Madness and Its Experts: Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love

Abstract

In the last few decades, madness has become entangled with discourses of rights and pride, which also reject the medicalized definition of the phenomenon as "mental illness." Having its origins in several intellectual and activist traditions contesting the construction of normativity, this body of work seeks to reclaim madness as a positive identity. In this article, I read Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love against this background. I argue that the novel, as an example of African writing that engages psychiatry and allied disciplines, offers some reflections on the possibility of a discourse of social justice on madness. The narrative emphasizes collective tragedy and injustice over a political discourse that focuses on the mad in particular. This is achieved through several strategies, including the conflation of the mad body and the national body, the portrayal of madness as endemic debility, and, especially, the valorization of the health professional.