Mad Afro-feminist Phonographies as Dis/abled Worldmakings in Marie-Célie Agnant's The Book of Emma

Abstract

Mad Afro-feminist Phonographies as Dis/abled Worldmakings in Marie-Célie Agnant's The Book of Emma Cae Joseph-Masséna WHAT IF VOICE ISN'T what we think it is? What if madness isn't either?1 By drawing on Haitian vodou epistemology and Afro-diasporic sonic cultures, The Book of Emma,2 Haitian-Canadian author Marie-Célie Agnant's first novel published in 2001, immerses readers into troubling figurations of both madness and voice, thus forcing us to shed comfortable certitudes on both subjects. Critical disability and mad studies scholars have often relied on Eurocentric frameworks to construct their formulations of sanity and madness. As a result, Black Studies scholars such as Sami Schalk and Therí Alyce Pickens3 have taken aim at ableist and sanist orders by encouraging the inclusion of non-Western understandings of the human to be found, for instance, in Afrodiasporic epistemologies such as Haitian vodou. Additionally, voice and sound studies scholars such as Alexander Weheliye have shown that the Eurocentric cultural hegemonies of visuality and logocentrism have often led scholars in the humanities to overlook the importance of voice and sound as critical categories. In The Book of Emma, Agnant provides us with renewed interpretative possibilities, enabling us to go beyond these disciplinary limitations. She does so through her crafting of astonishing figurations where non-binary understandings of both voice and madness are central to the characterizations of her main characters: two women of Haitian descent, Emma and Flore. Flore, the narrator, utters the novel's first words: I met Emma for the first time in the building facing the river. For a long time, the only words she could utter described the intense blue that permanently encircles a strip of abandoned land in the middle of the ocean, the place where her eyes had first opened on the world. (Agnant 9) These sentences are emblematic of two important intertwined dimensions I see occurring in Agnant's novel as a whole: a figuration of madness that is steeped in opacity on the one hand, and the centrality of the figuration of voice as a non-binary, strange, and fraught phenomenon on the other. These lines [End Page 101] produce quite the mysterious atmosphere. This eeriness is due in part to the consistent omission of cartographic references such as the name of a country, city, street or building. Instead of using these modes of designation, locations are suggested through periphrases such as "the building facing the river" or "the place where her eyes had first opened on the world." This affective mode of designation, which we will soon learn corresponds to Emma's mad modes of perception, is a consistent feature of Agnant's novel. Agnant's obfuscation of geographical, national, and linguistic references to Haiti in particular—the words Haiti, Haitian or creole never appear in the text—reveals the use of a Glissantian opacity as a literary strategy against colonial orders that demand legibility.4 Agnant's use of opacity affects not only her geographical description. As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Emma is detained in a Canadian psychiatric ward following her infanticide of Lola, her young daughter. But in Agnant's description, Emma's experience with madness is expressed with the same opacity as the physical locations of the novel from the very beginning of the text. Similarly, in these opening lines, Agnant eschews psychiatrist terminology and introduces Emma's experience with madness by describing her as someone who has long attempted to tell her story by describing the shades of blue surrounding the place she comes from. Flore's description of this poetic yet mad endeavor aligns much more with the standpoint of a person who experiences madness than a psychiatrist's. Agnant maintains this mode of engagement with Emma's madness throughout the novel. I read Agnant's phenomenological portrayal of Emma's Black madness as drawing directly on what La Marr Jurelle Bruce conceptualizes as a mad methodology, an approach that moves away from a rationalist order that automatically pathologizes and "discredits madpersons" and instead "recognizes madpersons as critical theorists and decisive protagonists in struggles for liberation."5 Agnant's mad methodology allows her to...