way off there was a
cart and horse a woman was driving it. It was she who sold me the knife. I gave
her the locket around my neck for it.) (Rhys 165)
She counters Grace, but secretly, reasserting that within this room, she is not in England,
that England is somehow elsewhere. She constructs England as Other to and outside of
her experience. Still, though, there is something sinister about her experience with
England; there she fools Mrs Eff and trades her locket for a knife. This is reminiscent of
her mothers trading her jewelry for money in order to survive; Antoinette trades her own
jewelry for an instrument of violence, perhaps in order to survive. However, if we
consider violence as a system, Antoinettes taking and hiding of the knife can be a
resistance to the forces that imprison her. The power of Antoinettes definition of
England, counter to Graces, is that she constructs her own border, a counter-border. As

the woman in The Yellow Wall-paper doesnt undo gender and instead uses it to invert
and redefine its own boundaries, Antoinette is using the border policing of England to
reconstruct its territory, the borderlands. In her piece Shibboleth, Doris Salcedo
harnesses the power of the border, placing it through the centre of cohesive modern life,
bringing the rift to the centre, the boundary of the Other into the Self. She is using the
power of borders against their own constructions: redrawing the border is a polyvalent
political act. Antoinette discusses her ability to border cross by night, saying of Grace,
When night comes, and she has had several drinks and sleeps, it is easy to take the keys.
I know now where she keeps them. Then I open the door and walk into their world. It is,
as I always knew, made of cardboard (Rhys 162). When Antoinette redraws the border,
making her own room distinct from England, she echoes the locking of the attic door in
The Yellow Wall-paper, inverting the meanings of the boundary, turning England into
an imagined community made of cardboard and unattached to reality, cementing the
sanity of her own attic. While her behaviour is still read as crazy by her captors, led by
Mr. Rochester, her redrawing of the border creates safe haven for herself, haven which
allows her to eventually escape, through burning the colonial mansion down. Though in
the end it is ambiguous whether or not she really burns the house down, once again the
actual truth does not matter so much as the possibility of resistance. Her escape is
ambivalent; her behaviour and redrawing of borders are ambivalent; borders themselves
become polyvalent. Within this polyvalence, Antoinette is able to hide her resistance
except to those who are willing to see it.

who lays claim to the borderlands?

Thus far we have mostly envisioned a world full of objects that we can transform
into tools to fight oppression. However, even as we seek to subvert imperialism it is
draping itself in new cloaks, even using double-voicing for its own agenda: for example, as
iek discusses in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? the freedom seemingly granted by the
liberal-democratic consensus is itself totalitarianism dressed in democratic garb, and the
practice of labeling dissent against it totalitarian as a justification for stifling that dissent
demonstrates the very totalitarianism the garb seeks to dissemble. Ken Keseys 1962
novel One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, narrated by a Native American character, shows us a
complex world in which institutionalised white men fight for their freedom against the
white woman Nurse Ratched12 and her guard of black boys. They use the forces they
have clearly on their side, patriarchy and White Supremacy, just as they flip the scripts
that would oppress them, namely those that often are used to invalidate those labeled
mentally ill. Meanwhile, Nurse Ratched and her aides try to do the opposite: imposing
the invalidation of the ill, while seeking to flip the scripts of patriarchy and White
Supremacy. This becomes a battle of the possible, with each player using whatever
resources she has available. There are no rules, per se; only limits in the (im)possibilities of
the mind. The story takes place in occupied Amerikkka, with our narrator, Bromden, son
of a Columbia Gorge tribes Chief, frequently referencing the process through which his
tribes land was bought13 by the Amerikkkan government and through which he began

Though the inversion of which gender is in power is theoretically rich in this text, the main focus of the
chapter will be a discussion of using whatever tools are available. So, for example, even thought Nurse
Ratched is a woman and has power over these men, the larger system of patriarchy still operates, and they
can use this against her for their liberation.
13 bought in the sense of stolen
12

silencing himself. Furthermore, the story takes place in a mental hospital within
Amerikkka: there are colonies within colonies, prisons within prisons, nations within
nations. The whole text becomes a borderland, with the players using all resources
available to contest the nature and the place of the border and the territories it holds or
excludes.
The same systems of power we have already been exploring converge in instances
of legible power in this book: cis-hetero-patriarchal White Supremacist capitalist
imperialism plays a huge role in every contested moment of power. However, the fight
becomes less pure, and we have to acknowledge the messiness, benefits, and downsides of
praxis for liberation. Saul Alinsky, notorious organiser, argues that significant social
changes in history have been made by revolutions evolution is simply the term used by
nonparticipants to denote a particular sequence of revolutions as they synthesized into a specific major
social change (Rules for Radicals 4). Since these social transformations require revolution
that is to say, disruption, radical change, the utter rejection of the status quo an
argument against the inappropriate or impolite (and thus invalid) nature of the mode used
to make change is an inherently conservative one. There is no such thing as, I support
the message but not the method. Alinsky continues, to say that corrupt means corrupt
the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles (25). No such
immaculate conception exists: if we believe in the ends, we must employ the means
effective to attain them, though surely, when there are multiple means, we must make the
most ethical choice14. Through this framework, let us analyse the resistances the inmates,
the doctor, and even the author, make in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest: that is, since

I do, however, leave open the question of relative morality. What kind of metaborderland do we create
between purity and cooptation?
14

liberation is the goal, they are willing to liberate themselves by any means necessary. In
protest politics, which are the politics available to the inmates, those with power, Nurse
Ratched and the Combine, always have more resources, more people (though these
people are motivated through terror), more collective time, more weapons, and the
official historical narrative. Those fighting power, the oppressed, are strapped for
resources, people-power, time, weapons, and counter-narratives. There is a distinct
disadvantage along power lines, yet the oppressed, in order to free both themselves and
their oppressors, must act: they do not have chance to think first and act later. They are
born, interpellated, into a world of action and cannot henceforth escape it. Unite
reflection and action into praxis and thus liberate yourselves, cries Paolo Freire. The
most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means (Alinsky 27). This is the praxis of
McMurphy, a new inmate who is perpetually in trouble with the law: his praxis is better
than the silence of its absence, the unquestioned maintenance of the status quo, the
squelching of dissent before it even begins to take form. All his acts of dissent demonstrate
the possibility thereof, even when they are imperfect, especially when they are imperfect.
McMurphy openly espouses his self-interested politics, despite the fact that the medical
establishment wants him to take a moral stand, which it could then break down. He sees
this battle against Nurse Ratched as Alinksy says political realists see the world: an arena
of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is
rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest (13). McMurphys tactics
change frequently, and he is always coming up with new schemes that sometimes logically
counter the old ones: he uses the tools he has available in the moment. Other characters
in the book begin catching on to this view of the world: when McMurphy has been given
a lobotomy, Bromden thinks to himself, I was only sure of one thing: [McMurphy]

wouldnt have left something like that sit there in the day room with his name tacked on it
for twenty or thirty years so the Big Nurse could use it as an example of what can happen
if you buck the system (Kesey 322), before he suffocates McMurphy that night. The
other inmates know that Bromden does this and why: they know that Nurse Ratched will
know that one of them defied her, countered her move to squash their dissent. They are
playing by new rules, the rules of action. As Alinsky says,
in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent with
both ones individual conscience and the good of mankind [sic]. The choice must
always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individuals
personal salvation. He [sic] who sacrifices the mass good for his [sic] personal
conscience has a peculiar conception of personal salvation; he doesnt care
enough for people to be corrupted for them. (26)
Through this action-oriented lens I examine the resistances of the characters in the book,
refusing to immediately condemn Bromden for the suffocation or McMurphy for Billys
suicide, for example. I shall not act as one of the means-and-ends moralists, constantly
obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves who are
are passive but real allies of the Haves (Alinsky 26). Though this chapter will
explore how even double-voicing can be used to oppress, I wish to make my own political
stance towards resistance clear.
With this framework in mind, systems of oppression function somewhat differently
in this novel (and my analysis of it). Though patriarchy and White Supremacy are
oppressive, the inmates use these systems to liberate themselves. It is an imperfect
liberation, and I am not launching a wholesale endorsement of using the patriarchy or
White Supremacy for our escapes into madness, but it is a liberation none-the-less, a
demonstration of the possibility of dissent. So, for example, when McMurphy sees it as his
only and final option towards a collective liberation to rape Nurse Ratched, he grabbed

for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front, screaming again when the two
nippled circles started from her chest and swelled out and out, bigger than anybody had
ever even imagined (Kesey 319). He reveals her femaleness to the inmates and thus,
because of the patriarchy, her weakness. This gives them some small continuous power
against her hegemony, even if patriarchy itself is oppressive. After his revealing of her
femininity, her new uniform, could no longer conceal the fact that she was a woman
(Kesey 320). McMurphys violent tactic works subversively; he reveals her weakness
forever, and it cannot be undone or unseen. McMurphy uses White Supremacy similarly,
girding the black aides to the fight he tactically needs to fight specifically by using racial
slurs. Though the aides do not at first respond to this, they see that his tactics are designed
to infuriate them, and some of his prior tactics have done so just enough, such as when
white inmate players purposefully cut the face of one aide under the guise of a basketball
game. However, this use of the script of White Supremacy (as above with the script of
patriarchy) does not ultimately uphold White Supremacy, as McMurphy is using this fight
to stage a resistance to Nurse Ratched, the medical establishment, logic, science, and
imperialism. Directly, this use of White Supremacy helps lead to Bromdens return to his
land, an ultimate refutation of/resistance to White Supremacy. The books war, then, is a
series of battles in which the characters gather whatever tools they can to fight for their
liberation, with even systems of oppression, such as patriarchy and White Supremacy,
becoming polyvalent.
Many wars are being fought in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, and many borders
being contested. The inmates are battling their own fears and restrictions; McMurphy
and the inmates are battling Nurse Ratched; Bromden and McMurphy are battling the
medical establishment, settler imperialism, capitalism, the Combine. The narrative

centres itself on the schizo and also on the post-European-contact Indian, one with a
European last name and influence of European culture. The narrative brings the margins
to the centre. Thus, the story takes place in the context of hybridity, imperial occupation,
madness, and border(land)s. Hybridising the border and considering the internal colonies
of Native American nations and tribes, it helps us to take a Chicana feminist reading of
the border:
the border is figured as a multi-level concept, representing on the one hand the
transgression of cultural and political constraints that often impede womens selfrealisation. On the other hand crossing borders and establishing new frontiers is a
metaphor frequently evoked in order to indicate a personal and often radical
transformation. (Jacobs 155-156)
In One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, the border is constructed in much this way. Inmates
often speak in clear distinctions between the Outside and the Inside, yet Bromden
understands the asylum as inside as a site of the Outside. Similarly to the attic of the
colonial mansion, the border between the ward Inside and the world Outside does
polyvalent work. One way in which it works is to cleave the Inside and Outside: to
simultaneously unite and divide. Considering the border as a mode of
distinction/discrimination, we can borrow from Judith Butlers Gender is Burning, in
which she says,
To claim that all gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that imitation is at
the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a
secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but the
hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own
idealizations. That it must repeat this imitation, that it sets up pathologizing
practices and normalizing sciences in order to produce and consecrate its own
claim on originality and propriety suggests that heterosexual performativity is
beset by an anxiety that it can never fully overcome, that its effort to become its
own idealizations can never be finally or fully achieved, and that it is consistently
haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for
heterosexualized gender to produce itself. In this sense, then, drag is subversive to
the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is

itself produced and disputes heterosexualitys claim on naturalness and originality.

