Ramah Robot, Brain Mother

In this paper I analyse the material sent to me over a period of 5 years by an Indian woman, born to a Muslim family and educated by Catholic missionaries, in whose madness (probably schizophrenia, if diagnosed by psychiatrists) can be perceived the internalisation of a Western moral cosmos and racist beliefs about the superiority of white people. It is a rich and voluminous collection of outpourings on sexuality, religion, race, corporeality and the glorious self. In turn abject and exalted, paranoid and perceptive, the texts invoke a fantastic world of erratic dreams, stories from the Bible, Hindu mythology, American movies, popular technology, conspiracy beliefs and contemporary Indian social life. As psychic texts – and a diary of the body in deep alienation – the collection provides a rare opportunity to consider the experience of ordinary people caught up in the post-colonial dynamics of gender and culture, on a level of consciousness that is usually kept properly hidden or under control. A traditional association of the feminine with evil is both taken in and turned around in the processing work of a self-aggrandising rather than self-abnegating subject.

The appeal of this ‘writing from below’ is to be recognised as ‘writing from above’.  In responding to this appeal, it is necessary to recognise a form of social protest that draws on the secret of duality and reversibility that I call, with reference to Baudrillard, ‘the intelligence of unreason.’

Gender; Sexuality; Post-Colonialism; Schizophrenia

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ISSN: 2202-2546

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