Exotic madness in Caribbean literature: From marginalization to empowerment and indigenization

Caribbean literature is replete with migrant figures that are viewed when they go abroad as both exotic and mad, the apparent otherness of their behaviour or life choices being perceived in the west as evidence of some form of mental imbalance. Victims of what Graham Huggan has called “a particular mode of aesthetic perception”, these characters distinguish themselves by their cultural difference which might inspire initial fascination, yet results in most cases in exploitative commodification often followed by radical rejection. The iconic example of such an occurrence is of course Antoinette, aka Bertha Mason, in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1960), the white creole who ends up locked up in the attic of Thornfield Hall, dreams of setting fire to it and is thought to eventually do so before jumping to her death. The first part of this essay analyses similar stories of exoticization followed by marginalisation written by West Indian authors and examines to what extent their characters manage to subvert their so-called exoticism to take advantage of it and achieve empowerment, however ambiguous this might turn out to be -- as it is the case for Antoinette. The texts that I focus on are Dionne Brand’s “Blossom, Priestess of Oya, Goddess of Winds, Storms, and Waterfalls” (1988) and Jean Rhys’s “Let Them Call It Jazz” (1962), two short stories in which the writers give us access to the characters’ allegedly deranged minds and thereby contribute to turning their exotic status on its head. The second part of this essay focuses on an even more radical way of addressing the assumed mental difference of the migrant other through a reading of Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (2015), a novel which could be said to indigenize the figure of the mad exotic. This novel indeed concentrates on a deeply depressive English woman, who nevertheless bears an intriguing resemblance with the two Rhys protagonists mentioned above. I argue that by conflating the figure of the mad exotic migrant with that of the depressed and disturbed English native Phillips not only interrogates the process of exoticization of the migrant other but also generates a form of empathetic familiarization with otherness that undermines any attempt to establish divisive categories and is ultimately a source of empowerment for the characters and the readers.