(125)
If we read sanity as heterosexuality and insanity as homosexuality, then we come to
see sanity as a performance that presupposes the existence of its Other, insanity. The
border between the two, then, the distinction, the difference, the definition, the diagnosis,
ends up uniting the two. Sanity requires insanity to form itself, just as the world requires
the ward in order to have any authority or meaning at all. This leads us to another
performance of the border, as Baudrillard articulates it: prisons are there to conceal the
fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral (1940)
just as, Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is
real (1940). The ward is there to make us believe that the world is sane. The ward is
presented so as to contain disorder within its borders, but the ward is an internal colony:
the ward puts disorder at the centre of the ordered world: order requires disorder to be at
its centre, and thus order itself cannot exist. The United States of Amerikkka requires the
internal colonies of Native American nations, as well as the internal colony of the AfricanAmerican nation, in order to exist: it is indeed built upon genocide, stolen lands, and
slavery, yet it must deny these internal colonies in order to go on existing as the land of
the free.
The United States of Amerikkka functions as an imaginary Outside of the insane
asylum, an imaginary nation devoid of contradiction, yet in its construction of nation, it
must play the role of inside. The point of cleavage, where the Outside/Inside meet and
depart, forms the actual border, and it can only function as the two distinct things (which
also contain each other) do so. Sara Ahmed talks about emotions in this manner in The
Cultural Politics of Emotion. The emotions do not exist inherently or without context. They

only exist as relations among subjects and objects. Subjects become subjects and objects
objects, in fact, through a process of emotion. A bear, she says, becomes fearsome only in
that a child finds it fearsome emotion connects and describes the relationship between
the child and the bear. Emotion defines, but this definition is an action. If we consider
madness an action rather than a state, then were in business. Moving with Ahmeds
argument, definition works to build relationships between entities, and definition requires
the drawing of boundaries. In order for one thing to be distinct from another, we must
build and enforce the boundary. Because borders are political, because borders are drawn
according to power relations, according to authority and its subversion, the inmates wage
fierce battles over the construction and maintenance of the border or hopelessly dont.
Ahmed writes, regarding the borders created between bodies,
the skin comes to be felt as a border through the violence of the impression of one
surface upon another. In this way, hate creates the surfaces of bodies through the
way in which bodies are aligned with or against other bodies. How we feel about
others is what aligns us as a collective, which paradoxically takes shape only as
an effect of such alignments. It is through how others impress upon us that the
skin of the collective begins to take shape. (54)
Ahmed describes here the basis of nationalism one collective formed only through a
bordering and exclusion of the Other. Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities
describes this phenomenon, detailing how through language communities enabled and
created by print capitalism one group of people could come to imagine themselves as a
community, a nation, based upon their non-Otherness; their commonality existing in
opposition to difference. This drive to categorise, rising simultaneously with the empirical,
scientific thinking of the enlightenment and predicting European colonialism, Anderson
details in terms of the census, the map, and the museum. He discusses the urge to
taxonomise, categorise, name, number, grid, define, diagnose, as taking multiplicitous

forms, each of which segments and controls in different ways. Regarding the census, for
example, Anderson states that after 1850 colonial administrations used more complex
systems to identify colonized populations, according to a maze of grids which had no
immediate financial or military purpose (169). This stood in sharp contrast to the prior
state, in which those whom the taxonomy immediately affected were cognizant of their
numerability (169). The new logic of the census becomes peculiar, trying carefully to
count the objects of its feverish imagining in such a way that every member of a category
had to be understood as one digit in an aggregable series of replicable digits in the
category (169). This reproducibility falls into the same ideology of reproducibility as that
upheld in empiricism and the new authority found in the new truth-telling mechanism of
science. People, like experiments, like data points, become infinitely repeatable, infinitely
observable, understandable, logical. Anderson continues his analysis through the use of
European-style maps, arguing that they worked on the basis of a totalizing classification
(173), one which subjected the entire planets curved surface to a geometrical grid
which squared off empty seas and unexplored regions in measured boxes (173). Not only
now is space measured, metered, boxed, named, but also that which evades measurement
is constructed as to-be-measured, to-be-mapped. Maps map their own futures, futures that in
space do not yet even exist. Maps dont tell stories in the past; they carry out imperatives,
inherently futurical. The charting of these boxes became the duty of adventurers,
explorers, troops, who were on the march to put space under the same surveillance
which the census-makers were trying to impose on persons (173), persons such as
Bromden. This march to map as to census is the same march that places the inmates
inside the hospital, bordering them up inside, at the heart of the nation. Bromden as

inmate becomes not only displaced through maps but also re-placed and replaceable
through census. As Baudrillard writes,
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the
map that precedes the territory PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA it is the
map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would
be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and
not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no
longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself. (1936-7)
Borders draw on reality and confuse it to the point where the real never existed.
Genuine and false iterations of madness, of nation, of ward, of world, become impossible
to distinguish, and above this the distinguish-ed world becomes impossible to discern from
the murky, amorphous, unlined one. The simulacrum becomes all-encompassing, just as
disorder becomes all encompassing, just as the Outside un/holds the Inside un/holds the
Outside. We can borrow from Ahmeds affect theory again, when she says,
To consider hatred as a form of intimacy is to show how hatred is ambivalent; it is
an investment in an object (of hate) whereby the object becomes part of the life of
the subject even though (or perhaps because) its threat is perceived as coming
from outside. Hate then cannot be opposed to love. In other words, the subject
becomes attached to the other through hatred, as an attachment that returns the
subject to itself If the demand for love is the demand for presence, and
frustration is the consequence of the necessary failure of that demand, then hate
and love are intricately tied together, in the intensity of the negotiation between
presence and absence. (50)
Ahmed details how the very Outside-ness of hatred is what causes the subject to internalise
it. The border undoes itself through its own existence. Madness is and yet cannot be
opposed to sanity. It binds the us all to the mad the same way hatred binds us to the
Other. Madness returns us to ourselves. The border itself returns the Outside to the
inside, undoes the origin even as we look back to it. The border functions on all these
levels simultaneously. The border becomes polyvalent even when it is not being used to
double voice or dissimulate; we feel the border is an illusion, but it is hiding nothing from

us. The border functions similarly to the author: the author does not exist before the text or
even create it: the author in fact is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture,
one limits, excludes, and chooses impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation,
the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction (Foucault What is an
Author? 913). The author herself need not be an illusion, but we interpret her
ideologically. The author herself holds no sway over the text, yet we believe she does, and
this belief is powerful. This belief is Marxs false consciousness, but it remains important
in terms of the power of discourse. When, however, we realise the falseness of this
consciousness, or to take on an improvement from Baudrillard, when we realise there is
no distinction between true and false consciousness, we fall into freedom in a Sartrian
sense, bound now to choose how we are, indeed forced to choose how we will be. The
possibility of choice, however, and as we see in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, can be
terrifying, and we often choose to pretend we are not choosing15.
A troubled relationship to choice and the enforcement of the border seems
particularly prevalent in the disturbed. Liah Greenfeld writes in Mind, Modernity, Madness,
The focused psychotic attitude to the boundaries between the bodily self and the outside
and, specifically, to food (todays anorexia) was frequently present with any of the other
expressions of schizophrenia (Greenfeld 19). She writes that historically, the essence of
schizophrenia is delusion, which she proposes to define as the inability to distinguish
between information originating outside the mind and information generated by the
mind (or inside the brain). For it must be remembered that human reality is a culturally
constructed reality: what we experience, i.e., what is empirical for us, in the vast majority

This is not to eschew the material effects of captivity. Even Baudrillard admits that a war is not any the
less heinous for being a mere simulacrum the flesh suffers just the same (1946).
15

of cases, is symbolic, meaningful, even if material (Greenfeld 19). Though Greenfelds

extended critique does not question the ultimate process of empiricism, her opening into
relative empiricism creates the ability for different truths to exist simultaneously, makes
the borders and where they are drawn questionable. Though she says that the mad are
characterised as such due to their inability to distinguish Outside and Inside, the
combinatory synthesis of Baudrillard, Foucault, Ahmed, and Butler allows us to see that,
like the myth of an author, our society has constructed, continues to believe in, and
enforces material consequences upon those who flout the reality of the border in order
to convince us of the reality of the mad. As Baudrillard says, before, the task was to
dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none (1941). There
is no sanity/border, yet there very much materially is.
Nationalism also is based upon borders, specifically the exclusion of those who
dont fit the story of the nation, usually racially and/or ethnically, Anderson argues; the
nation is a cis-hetero-patriarchal structure, subjugating women and pathologising the
queer (except in the new case of homonationalism, though homonationalism can hardly
be said to be queer), McClintock details. These facts have led to the pathologising of
women, queer people, the poor, ethnic minorities, and anyone else who doesnt fit the
national narrative. This exclusion leads us back to categorisation, diagnosis, and the limits
of language as well as self/Other. From this point gender theory, queer theory, critical
race theory, and postcolonial theory link with their roots in post-structuralism and become
useful for analysing how madness is created as pathology by the nation in order to
reinforce the (story of) the monolithic naturalness of the nation. This myth of naturalness
becomes that same script which can be deployed so as to exclude. Benedict Anderson
describes how this script ultimately conflates nation, race, and gender by connecting

naturalness to that which is not chosen that identity into which one is interpellated
rather than that which one can influence thus assimilating nation-ness to skin colour,
gender, parentage and birth-era (143). Despite this, most nations maintain an additional
myth of openness. Anderson claims that from the start the nation was conceived in
language, not blood, and ... one could be invited into the imagined community. Thus
today, even the most insular nations accept the principle of naturalization (wonderful
word!), no matter how difficult in practice they may make it (145). These groups of
people are pathologised primarily via science and medicine through this myth of
naturalisation: when they fail to naturalise, because they never could become a part of the
nation, it is possible to diagnose them as defective16. Science and medicine, as tools of the
nation, a pathologising force, lead us to the medical-industrial complex, the prisonindustrial complex, the military-industrial complex, and even the non-profit industrial
complex as we enter the neoliberal era and the erasure and demonisation of the welfare
state, which Carr argues in Scripting Addiction.
Bromdens knowledge of the Combine and extreme suspicion of and obsession
with mechanisation demonstrates his understanding of the aggregability of his body, the
way he can be fit into a larger system that works for the profit of the nation. He discusses
the ward as a factory for the Combine (Kesey 40), a place to either make it possible for
people to naturalise themselves to the nation or to keep them out of its public spaces,
spaces in which the national narrative is reinforced. Bromden knows inmates are either
products or prisoners. He describes the chronic patients as not in the hospital, these, to
get fixed, but just to keep them from walking around the street giving the product a bad

