Madness and psychiatry in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) as a novel concerned with madness and psychiatric incarceration. It aims to reposition the scholarship on the novel, which has focused largely on the exploration of same-sex intimacy. The article argues that this emphasis not only undermines Duiker’s project of contesting essentialized identities but downplays his expansive sense of social justice. Connecting the text to the growing body of anti and critical psychiatric thinking, beginning with Michel Foucault, the article unpacks Duiker’s contemplation of psychiatry as an instrument of oppression. Madness is conceived as fluid, a spectrum and an experience more profound than the language of psychiatry can apprehend. The injustice suffered by the pathologized and incarcerated is linked to other forms of oppression through the author’s use of multiple focalizations. Drawing on Egyptian mythology, the novel contests psychiatric knowledge with the notion of madness as spiritual insight.