Madness and Civilisation — memorialising the lives of institutionalised individuals through poetry

Published in 1961 in French, Michel Foucault’s study, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, is a compelling challenge to a falsely divided world. 

Who determines what is sane, what insane? What is the reasoning behind this divide, if not to ensure the truth and power of those deemed sane? It is the “othering” of those deemed insane, their isolation from society, which, for Foucault, informs a neurotic and policed modern or so-called civilised state. 

In his finely probing collection of poems, Automaton(tik): In Remembrance of the Patients of the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital, Rory du Plessis reimagines the lives of those exiled from a wider society, those deemed null and void – “chronically mad”. 

This diagnosis, by the medical superintendent Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees (1890 to 1907), appears in records now housed in the Cory Library at Rhodes University. These are the inspirational sources for Du Plessis’s poems. 

As the poet writes – “I take the fragments / and weave them as precious golden threads / into impressions of your spirit / to commemorate your life.” 

If commemoration is key, so is dignity and respect, so is the desire on the poet’s part to intuitively restore a lost memory. Invocatory, allusive, Du Plessis’s poems – none other than acts of love – remind us that all life is sacred, that no man endures only to be forgotten. His poems, after TS Eliot, are fragments shored up against our ruin, against forgetting, against dispassion.

Du Plessis writes of the “immensity of magic” in the midst of ruin, of an ever-deeper probing “to prospect for a word / to match your inner world”. We are diggers of truth, finders of solace and grace. This is not the task of the poet alone, though he, doubtless, is the one best able to return all that is lost to us. 

A record of the tragic fate of forgotten men, Du Plessis’s collection not only reminds us that the present tense is naught, that all exists at every moment, but that we, as a people, a civilisation, never truly progress. 

We live alongside memory; we are the sum of ghosts. However, if history hurts, it is also redemptive. For if one were to describe the tone and inflection of Du Plessis’s collection of poems, it would neither be wholly solemn nor nostalgically aggrieved. 

On the contrary, his is a “crusade” to unlock tongues, give voice to silence. A grower of tomatoes is the maker of a “rosary”, his devotion “prayers of petition”. To be “always smiling” means one has dug a deep well into the soul. Another stands “Outside in the dark, / alone / … like a mast / over a great plain”. 

No matter how solitary, how desolate a life, an unerring vantage allows for grace to persist. 

This is, I think, the overall spirit that informs Du Plessis’s poems. Their hopes and longings are never saccharine, never gratuitously hopeful. Rather, the poet places us in the midst of a question – regarding so-called madness and so-called civilisation – and asks us to pivot and ever-so-gently reconfigure our presumptions. 

Prejudice is crippling. And we become increasingly aware that knowledge is never entire, truth never finite.

The brief prosaic accounts which accompany each poem compel us to rethink the lives of the asylum inmates, to ask ourselves what mattered to each, despite the records thereof written by those who purported to know and understand their lives. Rather, like the poet, we become prospectors of the soul. 

After all, as Du Plessis reminds us of one patient, Marks – “The fields of your case file – / from your language / to the country of your birth – are potholed by / blanks.” 

Is life an erratum? A redaction? An inscrutable trace? What can we know? How can we care? What is the love between strangers, what is the poet’s yearning? For how can we account for Du Plessis’s heart-rending plunge into a long-lost memory? What must we make of his journey as a writer and a human being? 

As a collection, part biographical, part fiction, Automaton(tik) places us between what is knowable and what is unknowable. 

In a prescriptive and dogmatic world, it asks us to stay still awhile, tether all that is fleeting and fragile, bind ourselves to the invisible and lost. After all, is this not poetry’s greater gift? 

“As a pilgrimage to your life, / I climb a sacred mountain in the Karoo”, writes Du Plessis of the inmate Benatoni. 

Each of the poems is a sacred pledge, each a tender strand in a broken fabric. For it is not Du Plessis’s desire to provide a resolved whole, and neither is it to explain, or to explain away, the lives lost then recovered. 

His is an archaeological retracing, an occultation, a reimagining. “With the sun at my back, / my shadow walks ahead,” the poet writes, and we accompany him. 

“Lucky are those who / find an ennobled passing at home / where our sighs are met by a / hosanna of hands, / a kiss”.

But then, all the more should we consecrate the lives of those whose longings were unmet, whose sighs were unheard. These are the men at the heart of Rory du Plessis’s profoundly moving and rare votives, poems, prayers. 

***

Johannes

To be ‘always smiling’
you may have drawn from a
well of words
that was dug
into your soul
by life in Beaufort West.
Here the
landscape of language
is contoured by
metaphor and myth.
Legends stand
as proud guardians of truth and virtue, and
storytellers are the town’s key-bearers.
The tellers weave a
tapestry of tales from
generations of flame-to-ember pit gatherings.
Those at their feet
gulp up the stories as if they were
hounds at a watering hole after a herculean hunt.
The folk arise with lore spun over their tongues:
Parables of mermaids
in the desert
with Pegasus-soaring kudos, and
tales of praying mantises begetting the hump-backed moon,
make conversing a
mouthing of metaphors
that is as playful as a whirlwind
and as sharp as a prickly pear on the tongue.

Admitted: 13 April 1909
Age: 47
Died: 16 January 1930

In 1886, Johannes was admitted to the Old Somerset Hospital. By 1892 he was transferred to Robben Island Asylum and thereafter, in 1900, to the Port Alfred Asylum. In 1909, Johannes was transferred to Fort England Hospital. The doctors at the hospital described him as “demented” and “irrecoverable”. Consequently, when it came to reporting on his mental condition, the doctors simply stated that he “remains the same” or that there was “no change whatsoever”. Woven between these hollow entries are a few instances in which the doctors mentioned that they found him to be “always smiling” and when conversing, he would make many references to his hometown of Beaufort West. DM    

The book is published open access with the University of Pretoria's ESI Press.