This pathologisation links with criminalisation and militarisation, both of which processes provide
tremendous excuses to exploit the labour and lives of (in Amerikkka, black and brown) bodies that do not fit
the myth of the nation.
16

name (Kesey 15), when a good product, of procedures like electro-shock therapy and
lobotomy, consists of a man who leaves the ward mean and mad and snapping at the
whole world and comes back a few weeks later the sweetest, nicest, best-behaved thing
you ever saw A success, they say, but I say hes just another robot for the Combine and
might be better off as a failure (Kesey 17). Bromdens suspicion presumes the
impossibility of naturalisation for someone who refuses to become an instrument of the
Combine. He connects this suspicion directly to his position as a Native American and his
fathers experience being forced to dissolve the tribe. Bromden writes of his father:
The Combine. It worked on him for years. He was big enough to fight it for a
while. It wanted us to live in inspected houses. It wanted to take the falls. It was
even in the tribe, and they worked on him. In the town they beat him up in the
alleys and cut his hair short once. Oh, the Combines big big. He fought it a
long time till my mother made him too little to fight anymore and he gave up.
(Kesey 220)
To Bromden, the Combine is ubiquitous, taking form in government officials, his own
white mother, and even tribe members themselves. Bromden has a sense of the
Combines power as ultimate and inevitable, though by his own estimation, his refusal to
participate, that is, his residence in the mental hospital, is perhaps the only remaining way
to resist the Combine. Bromdens hesitance to join McMurphy, but his close observation
of him, stems from his experiences watching his father. He says of McMurphy, Hes
finally getting cagey, is all. The way Papa finally did when he came to realize that he
couldnt beat that group from town who wanted the government to put in the dam
(Kesey 174). Bromdens experience with the nation is that visible resistance is futile:
Papa had done the smart thing by signing the papers; there wasnt anything to gain by
bucking it. The government would of got it anyhow, sooner or later; this way the tribe
would get paid good (Kesey 174). His father still mourns, What can you pay for the

way a man lives? What can you pay for what a man is? (Kesey 220), even as he
attempts to naturalise his tribe. Bromden notices small resistances, though, like when his
father and uncles dig up the body of their deceased grandmother, or when after he
escapes the ward he hears that some of the tribe have taken to building their old
ramshackle wood scaffolding al lover that big million-dollar hydroelectric dam, and are
spearing salmon in the spillway (Kesey 325), mounting the same kind of resistance as
Cam Awkwards ancestors. It is significant that when he escapes, Bromden caught a ride
with a guy, a Mexican guy (Kesey 324). The man who thus helps him escape is a
thoroughly post-colonial man, Mexican, of a nation, but he is not Amerikkkan; he has not
been naturalised into this nation, and there is a hint of indigenous solidarity here.
Science and medicine also work so well as tools of the capitalist nation in
pathologising those who dont fit the story of the nation because they stem from the same
ideology. This ideology is that of logic (a particular kind of logic), which as Liah
Greenfeld explains stems from a monotheistic view of the world. This monotheistic
perspective, unlike a polytheistic perspective, requires consistent, coherent logic. It
requires order and organisation and a lack of contradiction or ambivalence. It thus links
to nationalism, imperialism, and eventually faith in empirical science. The truth produced
by medicine upon madness and disorder is motivated by profit, is motivated by
pharmaceutical companies, is motivated by capitalism. This is how we end up with a
confused and fragmental DSM, conflicting diagnoses and definitions, and a multitude of
different drugs for different disorders. The testing of these drugs also as well as the testing
of psychiatric conditions as well fall disproportionally on already marginalised people
people of colour, imprisoned people, poor people, as discussed in Carl Elliots White Coat,
Black Hat. He explains that because drug studies are required to be paid, many poor

people, especially those without jobs, are drawn to them as a source of income: because
many poor people are black and brown in Amerikkka17, the testing of drugs which may or
may not be safe for humans takes place primarily through the sacrifice of black and
brown bodies. Because wealth is so racialised and healthcare so expensive in Amerikkka,
primarily white people can afford medicine once it has been tested. In the current-day
field of medialised mental disorders of Euro-diasporic society, we still see the (continuing!)
legacies of cis-hetero-patriarchal White Supremacist capitalism in that poor
predominantly black and brown people are being sacrificed by white people in order to
glean diagnoses and drugs used primarily benefit rich white people.
Its all very well (indeed, very interesting) to talk about how the capitalist nation
uses the authority of a hegemonic truth-producing science to diagnose madness/mental
disorders to pathologise certain groups who lie outside the order of the nation, but what of
the way that madness itself challenges the basis of Eurodisaporic society? How it
challenges the orderliness, the logic, of science, nationalism, and capitalism? Is this the
reason that these societies condemn madness, calling it dis-order, invalidating it through
exclusion? It feels dialectic, ambivalent, multisided, incoherent. It feels like it goes beyond
border crossing; its border dissolving; its border reconstituting. Thats whats so
threatening about madness, disorder thats why we lock mad people up, give them
drugs, pacify them. Medication and incarceration oddly are part of the politics of civility
that make it socially unacceptable to speak out.
A diagnosis can allow access to potentially life-saving services, as Carr details in
Scripting Addiction, for example among drug addicts who are also poor and homeless

To be clear: this is because of structural racism and the legacies of colonialism, genocide, and slavery, not
because black and brown people exist inherently as poor.
17

women of colour, yet a diagnosis can allow the state to strip someone of all their rights, as
in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Drugs allow people to become productive members of society
and drugs force people to become productive members of society. Drug trials provide
alternatives to below-living-wage jobs and they destroy the bodies of the poor. In each
case, there are power dynamics, and in each case of power there is a struggle between
authority and its subversion (neither one original). Flipping the script, all of these things
have the possibility for reinforcing authority or providing opportunity for subversion,
madness itself is that. Madness itself can flip the script.

SORRY, I LOST MY WAY.

BACK TO THE SMOOCH TO KEEP ME ON TRACK.
SORRY, I JUST FLEW WEST FOR A WHILE.

Following Ahmeds affect theory, its not that a diagnosis describes an already
existent category the category works to do something to someone and for someone. It will
be more interesting to examine what diagnoses do rather than prescribe what they should
be according to some truth-value I have given myself the right to determine. I shall make
no suggestions upon how or whether at all we ought to diagnose. I do not deny that my
argument linking the act of diagnosis to the act of naming to the act of speaking (in the
broad sense of world-as-text) opens my previous statement to negation. These letters and
you will interact, and you each will transform through a combination of your wills. I do
not have permission or authority to make these present-predictions, yet here absent-I go
prophesying away, impressing upon you, your ear, your eye. I insist I slip. I may be

hiding in these (yellow) pages as behind wallpaper. I insist we script and flip. We lost
generations, exist. We madness resist.
OKAY, OKAY, GET BACK TO THE POINT, ANNA.
NEED I REMIND YOU THAT I AM A BACKWARDS NEEDLE?

In One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest we see these ideologies of the border at play, and
the Combine, Nurse Ratched, McMurphy, and the other inmates all are trying to use
them to their advantage in a war for their own liberation. Bromden notes that Nurse
Ratched, whom he calls the Big Nurse, works with an eye to adjusting the Outside world
too (Kesey 28), dreaming of a world of precision efficiency and tidiness like a pocket
watch with a glass back, a place where the schedule is unbreakable and all the patients
who arent Outside, obedient under her beam, are wheelchair Chronics with catheter
tubes Year by year she accumulates her ideal staff: doctors (Kesey 29). Bromden sees
that Nurse Ratched practices on the Inside what she cannot yet wholly practice on the
Outside. Within her realm of the disordered she tries to impose order, yet she cannot
impose this order on the Outside, the realm of the supposedly well. Ratcheds inability to
impose order on the supposedly orderly demonstrates the same kind of subversive
inversions present in The Yellow Wall-Paper and Wide Sargasso Sea are also at play here,
turning the disordered into order into the trappings of the Outside nation of insiders. Her
orderliness itself becomes a kind of disorder, recognised even by other nurses, one of
whom remarks, Army nurses trying to run an Army hospital. They are a little sick
themselves (Kesey 278). In an effort to impose her order, Nurse Ratched says to the
inmates: A good many of you are in here because you could not adjust to the rules of
society in the Outside World it is entirely for your own good that we enforce discipline

and order (Kesey 199-200). She sets up a parallel of Outside and Inside rules, yet makes
the distinction that the Outside rules failed. Somehow, though, she also insinuates that
the inmates failed, and she thus subjects them to more rules. This logic is contradictory
and ambivalent, thus disordered, but this doesnt seem to matter to the Big Nurse. In her
quest for order, she subsumes disorder, much in the same ways as Amerikka subsumes the
asylum.
While Nurse Ratched works as hard as possible to use the border between her
ward and the world to constitute different rule regimes, inmates, especially McMurphy,
are constantly working to re-constitute the border. For example, after an early
demonstration of inmate defiance, Bromden notes that the big nurse for the first time is,
on the other side of the glass and getting a taste of how it feels to be watched when you
wish more than anything else to be able to pull a green shade between your face and all
the eyes that you cant get away from (Kesey149). Just a slight defiance reconstitutes the
meaning18 of the border, the glass, in that Nurse Ratcheds gaze used to emanate from it,
but now the inmates gazes return onto her through it. The glass, polyvalent, is being used
now by the inmates to construct the power relations between themselves and Nurse
Ratched differently, through harnessing their male gaze and turning her into an object.
Similarly, another reconstitution of the border fundamentally changes the way an inmate
interacts with and relates to his constitution by the border the border and the inmate
enter a dialectic. When McMurphy said in his slowest, deepest drawl how he figured he
could use one of the smokes he bought this mornin, then ran his hand through the glass
(Kesey 201), he demonstrates a change in his aims: he is no longer trying to simply bodily
depart from the ward, no longer trying to just serve his sentence; he is instead attacking

