Alecia McKenzie's Madwoman Version: Connecting the Global and the Local

The novels and short stories of Alecia McKenzie, a Jamaican writer now based in Paris, are replete with characters displaying what can be regarded as some form of psychological imbalance, to the extent that Jamaica, her native island, has been described by one of her protagonists as ‘a mental hospital’. Clearly, as McKenzie herself declares in an interview with Véronique Maisier, ‘I’m interested in the effects of historical trauma and in how change, migration, violence and hardship affect mental health, which is a serious issue’.

The insanity that runs through McKenzie’s fiction can be construed as a universal condition providing readers with means of connecting with the suffering of her characters – after all, as McKenzie emphasizes, ‘we should try to avoid seeing individual characters as speaking for the whole society’. Still, in this paper, I would also like to read the ‘madness’ in McKenzie’s fiction, especially in her novel Sweetheart (2011), as a ‘regionally inscribed phenomenon’ (38), to quote Evelyn O’Callaghan in her Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (1993). Taking my cue from O’Callaghan’s chapter entitled “‘Madwoman’ Version”, I would like to show that McKenzie’s madwomen in Sweetheart – not only Dulci, her protagonist, but also members of her female entourage – are worth examining -- in all their complexities and without any attempts at pathologizing -- because, to borrow O’Callaghan’s words again, they are “metonymic of the debilitating ‘illness’ of the self which still haunts Caribbean societies in the wake of the colonial encounter” (46).