Going Mad From Pain in Caryl Phillips’s Fiction

This paper deals with Caryl Phillips, whose fiction gives a voice to those who were silenced by history: lonely, marginalized characters such as Caribbean female migrants or Christianized slaves trying to convert their own people. Tales of family disruption, displacement, dis-membering, dispossession, loss are at the heart of his work. No wonder therefore if many of his characters, regardless of their gender, location or the time that they live in, enter the “realm of madness” as an ultimate exit from the unbearable pain of their lives.
My proposal is to concentrate on Leila from The Final Passage (1985), Irina from Higher Ground (1989), Emily from Cambridge (1991) and Martha from Crossing the River (1993). These characters are motherless, husbandless and except for Leila, childless. Their traumatizing experiences, including a miscarriage, the birth of a stillborn baby, separation because of slavery, lead these four women to lose touch with reality, the pain driving them literally “crazy”. However, except for Martha, their “insanity”, momentary or definitive, opens the way to the logos which is uttered even if it disrupts the normative, patriarchal/colonialist society.
Society’s silencing of these characters goes together with its inclination to associate mental disturbance with the realm of sound: hearing voices, shouting, screaming, repeated utterance. This sonic tendency is mirrored in Phillips’s writing. During the characters’ hallucinations, some passages create an aural experience alluding to their trauma, as some structural units are repeated over and over again. My contention is that these narrative devices transfer the characters’ chaotic experience into the writing and create a sense of confusion in the reader which privileges immediate empathy.