18

read meaning in the sense of doing.

the system. Hes been an outlaw all his life, but now hes defying the law, reconstituting
the law. As Sartre says in The Flies, Once freedom lights its beacon in a man's heart, the
gods are powerless against him (102). Freedom has entered McMurphys heart, and
though this border, this glass, materially affects his life, he is no longer bound by it. He
has found the possibility of defying it.
Even Bromden and the other inmates, through McMurphys repeated
demonstrations of the possibility of freedom and the permeability or reconstitutability of
the border, begin to question and reconstruct the border. When the inmates leave for
their fishing trip, their passage to the Outside seems pretty unremarkable, but Bromden,
watching birds and leaves, observes, It looked at first like the leaves were hitting the
fence and turning into birds and flying away (Kesey 234). The inmates are like these
bird-leaves; the crossing of the border changes their nature, just as race can change by
passing into different racial contexts. Inside, the men are leaves, but when they pass
Outside, when they hit the fence, they turn into birds, can fly away east, west, or over the
cuckoos nest. Travelling into the Outside opens up possibility to these men, and they
return transformed, carrying their experiences of the Outside back Inside with them.
However, as they first travel Outisde, they cannot escape the markers of their Inside-ness,
their Otherness, their green uniforms. Bromden writes that the day was so beautiful
everybody shouldve been happy just being outside in it (Kesey 234), but this was not
the case. Instead, they all stood in a silent bunch with [their] hands in [their] pockets
while the doctor walked to get his car. A silent bunch, watching the townspeople who
were driving past on their way to work slow town to gawk at the loonies in green
uniforms (Kesey 234). These men are still Other, and though no one gawks at them
Inside, their passage into the Outside hasnt somehow normalised them. Though they

have been transformed through this passage, the border crossing does note completely
change them. This actually sets up the grounds for dissent because though the border has
some distinguishing powers, the men can cross back and forth. They begin to see the
border as illusion, even though there are material benefits to believing the illusion, which
allows them ultimately to leave the hospital.
The illusion of, yet materially functioning, border between the Outside world and
the Inside ward rests upon a second border, that between sanity and insanity. Thus,
control over this border also becomes an opportunity for the exercise of authority or its
subversion. Control over this border comes in many forms, but, as discussed in the
chapters above, the performance of madness is one way in which to construct and/or
transgress this border. Let us consider performance in terms of symptoms of the real.
Now, we already know that it can be difficult, nigh, impossible, to distinguish between the
real and the simulacrum: Since the simulator produces true symptoms, is he ill or not?
He cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not-ill (Baudrillard 1937), but
Baudrillard also offers an analogy/analysis of the medical establishment, which he says
stops at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness. For if any
symptom can be produced, and can no longer be accepted as a fact of nature, then every
illness may be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning
since it only knows how to treat true illnesses by their objective causes (1937). As
though this were not problem enough for Nurse Ratched and the medical establishment,
Baudrillard continues, in the sense that all lunatics are simulators, and this lack of
distinction is the worst form of subversion. Against it classical reason armed itself with all
its categories. But it is this today which again outflanks them, submerging the truth
principle (1938). This simulation becomes the basis from which truth becomes defunct

and the border transgressable. McMurphy, then, in his insistence that he is mad
ultimately is also insisting that he and all the other inmates are not mad either (and that
they are thus unjustly locked up). When Bromden says, if this barrel-chested man with
the scar and the wild grin is playacting or if hes crazy enough to be just like he talks, or
both (Kesey 19), he lays the groundwork for the doubt of madness as a true disease as
well as the possibility that it could be multiple things at the same time, a feminist, antilogical both and. Then when McMurprhy insists But I am crazy, Doc. I swear I
am (Kesey 47), his insistence seems a protest too much, an obvious attempt at
simulation, but simulation which the medical establishment cannot detect. Though the
authorities warn: Dont overlook the possibility that this man might be feigning psychosis
to escape the drudgery of the work farm (Kesey 47), this feeling of drudgery towards
work being antithetical to myths of Amerikkkan work ethic, there ultimately isnt a way
for the doctors to discern whether or not this is true, rendering the border between the
mad and the sane defunct. For this reason it is funny when McMurphy asks, Doctor
do I look like a sane man? (Kesey 47). McMurphy continues to play with the easy
transgression of the Inside/Outside border and the mad/sane border when he tells the
inmates, hell, I been surprised how sane you guys all are. As near as I can tell youre not
any crazier than the average asshole on the street (Kesey 65), and later when he says
directly, wondering why so many men are voluntarily in the ward, Sefelt, what about
you? Theres nothing wrong with you but you have fits. Hell, I had an uncle who threw
conniptions twice as bad as yours and saw visions from the Devil to boot, but he didnt
lock himself in the nuthouse (Kesey 195). Kesey does not render the border
meaningless; he instead demonstrates the power of the border itself to divide; he calls
attention to the performative act of crossing these borders.

Eventually, the other inmates begin to catch on to the performativity of the

borders and of their own madnesses. When Bromden says of their collective defiance of
Nurse Ratched through watching the baseball game even though she turns off the screen,
If somebodyd of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year-old
woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and
recriminations, theyd of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons (Kesey 145), he
demonstrates no evaluation as to the truth or falseness of their craziness, instead
discussing the behaviour and its interpretation by a theoretical audience. Once they have
left the ward and have a substantial, rather than theoretical, audience for their
performative madnesses, McMurphy demonstrates how he can use his interpellation, due
to his green uniform, to his advantage, saying to the men at the gas station, we aint
ordinary nuts; were every bloody one of us hot off the criminal-insane ward, on our way
to San Quentin where they got better facilities to handle us (Kesey 236), thus
intimidating them into a discount. Seeing McMurphy flip this script use the
interpellation of the insane as unstable and dangerous the others begin to do the same.
Harding says to these men,
We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked
pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you? No? You
must hurry on? Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the
aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more
powerful he could become. (Kesey 238)
The inmates have learned to use the subversive possibility contained in their sites of
madness; though their diagnoses have been used to keep them under control, they are
now using these same diagnoses to access power. When the hospital staff are discussing
McMurphys possible psychopathy, they describe him as a classic psychopath, with a
marked disregard for discipline and authority, the doctor says (Kesey 155). This

diagnosis seems the most obvious demonstration of the polyvalence of madness: this
disregard for discipline and authority, this disregard for the ruling factions of society, and
the rules themselves, is defined as illness: indeed, it is dis-order. The diagnosis of disorder
can be used to keep McMurphy in this hospital forever, but McMurphy knows, as above,
how he can use even the diagnosis of his behaviour to defy the authority which, and the
defiance of which, gave him the diagnosis.
The Big Nurse is aware of McMurphys trouble-making, disruptive, resistant type,
saying sometimes a manipulators ends are simply the actual disruption of the ward for the
sake of disruption (Kesey 27). Thus the two enter a battle for and against disruption,
with the Big Nurse trying to impose order on the dis-ordered, and McMurphy trying to
return us to ourselves (as madness). McMurphy has a keen sense for the operation of
power and its opportunities for subversion. When Nurse Ratched says to him everyone .
. . must follow the rules (Kesey 25), he replies, that is the ex-act thing somebody always
tells me about the rules . . . just when they figure Im about to do the dead opposite.
(Kesey 26). McMurphys history demonstrates the way in which diagnoses by
Amerikkkan authorities change depending according to convenience: McMurphy wins a
Distinguished Service Cross in Korea, for leading an escape from a Communist prison
camp. A dishonorable discharge, afterward, for insubordination (Kesey 45). McMurphy
knows that his actions against authority will be variously rewarded and punished
according to that authoritys convenience, but he also knows that any demonstration of
the defiance of authority, making visible the possibility of dissent, is dangerous to
authority. When he calls for a vote he says, Hell, I dont care. Vote on anything (Kesey
70). He knows that the vote itself is inconsequential, but that the demonstration of
democracy in the face of totalitarianism shakes the walls. Carefully, he plans to show the

inmates just one time, she aint so unbeatable as [they] think (Kesey 74). As detailed in
the previous chapters, the demonstration of the possibility of dissent can be key to the
continued practice of dissent. This is why McMurphys whole body shakes with the
strain as he tries to lift something he knows he cant lift, something everybody knows he cant
lift. But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly,
he might do it (Kesey 125). He is demonstrating that it is possible to fight back against
something potentially unbeatable: But I tried, though Goddamnit, I sure as hell did
that much, now, didnt I? (Kesey125). He asserts that disruption for the sake of
disruption, as Nurse Ratched insinuates, is worthy. After this panel lifting incident, the
inmates are unruly. They still take some coaxing, but they know that it is possible to defy
Nurse Ratched, and by extension the Combine. Their understanding of the possibility of
dissent is why it can be an important, though temporary, component of dissent just to
demonstrate its possibility. When Harding says to Nurse Ratched, Lady, I think youre
full of so much bullshit (Kesey 320), he has called her bluff, the bluff of the border, and
she has nothing to say. Harding continues, But then, when you are told that you are full
of bullshit, what kind of written comeback can you make? (Kesey 320). This is freedoms
lit beacon in this mans heart.
This freedom causes the men to use all the tools available to free themselves. This
is hardly unique to One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. When Audre Lorde says, the masters
tools will never dismantle the masters house, she does not say the masters tools cannot
be used to demonstrate the fallibility of the house. When Native American scholar
WHO IS SHE says, Sovereignty carries the awful stench of colonialism. It is incomplete,
inaccurate, and troubled. But it has also been rearticulated to mean entirely different
things by indigenous peoples (26), warrior PMLA (1689), she articulates how a tool that

has been used to oppress indigenous peoples, sovereignty, can and perhaps must be used
by indigenous people to protect themselves, given the material reality of a sovereigntyruled-regime. When WHO IS THIS asserts that
Moreton-Robinson, who names Australian sovereignty white and patriarchal,
makes a strong case that Aboriginals who hold on to their perspective on
sovereignty undermine, rather than legitimate, state power: our presence cannot
serve the legitimacy of patriarchal white sovereignty because we are the source of
its insecurity (Writing 99). warrior PMLA 1690
Moreton-Robinson asserts that, as disorder threatens the basis of order (yet is required for
it), as homosexuality heterosexuality, genderqueer the gender binary, the internal colony
the nation, indigenous sovereignty threatens the basis of state sovereignty. The
indigeneity of indigenous sovereignty transforms the nature of sovereignty; this kind of
sovereignty is fundamentally different when used to counter white sovereignty, even if it
bears similarities. Non-European, anti-colonial nationalism are fundamentally different
from colonial European nationalisms, and they can be a force of liberation in the face of
neoliberal neoimperialism19 even as it continues to oppress the Others who fall outside
the nation, the sub-sub-alterns. This thus is not to say that the inmates use of patriarchy
and White Supremacy to liberate themselves is a full dismantling of the masters house;
their liberation, including Bromdens escape and return to his homelands, uses the scripts
patriarchal White Supremacist imperialist capitalism (the Combine) against itself.
If we deny that the use of the Combines scripts against the Combine can be part
of a mode of liberation, we are wishing to return to this impossible immaculate
conception, hierarchicalising resistances according to their relative purities. In doing this
we undermine and invalidate many imperfect but liberatory struggles, especially those of
people of colour. When Carr writes in her linguistic anthropological book Scripting

19

See the epilogue for more details on this subject.

