‘Madness’ and ‘Spirituality’: A Study of Diasporic Fragmentation in Clarke’s Late Fiction

Abstract

The paper below explores how spiritual imagery and mental fragmentation is used by Austin Clarke to describe the psychic cost of the displacement and colonial trauma in The Polished Hoe, The Prime Minister, and The Question. Clarke never makes a distinction or opposition between madness and spirituality that they are bound to different worlds; on the contrary, he demonstrates that they are twin responses to the rule of imperialism, to diasporic fragmentation and cultural shock. Hallucination, confession, prayer and silence in his subsequent fiction are not an aspect of weakness or madness, but are domains where become zones in which identity, memory and resistance come into collision with one another which are spiritually and politically charged.

Clarke constructs madness not as the inability to collapse using the postcolonial trauma theory, Black Atlantic religious speech, and subaltern studies, but rather in a disruptive grammar of survival, a corporeal critique of neocolonial realities. Simultaneously, his spirituality also includes his attitude towards spirituality, which rejects institutionalised religion, more so the colonial Church, and retrieves fragmented belief systems as tools of cultural survival. The biblical citations, institutional attack, and the pictures of the plight of women enhance a creation by the empire not only to inflict economic and social injury on women but also metaphysical injury. All the same, the fiction of Clarke dramatizes the sacred and the disjoined nature of post-colonial life, and this demands that we read the divided voices, the disintegrated psyches, as resistance. His novels make the readers consider the spectres of empire, both in the political order, and in the spiritual and emotive topography of individuals who needed to be in its afterlives.