A Tale of Two Traumatizing Mothers: Individual and Political Madness in Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage

This chapter centres on The Final Passage (1985), the first novel by Anglo-Kittitian Caryl Phillips. This work of fiction deals with the post-war migration of Caribbean people to the centre of the British Empire and focuses on the mental distress of a young woman who has left her native island to settle in the so-called Mother Country. The discussion of this literary text aims to show how literature can help us understand, and feel compassion for, the existential malaise of someone who is victim of what Frantz Fanon has called ‘colonial alienation’. The protagonist’s madness is read through her problematic relationships with her two mothers, not only her cold biological mother but also England, the mythical yet racist Mother Country. The madness-inducing rejection suffered by Leila in the 1950s, both at the private and the collective level, is placed in its literary and historical contexts but is also construed through the 2018 Windrush scandal to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of Phillips’s novel in learning about the issues surrounding Black mental health in Britain.