Addiction about the way poor and homeless women of colour are able to flip scripts, which
require them to divulge true inner states in order to obtain such resources as housing
and childcare, she details how these women use tropes of how they are supposed to
behave to undermine the system attempting to control their behaviour. She writes,
people can act politically by strategically reproducing rather than simply
resisting ideologies of language. For in perfectly performing inner reference and
therefor the role of the good client, those who flipped scripts also directed the
flow of the basic resources, sanctions, and services. Thus, Scripting Addiction
follows flipped scripts through the institutional and social terrains that so often
punish and penalize in order to gauge the rewards of this linguistic practice
whether in the form of real resources gained or tragic losses avoided. Only then
can a politics, which is too often misdiagnosed as a pathology, be recognized. (1920)
While these women are not dismantling the entirety of the masters house, they are using
the resources available to them to mount a resistance against the masters house. They are
doing the work Cam Awkward describes his ancestors as doing. If we invalidate their
imperfect resistances, we reinstate the impossibility of resistance, when understanding that
it is even possible to resist and dissent, as detailed above, is essential to the development of
critically resistant politics. Mireille Miller-Young discusses in Hip-Hop Honeys and Da
Hustalz how it is possible to create subversion through self-commodification the
locking of oneself in the attic with yellow wall-paper and the enabling of radical
consumerism, in which consumption can work through capitalism as resistance (MillerYoung 283). While it is imperative to note that forever working through capitalism will
allow capitalism, an oppressive structure, to continue, it is also essential to understand
how these resistances through capitalism undermine a larger regime of oppression: taking
even this resistance-through-capitalism, a resistance often invisible to white consumers of
hip-hop, reveals a threat to the dominant society, a redefinition of self-hood and
subjectivity through the selective appropriation of aspects of the capitalist ethos as a way

to survive economic crises or as a path to social mobility (Miller-Young 283). This

resistance wont end capitalism, but it might allow those capitalism oppresses most to
survive long enough to end it in the future: survival can be a form of resistance. Cohen
suggests in Deviance as Resistance, that, through the repetition of deviant practices by
multiple individuals, new identities, communities, and politics emerge where seemingly
deviant, unconnected behavior can be transformed into conscious acts of resistance that
serve as a basis for a mobilized politics of deviance (43). The characters in One Flew Over
the Cuckoos Nest, deviant from a false but still materially powerful border of the normal,
are not dismantling the entirety of cis-hetero-patriarchal White Supremacist imperialist
capitalism, but their use of patriarchal and White Supremacist scripts for their own
liberation, with particular attention to Bromdens escape from the internal colony of the
mental hospital and his return to his homeland, demonstrate how sometimes in order to
resist at all, we need to use the tools we have available to us. The imperfection of our
resistance does not diminish the resistance as such, and the invisibility of our resistance to
our oppressors does not erase the messages we are coding to our comrades.

unafraid of yours
For Women Who Sleep In Infirmaries Because the Ghosts Have Stolen Their
Beds
When the nurses bring you drugs, do not take them. They are keen to force the
bush from your bones and scrub this too much sorrow from your sleep. They do not
know your mother.
When they ask: what brings you here tonight?
say you, mean i. be too afraid to identify with burning buildings.
say i was born in muqdisho, mean i was born in exodus.
say hospital, mean tree.
say midwife, mean blind woman also fleeing.
say birthday, mean papers. mean have none.
say grew up in kenya, mean refugee camp. mean ifo.
mean dust between both breasts. mean men like wolves feasting on flesh.
say flesh. mean flesh.
say we moved here in the late nineties, mean resettlement.
say Atlanta, GA. mean Scottdale. mean Public Housing, gentrification.
say ivy league, mean infiltration.
say English. mean taking back tongue. say tongue, taste tongue
say poetry, mean gabey. mean buranbur.20Say hooyoy waa anaga like it means
something beyond the borders of your mothers name.

20

Gabey and Buranbur are both forms of poetry.

When they come in while you are convulsing, they will ask: would you like a sleeping aid
tonight?
say no thanks, mean please.
say im fine, mean listen. mean help.
say women, say madness. mean qamar. mean nimco.
hear PTSD, mean jinn. mean exorcism. mean calamity, mean death. mean your mother.
mean you.

When they come back unbelieving, wondering: in the past twenty-four hours have you
had thoughts of harming yourself or others?
say no. mean nothing.

one day, they will find boats capsized off the shore of your small island, all
the marrow of your bones. and they will know, what it means to

the dead lining

risk death searching for water in

times of drought.

say good night, mean dont go.

watch the room darken.

-Sadia Hassan

technoculture and the rephrasing of the

schizophrenic state
At this point we enter the realm of casual crazy, of small infinities of madness, of
ubiquitous disorder. In Jennifer Egans 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, we see an
anxious, paranoid story of societys long, slow decline21 and then entrance into a new,
technologically mediated post-9/11 consciousness, in which American is a husk word
used ironically, everyone has a condition, and, in the later time periods, its easier for
people to talk through their handsets than with their voices. The internet age reconstitutes
space and time. As noted above, in Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson argues that
the rise of print capitalism aided the formation of nationalism by creating imagined print
communities: if a French-man [[[sic]]] reads Le Monde each morning in French, he can
imagine a community of French-men doing the same thing in the same language at the
same time, even though he will never actually meet these people. Computer
communication decentres the nation and allows for the formation of new kinds of
imagined communities, still subject to hegemonic forces such as cis-hetero-patriarchy and
colonialism, as Egans work demonstrates. This new kind of post-nation community,
however, also forces a reconstitution of the subject, and we must explore how this
reconstitutes madness as a site of resistance, oppression, polyvalence, and script.
A Visit from the Goon Squad moves through generations from the late 20th century to
the early 21st, but each generation seems afflicted with the same ubiquitous abnormality:
it has become normal, if not visible, for everyone to be mad. Part of the very fabric of
society is the policing of (the border of) madness, similar to the policing of (the border of)

21

questionable.

gender Halberstam describes in Female Masculinity, similar to the policing of the border of
the state Ahmed describes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Even post-nationally, madness
continues to be a site of border transgression, only everyone seems to be transgressing it
with no earth-shattering liberating social change. In the very first pages of the book, we
learn of our first characters kleptomania, her condition (Egan 5), as described by her
therapist. Next we encounter another condition, this time Bennies, again as named by his
therapist: The Will to Divulge, Dr. Beet called this impulse, and had exhorted Bennie to
write down the things he wanted to confide, rather than burden his son with them.
(Egan 15). Every disorder seems to have a name; all the disordered seem to have someone
to explain their strange behaviours to them. There is a sense of impending madness from
within as well as without. In Saving Normal Allen Frances, Chair of the DSM-IV Task
force, articulates an anxiety about this fear, stating all human difference is being
transmuted into chemical imbalance that is meant to be treated with a handy pill.
Turning difference into illness was among the great strokes of marketing genius (280). In
this world every difference has the possibility of being transformed, through the market,
into disorder. It is not only therapists, directly linked to the medical establishment, but
also other important social figures who hand out diagnoses: Albert knows that Ramsey,
his boss, will ask these questions, and that they will likely lead to his being fired: the latest
in a series of failures brought on by what his mother, back in Minehead, calls his selfdestructive tendencies (Egan 39). Rolph shoots himself (Egan 45). Scotty ends up
obsessed with hygiene, taking his jacket to the cleaners still in its dry-cleaning bag, which
caused a breakdown in the gal behind the counterWhy you clean? You already clean,
bag not open, you waste your money (Egan 51). Stephanie deems her off-beat
neighbour, Noreen, nuts (Egan 65). Stephanies freshman suitemate was anorexic (Egan

66). Bosco plans a suicide tour (Egan 69). Kitty seems to have turrets22, blurting out
exactly what she shouldnt say (Egan 83). The density of sick characters is overwhelming.
Jules is suddenly full of a desire to rape his beautiful starlet interviewee, Kitty, saying that
he feels,
anxious, dully aware that Im placing my career and reputation at some risk with
this caper. But more than that, I feel this crazywhat?rage, it must be; what
else could account for my longing to slit Kitty open like a fish and let her guts slip
out, or my separate, corollary desire to break her in half and plunge my arms into
whatever pure, perfumed liquid swirls within her. I want to rub it onto my raw,
scrofulous (ibid.), parched skin in hopes that it will finally be healed. I want to
fuck her (obviously) and then kill her, or possibly kill her in the act of fucking her
(fuck her to death and fuck her brains out being acceptable variations on this
basic goal). (Egan 93)
After this exceptional incident, Jules returns to normal life, but in while in prison for
kidnapping and attempted rape: he seemed to regain the composure hed lost so
spectacularly He went on medication for his bipolar disorder (Egan 64). The
medication, the mediation of his existence through a technology, returns him to what is
judged as normalcy, though his location in jail seems like it should continue to exempt
him from normal status. In prison he also, edited a weekly prison newspaper, and his
coverage of the impact of 9/11 on the lives of inmates won him a special citation from the
PEN Prison Writing Program (Egan 64). Jules ends up able to live a more successful life
in prison than outside it, a complication of border politics between the outside world and
the inside/the prison: to be sane amongst criminals seems a disruption in the order of
society. The vantage point of crazy becomes unclear: characters speak of the mad even as
they themselves exhibit historically mad behaviours or as other characters cast them as
mad. For example, suicidal, love-sick Rob, high on ecstasy, states, while he is out at 2am,
that, Its after 2:00 a.m., the hour when (it turns out) regular people go home to bed, and

22

Oh, so now Im qualified to make diagnoses? Qualified? In authority? The author?

