Loss of reason

Quite recently I completed a book called Outrageous Reason: Madness & Race in Britain & Empire, 1780—2020. Researching and writing it was an unsettling journey, perhaps most fundamentally because I had not really grasped, and perhaps still have not fully grasped, the sway of whiteness as a pervasive and insidious form of power, as well as the challenges of having to negotiate everyday life as a Black person in racist society. Even more pressing are the double jeopardies of racialised people with mental health problems.

Madness possesses enormous significance for the modern Western outlook. With the dawning of what’s been called the ‘age of reason’ in the seventeenth century, the divide between the “rational” and the “irrational”, or between “reason” and “unreason”, took on a pivotal role. Whiteness also became a dominating power, underpinning the supposed “rationality” of Eurocentric culture and thought, and pushing to the margins not only those defined as non-white, but also those considered not-able. This is the terrain on which Black people, disabled people and those designated mad were constructed and maintained, all the time being measured against a white, male, middle-class norm. 

What really counted for the imperial governing classes was not primarily race, or Black skin colour, as such, but the capacity for what were thought of as “civilisation-bearing skills”, above all, emotional self-control and self-mastery. For observers like H.G. Wells and Beatrice and Sidney Webb around the turn of the twentieth century, only a minority of Britons counted as “adult” or “civilised”, as capable of controlling their appetites or judging their own best interests. Officials frequently applied racial metaphors to poor Britons, referring to them as a “backward people”, “degenerates” or a “race apart”. It became difficult to overcome the stigma attached to supposed loss of reason. 

Whiteness is all about segregation, keeping things separate and tidy. Consider, for instance, the European lines of division and demarcation drawn between disciplines, topic areas, historical periods, and geographical territories. These kinds of artificial lines were also drawn between colonial and domestic psychiatry; between British domestic and imperial history; between “home” and “away”; between the colonial and post-colonial periods. In actuality, though, there is lots of continuity and spillage between these spheres. Colonial legacies that have supposedly been annexed into the past still reverberate loudly in the present. In mainstream historical narratives, Black history and Mad history have frequently been treated separately and eviscerated of their significance. Historical episodes like the dastardly killings on the Zong, a slave ship from which dozens of Africans were cast overboard to their death as “sick cargo” in the 18^th century, continue to resonate and exert a hold over imagination of artists and writers. 

This is just one of several traumatic episodes in my account for which there can be no satisfactory closure, regardless of the time that has elapsed. They cannot be banished to the past since they are still very much alive as sources of continuing critical attention and concern in the present. For example, there are parallels here with contemporary attitudes towards immigration. For instance, there is a disturbing continuity between the Zong case and the 2014 trial of security guards accused of the manslaughter of Jimmy Mubenga, an African deportee on a British Airways flight to Angola. In both cases, the humanity and personhood of the victims was obscured and distorted by the manipulation of the legal process. 

In order to challenge the colonial mentality invested in whiteness, required is perhaps a subversive imaginative disposition like that of the seventeenth century poet and cleric John Donne, who has been described as “always seeking connections between things not obviously connected”. To give an example, I have a surname that as well as naming three villages on, or close to, the east coast of England, from one of which I appear to originate, is also an Abrahamic surname that I share with many Palestinian families in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and that routinely made me a focus of interrogation when I passed, as I quite frequently used to, through Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Though I inevitably found the insinuations of the Israeli authorities abhorrent, I was, and am still, content to acknowledge, without necessarily assigning a precise meaning to it, the connection, and hence a solidarity, between (say) a Barham in Suffolk and the diverse Barham families in Palestine. So the Israeli authorities are right to forefront these connections, albeit for quite the wrong reasons. 

A related concept that does a lot of work in Outrageous Reason is “entanglement”, above all the entanglement of Black lives and mad lives in a historical terrain where white power has long prevailed. Notably, at the end of empire, madness and blackness have been far more entangled than is commonly assumed, concentrating around the black psyche as a site of political struggle and focusing especially on the stereotype of the “mad” West Indian migrant. 

So where do we go from here? At a structural level, there are no real grounds for optimism, it is true, with obstacles at every twist and turn that are hard-wired into the system. So it is difficult to envisage a wholesale transformation in any conceivable span. Yet, set against this, must be the recognition that increasing numbers of people are becoming alert to these questions and are challenging and resisting the dominant culture, and discovering in African worldviews, for instance, radical methodologies of hope and renewal embracing the notion that everything in the universe is interconnected and that, as in the philosophy of Ubuntu, “a person is a person through other persons”. It is to this task of re-inscription, of the renewal of connections that have been severed, that Outrageous Reason is explicitly dedicated, sketching a kind of imaginary political algebra, from the Arabic, “al jabr”, meaning “reunion of broken parts”.            

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Peter Barham has been working, writing and engaging critically in the mental health field for more than 50 years. His work straddles clinical research, psychoanalysis, practical initiative, historical inquiry, mental health activism and film making. Outrageous Reason is out now.