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am not an African." The British-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips was hit with this seemingly simple but forceful realization in early 2003, while sitting inside a one-story house surrounded by a snowy American landscape (Phillips, "Out of Africa" 206). Prior to this moment of clarity, Phillips had been in conversation with the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, into whose living room he had been welcomed; the subject of their exchange had been Joseph Conrad's controversial novella, Heart of Darkness (1902). During this encounter, which took place almost three decades after Achebe first delivered his famous lecture on Conrad's book-a talk entitled "An Image of Africa"-the Nigerian writer uncompromisingly stood by his verdict: Conrad, whose novella presented Africans as "rudimentary souls" and "savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet," was a "thoroughgoing racist" ("Image" 19, 7, 11). Phillips, who had always rather viewed Conrad's narrative as an indictment of the European colonial enterprise in Africa, took the opportunity of his conversation with Achebe to respectfully voice his disagreement with his elder, upon which the Nigerian writer emphatically replied, "you cannot compromise my humanity in order that you explore your own ambiguity. I cannot accept that. My humanity is not to be debated, nor is it to be used simply to illustrate European problems" (Phillips, "Out of Africa" 206). It is at this point that Phillips became fully aware that he, born to African-Caribbean parents in St Kitts and brought up in England, had an interest in probing "the health of European civilisation" ("Out of Africa" 206) that Achebe did not share. While the younger British-Caribbean writer was willing to engage with Conrad's tale about the "infamy" of colonialism (203), even if it meant putting up with "a certain stereotype of African barbarity that, at the time, was accepted as the norm" (205), his older Nigerian colleague was most definitely not ready to make such a concession. Eventually understanding the validity of Achebe's

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Two novels shortlisted in the fiction category for the 2017 NGM Bocas Literary Prize are explicitly concerned with madness and altered states of being. In Marcia Douglas's The Marvellous Equations of the Dread (2016), a witness observes of Jamaica that "[m]adness is rampant on this island. The mad dream dreams and have visions. They stand on street corners and tell it" (76, italics in original). Some of these visionaries, it transpires, are, in fact, temporarily embodied ancestral spirits returned to earth to intervene in their society's implosion. But as the witness also notes, "No one listens" (76, italics in original). In Kei Miller's overall prize-winning Augustown (2016), however, people do listen. They listen to the preacher, Bedward, who has the gift of flight but, as history records, ends up committed to a lunatic asylum. It is madness, of course, to think that the spirits of the dead can and do return to our material reality and communicate with humans, or that humans can fly. Or is it? How do we critically analyse representations of a Caribbean world, such as occur in these two texts, which matter-of-factly include possession, states of transformation, visions and warnings from unknown sources, communication with spirits, and the rising of bodies into the sky as part and parcel of everyday life? The Caribbean has, throughout its history, been represented as an exotic, odd, and somewhat suspect space whose "natives" believe and act in strange (that is, non-Western) ways. The cruelty of enslavement and colonialism that created the people of the region and its peculiar social structure in many ways warped those who inhabited the space, so that even supposedly civilized and rational Euro-Americans living there started to change: to go crazy, to "go native," to go mad. Early commentators blamed this instability on the climate, the culture, the purportedly degenerate Creoles and allegedly savage Africans, the heathen "Hindoos"; and yet it was likely something generated by the extraordinarily violent excesses