drunk, crazy, fucked-up people stay out (Egan 104). Rob seems to cast himself one of
these people without fully acknowledging his status as ab-normal. He seems to cross the
border, temporally, without noting how this change in context reconstitutes him.
All these instances of madness do involve the transgression of the border between
sanity and insanity, order and disorder, public and private, instances of which we have
explored in prior chapters, but most transgressions in A Visit from the Goon Squad do not
seem ultimately transgressive, or revolutionary. Aimee Le, in Would All the Hapa Kids
Stop Copping Swagger? regarding linguistic and cultural appropriation, provides a
possible explanation for why these kinds of ubiquitous craziness do not seem subversive,
saying, hipster jouissance comes from transgression of rules of social order and while in
this sense is resistant, the negation is merely abstract like any neurosis, it just
repeatedly stages the transgression of the Law which it re-founds (Le 44). Deleuze and
Guattari in Anti-Oedpius: Schizophrenia and Capitalism throw off the chains of this obsession
with neurosis and paranoia, moving towards a freedom provided in, indeed built by,
schizophrenia. The above examples of madness in A Visit from the Goon Squad seem
paranoid, anxious, obsessive, neurotic: these can be subject to (psycho)analysis, to
therapy, to diagnosis. They do not resist diagnosis, as Greenfeld as well as Deleuze and
Guattari assert schizophrenia does: they are instead products of diagnosis. These madnesses
have been tamed, categorised, (psycho)analysed, drugged. To psych: to submit. To schiz:
to die, to suicide the self.
This casual crazy, pervasive disorderliness, universal private paranoia, seems
defined by several of the same phenomena previously explored. Cis-hetero-patriarchal
White Supremacist imperialist capitalism, wielding tools of science and medicine,
continues to act to divide, diagnose, and oppress. This continuation manifests throughout

the book in terms of our old friends: madness of women, disorder of feminine men,
subjugation through imperialism and racism, power through capital, an obsession of
categories and names, and performative acts as sites of polyvalence. However, cis-heteropatriarchal White Supremacist imperialist capitalism seems dressed in new clothes the
post-nation, the universal, technological democracy. This chapter will show, however,
that even as we found nationalism a source of oppression in previous chapters, a
neoliberal, globalised, liberal-democratic consensus can be even more dangerous.
Throughout the text men wield power over and through women, power
demonstrated through sexuality, rape, military force, the naming of madness, and the
degradation of the feminine. Within this patriarchal model there is room for resistance,
but when a woman disrupts the patriarchal script, she is quickly disciplined, and the
border of the powerful is maintained. For example, when Kitty continues to decry the
dictators, genocide, his soldiers quickly attack and subdue her (Egan 83), ensuring a
continued farce of his spotless masculinity. Similarly to in Scripting Addiction, when a
woman, Lulu, plays the script, her employer, Bennie, predicts, Shes going to run the
world (Egan 169). As Carr argues in Scripting Addiction, script flipping is a useful
resistance tactic for when overt resistance is not viable. Thus in this text, the diagnosis of
women as mad can indeed be oppressive, but it becomes possible for these same women
to flip the script.
In order to examine several ways in which patriarchy operates in this text, it is
useful to compare two conversations between Lou, aging and powerful record producer,
and his somewhat feminine son.
Your sisters acting nuts, Lou says, striding into the dark.Why? Rolph asks.
He hasnt noticed anything nutty in Charlies behavior. But his father hears the
question differently.Women are crazy, he says. You could spend a goddamn

lifetime trying to figure out why. Moms not.True, Lou reflects, calmer now.
In fact, your mothers not crazy enough.The singing and drumbeats fall
suddenly away, leaving Lou and Rolph alone under a sharp moon.What about
Mindy? Rolph asks. Is she crazy?Good question, Lou says. What do you
think?She likes to read. She brought a lot of books.Did she.I like her,
Rolph says. But I dont know if shes crazy. Or what the right amount is. (Egan
34)
In this passage, Lou, the patriarch, seeks to teach his son, through demonstration, that
men get to decide how women ought to be in relation to madness. Men get to decide
which women are mad, too mad, not mad enough. Lou seems to have no analysis of what
might drive a woman to actual madness violence through patriarchy, for example and
instead focuses on his own ability to determine and diagnose their madness. Rolph, who
has demonstrated his unwillingness to partake in masculinist competition by, for one
example, refusing to kill tropical fish with his father, resists this urge to categorise as mad
the women in his life. This is the Rolph who shoots himself. Just a little while later,
suspecting his new girlfriends affections for one of the safari trip leaders, Lou confides in
Rolph,
Women are cunts, his father says. Thats why. Rolph gapes at him. His father
is angry, a muscle jumping in his jaw, and without warning Rolph is angry too:
assailed by a deep, sickening rage that stirs in him very occasionallywhen he
and Charlie come back from a riotous weekend around their fathers pool, rock
stars jamming on the roof, guacamole and big pots of chili, to find their mother
alone in her bungalow, drinking peppermint tea. Rage at this man who casts
everyone aside.They are not He cant make himself repeat the word.They
are, Lou says tightly. Pretty soon youll know it for sure. (Egan 43)
Lou invokes the same universal categorisation of women here with cunt as he did
before with madness in order to discredit the women he discusses. There doesnt seem
to be anything inherent about madness and women; rather, Lou recognises madness as a
tool he can use to oppress women, the same way he can use womens sexuality (as

cunts) to oppress them (while living a very freely sexual life himself). Again, Rolph
resists the masculinism in this passage.
Charlie/Charlene, Rolphs sister and Lous daughter, is able to play23 Lous
obsession with masculinity and control over women, however. On safari in Africa, she
manages to win attention from her father by infuriating him. In order to do this, she uses
his racist, sexist ideology against him, by dancing sexually near the African men (whom
Lou reads as Black) who accompany the safari. Playing this trope, she angers him to the
point that Lou lets go of Mindys hand and sits up straight. He wants to grab his
daughters skinny arm and yank her away from these black men, but does no such thing,
of course. That would be letting her win (Egan 33-4)24. Charlie gets some of what she
wants, attention from her father, by using his own anger against him; she is able to use
her gender, one which patriarchy actively constructs to oppress people in female bodies,
to be momentarily, resistant, powerful, and subversive. Though she uses the patriarchy
which oppresses her, as a woman, to temporarily get her fathers attention, she does not
have his attention already also because of the ways in which patriarchy allows him, as a
man, to live as a married and re-married bachelor pre-occupied with beautiful young
women; the patriarchy allows him to remove himself from the familial or domestic
sphere.
Race, like gender, becomes a site for struggles of power in this text, often as it
interacts with class, gender, and madness. When Rhea, whose love for Bennie is not
returned, says,

in the sense of you got played, Lou got played
I want to note that white Charlie uses these African men to anger her white father. Her resistance to his
patriarchy uses and seems to continue White Supremacy, even as it resists patriarchy. Though resistance is
imperfect and still important, it is also important for us not to glorify the ways in which resistances can
exclude and continue to oppress.
23
24

Down the path from the Pit is where the cholos hang out Sometimes they talk
to Bennie in Spanish, and he smiles at them but never answers. Why do they keep
speaking Spanish to him? I go to Jocelyn, and she looks at me and goes, Rhea,
Bennies a cholo. Isnt that obvious?
Thats factually crazy, I go, and my face is getting hot. He has a Mohawk. And
hes not even friends with them.Jocelyn goes, Not all cholos are friends. Then she
says, The good news is, rich girls wont go with cholos. So hell never get Alice,
period-the-end. (Egan 24)
she and Jocelyn are pitting race, class, and gender power structures against each other
was well as analysing them intersectionally. Rheas position as a white woman who loves
Bennie blinds her to his non-white-ness, leading her to call Jocelyns assertion factually
crazy. This assertion reveals her racist pro-white bias, her expectation that her racial
classification is correct, and her ability to use madness to discredit her friend. Jocelyns
response is an appeasing one: she uses an analysis of Alices wealth to demonstrate Rheas
relative proximity to Bennie and thus her higher likelihood of attaining his affections
(through Alices rejection of them). Here Rhea and Jocelyn show how patriarchy,
capitalism, and white supremacy interact with each other to form different levels in
hierarchy at the same time as they use madness to discredit those they do not wish to
listen to. It does not require (white) men to perpetuate cis-hetero-patriarchal white
supremacist capitalism. Madness can, as here, be used as a tool for oppression.
While, as noted, many characters diagnose each other mad, the relative power of
these diagnoses to control or invalidate is differential depending upon the relative powers
in society. Particularly regarding madness, the power of the medical establishment is the
strongest, and the experience of psychoanalysis is itself a struggle for power a
contestable one. When analysing Sashas, the kleptomaniacs, surge of sympathy for a
plumber whose screwdriver she steals,
Coz [her therapist] had tried to connect the plumber to Sashas father, who had
disappeared when she was six. She was careful not to indulge this line of thinking.

I dont remember him, she told Coz. I have nothing to say. She did this for
Cozs protection and her ownthey were writing a story of redemption, of fresh
beginnings and second chances. But in that direction lay only sorrow. (Egan 7)
Coz demonstrates what Deleuze and Guattari describe as psychoanalysiss obsession with
the father-mother-child triangle, the Oedipus complex painted upon its own discipline.
Cozs power over Sasha is real he has the ability to diagnose her, to prescribe her drugs,
to recommend her detainment. However, in this scene Sasha seems to hold the reins. She
does not let Coz indulge this line of thinking. She will not put up with his obsession with
her father. She feels concerned, on Cozs behalf, on what he is ultimately trying to do by
being her therapist: write a story of redemption. This story of redemption is exactly
what A Visit from the Goon Squad itself refuses to be. A Visit from the Goon Squad is obstinately
pessimistic, infused with madness, and steeped in despair. From these early pages
onwards, Egan is mocking the psychoanalytic trend towards diagnosis and towards some
kind of fix for all wrong with the world. Like Deleuze and Guattari, she seems to be
centring on the schizo and giving up the urge for healing. Egans transition into the
internet age seems to parallel the proliferation of madnesses she describes; as Deleuze and
Guattari claim the monarchical state was and was not replaced by the capitalist one and
did and did not replace a despotic state, Egans modern world is neither better nor worse
than the old off-the-grid one: instead things seem grimly static; she is unwilling to resolve
tensions for us, make her novel neatly categorisable. In this passage, she has painted
Sasha as the healer or the humourer, rather than Coz, whose job this would seem to be.
She paints psychoanalysis, therapy, the medical establishment, as the one in need of help,
and not as the one to provide psychological peace. Through this passage, Egan
demonstrates Sashas flipping of the script, a flip that shows,

a new confrontation Not the standard confrontation between a bourgeois

Freud and a revolutionary Marx, where Freud ends up the loser, but a more
radical confrontation between Marx the revolutionary and Nietzsche the
madman. The result of this confrontation is that Freud and psychoanalysis
(and even perhaps Lacan) become impossible. (Deleuze and Guatarri xviii)
Even though psychoanalysis is impossible, almost all the characters seem to require its
performance. Psychoanalysis becomes part of the precession of simulacra,
indistinguishable from the illness it seeks to displace.
This early instance of story-manipulation and the casting of therapy and the
medical establishment as somehow sick even within a therapeutic space leads to looming
questions throughout the text: how to determine reality, and how to play/imitate whats
real. As Baurillard writes in The Precession of Simulacra, simulation is no longer that of a
territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real
without origin or reality: a hyperreal (1936). Like Derridas sliding signifiers and
displacement of origin, the real and its representation slip into each other such that they
are indistinguishable and neither truly precedes the other, as Baudrillard continues: No
more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept (1937). Egans
characters ponder these questions, demonstrating the non-truth non-behind Baudrillards
discussion, mentioned earlier, that if one produces true symptoms then the line is
muddied between the truth and falseness of illness. Rhea contemplating Alice, Bennies
love interest, says, I cant tell if shes actually real, or if shes stopped caring if shes real
or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real? (Egan 31). There is a barrier between
Rhea and Alice, between Rheas perception of Alice and whatever Alice is performing.
Theres a simulation cycle, a cycle of confusion. Reality loses its grip upon itself, and
Rhea wonders if releasing her own grip would get it back. Earlier, when contemplating
the performance of a punk-rocker identity, aspiring punk-rocker Rhea ponders the

following: Knowing all this makes us one step closer to being real, but not completely.
When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if
its happened? (Egan 24). In this instance the tone is difficult to discern: is Rhea sincere
or facetious, humourous or serious? This ambiguity brings another level to the discussion
of the real: it doesnt matter whether or not Rhea is serious in her contemplation. Sincerity
and facetiousness lose all meaning when the concept of the real and its simulation become
blurred.
This ambivalence in the reality/simulacrum game creates the appearance of the
indifference of the text to the reader. It doesnt matter what the text might say, for it is a
simulacrum while the reader is a simulacrum, while the context is a simulacrum. Egan is
playing games with us. When she describes Rheas and Jocelyns visit to the decrepit Lou,
she writes a scene in which, much like at the end of Wide Sargasso Sea when Antoinette
burns down the house in her dream, Jocelyn murders the old man, and we as readers are
for some time left with ambiguity as to whether or not this has actually happened. Even
when Egan clarifies, we retain some dis-ease:
I reach underneath Lous hospital bed, I heave it up and over so he slides into the
turquoise pool and the IV needle tears out of his arm, blood spinning after it,
feathering in the water and turning a kind of yellow. Im that strong, even after so
much. I jump in after him, Rhea shrieking now, I jump in and I hold him down,
lock his head between my kneecaps and hold him there until everything goes soft
and were just waiting, Lou and I are waiting, and then he shakes, flailing between
my legs, jerking as the life goes out of him. When hes absolutely still, I let him float
to the top.I open my eyes. No one has moved. Lou is still crying, searching the pool
with his blank eyes. Through the sheet, Rhea is touching his chest. (Egan 50)
There is a disjunction between what has actually happened and what hasnt, but this
border is contestable, much like madness is contestable as real or simulation. Because we
are presented with the more absurd option first, it seems real to us as readers. For some
time we believe it, and in our experience of its negation we realise that we believed it. Egan

is, in fact, pointing to her whole work as artifice, as simulacrum, as meditation behind
which there is nothing real hiding. Egan is pointing out that her text, like the real, no
longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative
instance. It is nothing more than operational (Baudrillard1937). Our key question then
becomes not what does this text mean? and instead on whose behalf does it operate?
Her text itself, like gender, like nation, like madness, is performative. She is doing something
to us, the readers, to us, the world. To be clear, this isnt all fun and games, though I have
been calling it play. There are material consequences to madness, even if it is a
simulacrum, even if it is insincerely performed. Though the function of the asylum may
be to convince us that society itself is not mad; the people locked in the asylum remain
locked in the asylum. The simulacrum is not immaterial.
Even the materiality of the (un)real, however, is contestable in A Visit from the Goon
Squad. The novels preoccupation with a changing technoculture through computers and
the internet is manifested in characters contemplations about how this change
restructures society, some characters embrace of the change, and some characters
resistance to it. Bennie, Lous protg record producer, having sold his label to big oil
corporate capitalist interests, begins to feel sneaking suspicions about the lack of art, truth,
or realness in the records that he produces. He is worried about artifice without art:
He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual
instruments in an actual room. Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was
usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tapeeverythingwas
an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out.
He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that
people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course)
above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors hed sold his label to five
years ago. But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit.
Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was
digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its

microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!

Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud. (Egan 14)
Bennie demonstrates anxiety about the realness of his products when produced through
the digitisation process. He recognises and mistusts the transformation of digitisation, also
noting the connection between it and corporate interests. The word holocaust in
conjunction with these corporations links global corporate capitalism to a realm of
horror outside death, as Arendt describes, there are no parallels to the life in the
concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the
very reason that it stands outside of life and death (444). Other characters demonstrate
different uneasiness with the corporate power of and through digitisation, but the sense of
anxiety towards this brave new world is pervasive in the book. This disease, like madness,
as madness, Egan demonstrates can work both for resistance and for oppression: Scotty,
Bennies old bandmate, mistrusts new technology to the extent that he slips through its
cracks, while Alex feels so disempowered by it that he is convinced to sell out and become
a parrot. This happens in the context of capitalism and property, Alex saying,
Because he never could quite forget that every byte of information hed posted
online (favorite color, vegetable, sexual position) was stored in the databases of
multinationals who swore they would never, ever use itthat he was owned, in
other words, having sold himself unthinkingly at the very point in his life when
hed felt most subversive? What he needed was to find fifty more people like
him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it. (Egan 161)
Alexs mistrust stems from his perception of the power of multinational corporations
through their access to knowledge about him. Though these pieces of knowledge
favourite color, vegetable, sexual position do not leave him particularly vulnerable, he
feels powerless through having sold himself. It is also key that these corporations are
multinational: it is not the power of the state that he fears, but instead the concentrated
wealth of a few capitalists, and their power through this wealth. The fear of the modern

subject is not of the state, is not of a directly accessible or observable power. The fear is of
constant surveillance, an almost Godlike fear yet humanly bound. Living surveyed, the
modern subject is differently constituted than Andersons French-man, with an
internalised gaze from some no one who is omnipresent.
Scottys reaction to this fear of the anonymous and disembodied omniscient is,
instead of selling out, to slip under the radar. He articulates computer systems into Xs
and Os and compares it to human experience, forging his own experience into a universal
experience:
Xs and Os and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly
call experience, and if I had access to all that same information via cable TV
and any number of magazines that I browsed through at Hudson News for fourand five-hour stretches if I had not only the information but the artistry to
shape that information using the computer inside my brain (real computers scared
me; if you can find Them, then They can find you, and I didnt want to be found),
then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other
people were having? (Egan 53)
Scottys skepticism about the difference between reality and its simulation, a thing and its
mediation, leads him to conclude that his experience through technology and media ends
up being universal, especially because he processes it through the computer inside [his]
brain. This doesnt mean Scottys experience is universal, just that he believes this; this is
similar to Andersons argument that though the members of a nation are not all having
the same experience, they understand themselves as having the same experience and
constitute themselves as subjects as such. This belief in the universality of people and
experience is a new form of subjectivity and collective community, even if only certain
subjects, or members of a certain nation, say, perhaps, the United States of Amerikkka,
feel it.

Characters in the novel frequently discuss the change of the age to one in which
nothing and no one is lost. While forgetting is possible, it is temporary. Anything from the
past may at any point immediately be pulled into the present. Bennie manages to find all
of his old gang on Facebook: it seems you can find almost anyone on a computer. He
found Rhea all the way in Seattle, with a different last name (Egan 47). This neverpassing of the past, never-losing of the lost, though, isnt entirely benign. When describing
how the safari party will in the future reunite through finding each other online, Egan
writes, mostly, the reunions will lead to a mutual discovery that having been on safari
thirty-five years before doesnt qualify as having much in common, and theyll part ways
wondering what, exactly, theyd hoped for (Egan 39). The imagined universality is, as
Baudrillard declares Disneyland to be, ultimately just a farce created in order to
dissimilate the fact that the rest of the world is a farce: the universality turns out to be
hollow, unreal, but its unclear to the newly constituted subjects why their experience
doesnt follow their expectations.
Rebecca, Alexs wife, reacts in yet another way to this new mediation of reality.
She studies it. She studies word casings, a term she invented for words that now only have
meaning25 in quotation marks. The explanation of these words begins innocuously
enough: friend and real and story and change Some, like identity, search, and
cloud, had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage (Egan 164), but it soon
returns to the same dispersed but omnipresent fear: how had American become an
ironic term? How had democracy come to be used in an arch, mocking way? (Egan
164). Given the earlier discussion of nationalism and its connections to madness, this
erosion of the nation and the emptiness of the language describing it, both phenomena as

25

By now you know Im not endorsing this meaning lark, but this is Rebecca, not me.

mediated through computers and the internet, could indicate a potential transformation
in madness we are just on the cusp of.
A Visit from the Goon Squad, the DSMs IV and V, Saving Normal, and Mind, Modernity,
Madness all postulate that in the contemporary era there is a proliferation in the diagnosis of
mental disorders (particularly in the West/Euro-diasporic societies). The universality of
experience (articulated by Scotty), the disgust and fear of multinational corporations (with
no borders), and the cruelly ironic emptiness of language in a digital post-nation seem to
lead to a new simulacratic subject. This subject feels her experience to be universal
despite an inability to resist imperialism a force that inevitably creates different
experiences for those who benefit from it and those who are hurt by it. The new self is at
once bound to linear time and disruptive of it. This transgression is much like the
transgressions of the hipster that Le describes. The boundary between the public and the
private is lost: everything is on view to the multinational corporation with no borders.
This multinational corporation functions in a new era of post-nationalist neoliberal
globalist capitalism26 in the way that capital functions in capitalism: Capital is indeed the
body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being (Deleuze and
Guattari10). What this means, or, rather what this does, is allow the corporation to take
credit for human labour. To continue the parallel analogy, as in capitalism, Everything
seems objectively to be produced by capital as a quasi cause (Deleuze and Guattari 11),
appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and
the parts of the process (Deleuze and Guattari 10), in post-nationalist neoliberal globalist
capitalism, the corporation seems to produce and cause everything. Thus the corporation

which absolutely refutes borders (until actual humans want to cross them),s thus denying workers in neocolonised territories the protection borders might afford.
26

becomes a very mystic being since all of labours social productive forces appear to be
due to [the corporation], rather than labour as such, and seem to issue from the womb of
[the corporation] itself (Deleuze and Guattari 11). If we continue to follow Deleuze and
Guattaris analysis of the move from the feudal despotic state to the capitalist nation-state,
the regimes of power do not fundamentally change; they just take on slightly distinct
forms. The move to the post-nation, then, is a transformation of the world without a shift
in the regime(s) of power. However, with the transformation of the world comes the
possibility for the transformation of consciousness, subjectivity, and madness, and the
veiled stasis of the regime(s) of power means there is continued opportunity for subversion
at all sites of this power. Let us consider the internet, then, not tunnels through which
these characters thoughts pass, or even as a set of blocks with which their consciousness is
constructed, but instead as a technological framework that reconstitutes the meanings of
these human capacities (In the Service of the Machine 4) through their operation. In other
words, rather than simply furthering a particular capacity for action or representation,
technology works to alter the grounds on which meaning attaches to any action or
representation alter historically embedded social and cultural meanings (In the Service of
the Machine 4).
A Visit from the Goon Squad begins to explore what form this new digitally interfaced
consciousness might take, both through an older generations baby-steps into an internetmediated existence and through a younger generations development through the tech
age. The older generation seems fascinated by the ability to keep in touch with lost
contacts, an age of no losing touch yet increased loss of actual touch, and the near
impossibility of staying off-the-grid. Alex writes of Lulu: He hadnt seen or even spoken
to Lulu since their meeting three weeks ago; she was a person who lived in his pocket,

whom hed ascribed her own special vibration (Egan 165-6). The mark of personhood
has become a vibration, and a person requires no physical body in order to be. The
relationship between humans is no longer a relationship between bodies situated in space,
but instead between snippets of thoroughly dis-embodied text. Alex had a crazy wish to
T Rebecca, even found himself mentally composing the message: Nu job in th wrksbig
$ pos. pls kEp opn mind. Lets go, Rebecca said (Egan 165). Though Rebecca, his wife,
is standing right next to him, it is easier for Alex to consider communicating with her
without using his actual voice, her actual ears. Several members of the generation react
with some measure of caution. Alex feels strange about this impulse. Returning to the
real world from prison, Jules observes that everything has changed, especially noting,
Everybody sounds stoned, because theyre e-mailing people the whole time theyre
talking to you (Egan 66). Events in the world become easily but questionably subsumed
by stories told after the event about ones presence there; actual presence, should such a
thing ever have existed, no longer matters. The digital seems not just to precede the
analog, but also to supersede it, becoming hyperreal: The TV is new, flat and long, and
its basketball game has a nervous sharpness that makes the room and even us look
smudged (Egan 48). This blurring of reality, striking down of boundaries, and the
imagined universal subjectivity some people begin to feel is characteristically postmodern. Egan seems aware of the dangers of some kinds of post-modern ideologies,
stating Dollys estrangement from politics: A party to celebratewhat? In retrospect,
Dolly wasnt sure; the fact that Americans had never been richer, despite the turmoil
roiling the world? (Egan 74-5). Egan seems to take a cautious stance: imagined
universality can allow us to perpetuate imperialism. Indeed, as Appiah argues in Is the
Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial? the role of postcolonial peoples in

postmodernism must remain distinct from the role of postmodernism in the postcolonial
world (356). Postmodernism asserts itself as global, as universal a contradiction of its
own terms. Postcolonialism, or anti-colonialism, holds more at stake in its specifics, in its
politics, in its material reality. Those who benefit from colonialism have the privilege and
power to be apolitically postmodern and universalist, like the characters in A Visit from the
Goon Squad, while the colonised suffer from a neo-imperialism, wrapped in the garb of
universality and neoliberalism.
Let us return to Alinskys assertion that any strategy which works will be
condemned as unethical by the Haves. In neoliberalisms case, nationalism has only come
to be interpreted as oppressive just as postcolonial peoples have been using it to liberate
themselves27. Even postcolonialism has been refigured not as anti-colonialism, argues
Arif Dirlik in The Postcolonial Aura, but as the reconfiguration of earlier forms of
domination (563). Dirliks discussion of the necessity of postcolonialism to recommit to
specificity and not universalism in order to cease reifying a capitalist structure of society
can be applied to Egans nervousness surrounding technology: the characters universalist
ideologies disguise the need for an anti-colonial specificity: attention needs to be shifted
from national origin to subject-position: hence a politics of location takes precedence over
politics informed by fixed categories (in this case the nation) (567). Dirlik is not arguing
for the dissolution of borders, instead for an anti-coloniality committed to a new kind of
specificity, a new kind of border. Dirlik ultimately calls for a relational understanding of
liberation, not a universalist or an essentialist one. However, Egans construction of
Amerikkkan subjectivity through a dislocated imagined community seems destined

I do, however, maintain that nationalist liberation is imperfect and in many ways oppressive. I am simply
arguing here that neo-imperialism through neoliberal globalisation is perhaps even more oppressive.
27

towards an imperialism-allowing universalism. In The Plague of Fantasies iek discusses

how a symptom, though a materialisation of a universalist principle, is also its exception
and thus its defiance. He discusses the under-class of affluent liberal-democratic society
not as a mistake by this society, but as a symptom of its organising structure: Todays
exceptions are the symptom of the late-capitalist universal system the permanent
reminder of how the immanent logic of late capitalism works (162), which he explains is
through liberal actions such as affirmative action that always tinker at but never change
the underlying basis of liberal-democratic universalist affluent society. iek
characterises this postmodern universalism as a nave trust in the screen (168) that
makes an interrogation of ideology irrelevant. It seems thus a condition of an internetgenerated subjectivity to become an unwitting and uncritical universalist imperialist.
Heidegger provides potential for a way out, stating that technologys threat to
man [[[sic]]] does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and
apparatus of technology (28), instead from within humans though the internet
reconstitutes subjectivity, this reconstitution is similar to Deleuze and Guattaris
description of the move from the despotic state to the capitalist one, a changed world
steeped in the same regimes of power. With the same regimes of power, however, we
retain our potential for dissent. Dissenting against a universalist ideology of liberaldemocracy, one that itself becomes totalitarian, can be difficult, with all subject-citizens
collapsing their categories and becoming narrativised as equals, despite differences in
material circumstances. The hope Egan gives us is in the younger generation: particularly
in Alisons slide diary, and especially in her brother Lincoln, who is on the autism
spectrum. The combination of Lincolns obsession with pauses in music and the medium
of Alisons journal comprise an anti-linear representation of the specificity of their

experiences as well as a creation of new space through dis-order. Lincolns pauses are a
new mode of communication, empty yet full, and cyclical:

(Egan 126)
This kind of representation is only possible through the slide diary, only possible through
digitisation. The pause is a silent sound, an absent presence, and it invokes the specificity
of what it is not: the pause highlights the sound surrounding it as well as all the sounds
that are not the song. A pause, and the space provided by it, is the most specific possible
application of a universal principle. This is situated universality, and it provides the
possibility for dissent and anti-colonialism through the dislocated subjectivity of the
technologised postmodern subject. When Alison says,

(Egan 152)
She articulates all these things simultaneously. Linearity does not have a chance. This
slide becomes so completely polyinterpretable that it, like the pause, is universally specific,
an erasure of the author at the same time as the author is so absolutely present(ly absent).
The transformation of the digital subject can be beyond logos or logical thinking, one that
creates and allows for the multiplicitous filling of space. This multiplicity, however, does
not guarantee liberation, but the disruption of universal universality allows for the
possibility of a disorderly, polyvalent, reconstituted site of resistance.

show me what democracy looks like

im writing my thank-yous and acknowledging my debts28 before ive even
finished writing my thesis, which i suppose is somewhat fitting for an anti-linear ideology
still bound by linearity. perhaps i am in a rush to displace my authorship. perhaps i would
rather thank people for helping me do something i havent yet done not just to disrupt the
oppressive logic of linear time but maybe just a tiny little bit to remind myself why im
writing and who im writing for (and thus spur myself on, to, you know, actually write it).
i owe the greatest thanks to Ivy Schweitzer, who became my thesis advisor almost
before she knew it. throughout the process she acknowledged my often centrifugal
thinking and helped to reign my ideas into a project within the scope of a senior honours
thesis. without her my thesis would be simply a room full of books29. more than this,
though, our roaming discussions during thesis meetings often about systems of
oppression at dartmouth not directly pertaining to my thesis gave me more reason to
write.
William Spurlin and Gretchen Gerzina advised my summer research and aided
my continuous explosion of ideas, transforming the project from an exploration of the
ADD/ADHD epidemic through a queer, feminist, post-colonial lens into a wholesale
pool of madness muddied with borders and border crossings. my professors have, on the
whole, been crazy-inspirational and many of them a source for my understanding that
resistance is possible especially those whom i learned with primarily outside the
classroom, professors Rickford, Padilla, Goldthree, and again Schweitzer.
my political awakening took place mostly inside a tent outside collis during my
sophomore year. i learned more about the practice of democracy from Aime Le, Nathan
Gusdorf, Stewe Towle, Deanna Portero, Matt Cloyd, Leo Valdes, Guillermo Rojas, Janet
Kim, Lily Brown, Allison Puglisi, and Taylor Payer than any class or book. and let me
emphasise that classes and books are the main men of my life. since then, my fierce
intellectual comrades, especially those holding dance parties in president Hanlons office,
have been critical in forming my freedom dreams yall know who you are. Aby Macias
and i occupy some feminist liminal space, which is its own kind of inspirational special.
love to all my loves, those of you who go night-swimming with me, streak the green at
4am in winter, stroll graveyards, read rilke, spit poems, laugh at linguistics jokes, play
music, and force me to consume nutrients30. and of course many thanks to my family,
especially Mum, Dad, Alice, and Thomas, none of whom bat an eyelash when i shave my
head but all of whom continue to support and love me.
the imperfection of our resistance does not diminish the resistance as such, and the
invisibility of our resistance to our oppressors does not erase the messages we are coding
to our comrades.

debts in the sense that we live in a capitalist society (even though i dont think this is the way social
relations actually work and we ought to be working towards an anarcho-communist society in which we
value inter-dependence and participatory democracy and dont owe debts because there is no property)
and these people have given me time/energy/life.
29 and while it would be a fascinating performative act to present a room full of books to the english
department as the manifestation of my English Honours Thesis, im tryna do the resist-and-graduate-andleave thing.
30 actual quote from Crystal Ye as she bought me orange juice and soy milk: sometimes i think you are
preparing me for motherhood.
28

UPSIDE DOWN TAPESTRY MOSAIC

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A NOTE ON HISTORY
i have listed here works i did not directly quote or cite in my thesis. this is an
attempt to lead you to sources31 of my ideas should you be curious.

31

ha.