The Blacker the Madness: The Balmy Methodologies of La Marr Jurelle Bruce

“I shall be derelict. I leave methods to the botanists and the mathematicians. There is a point at which methods devour themselves.”

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1986)

In How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity—recently awarded the Nicolás Guillén Prize for Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature—La Marr Jurelle Bruce deftly explores madness both as an object of analysis and as a methodology. Here the richness of blackness melds with the richness of possibility that is madness. Through examining black artists, this balmy methodology also situates black radical creativity as a lens into four overlapping motifs: an interrogation of phenomenal madness—an unruliness of mind—that centers the lived experience of mad subjects; a medicalized madness that codifies and diagnoses “pathologies” as part of a politicized and epistemic operation; a type of rage that documents the maddening conditions that black people are rightly livid about; and a form of psychosocial madness—an unruliness of will—that unsettles normativity. These myriad forms of madness are discussed through black radical works such as literature, jazz, and protest music, but are most importantly considered as sites wherein black madness is seen as “artmaking, self-making, and worldmaking” (5).

Similar to the Surrealist game “the exquisite corpse” (cadaver exquis), the collection of words and ideas presented in Bruce’s text goes beyond the pages itself. One cannot read this work without also assembling its madness with the mad blue notes of Buddy Bolden, the crazy blues of Bessie Smith, the “good at” madness of Ntozake Shange’s Hyacinthe, the maddening black genius of Ms. Lauryn Hill, the unruly madness of Kanye West, or the “mad real world” of Dave Chappelle. Bruce is not simply using these creative artists as case studies of madness dipped in black, but is presenting a terrain where the expanse of madness and blackness can only be read together—in this push and push, the fracture of Reason is revealed.

Importantly, to dwell in blackness is often to dwell in madness. Or as Bruce notes, “The Middle Passage literally deranged and threw millions of Africans askew across continents, oceans, centuries, and worlds. I use derange also to signal how the Atlantic slave trade, and the antiblack modernity it inaugurated, framed black people as always already wild, subrational, pathological, mentally unsound, mad” (4). Black radical creativity is a means of signifying this derangement, while also practicing ways of being otherwise to the oppressive structures of antiblackness, coloniality, and sanism. The exquisiteness of Bruce’s writings partly lies in the fact that its riffs and rhythms can only be understood by engaging with other works produced by mad black subjects.

In stitching together these fever dreams, How to Go Mad is better understood as an assemblage of bodies that erodes epistemological and ontological distinctions by being transgressive and openly hostile to the “gentrified precincts and patrolled borders of Reason” (17). There is always another corpse to dissect, another corpus to replant that will disrupt the finely delineated lines people construct between madness and reason. For instance, what happens when the “crazy nigger” who is noted for their reckless defiance and unreasonableness in the face of white supremacy hears the demand of Busta Rhymes in both The Madd Rapper’s “Bongo Break” and Blaq Poet’s “We Gonna Ill”? Each song selection itself demands a different hearing, but crucially the illness presented in both is one of black inevitability.

In this way, the book is constantly coming undone because it opens itself to breaking down—here a “breakdown doubles as a breakthrough” (14). In addition, this process also allows madness and blackness to be reconfigured as a “big black hole” wherein “strangeness, wonder, violence, terror, splendor, care, love, and truth” are collected, transmitted, and cared for” (238). Madness need not be averted or silenced. As such, rather than holding on to reason or collapsing into unreason, How to Go Mad asks us to both hold tight and let go in the practice of a radically caring mad methodology: “Sometimes we must hold tight to steady ourselves amid the violent tumult of this world—and sometimes we must let go to unmoor ourselves from the stifling order imposed on this world” (11).

Mad Diasporas (dwelling made of passionflower)

Within this unmooring, Bruce also articulates the contours of a reasoned world that has placed a plurality of subjects—including queer people, black people, neurodivergent people, colonized people, and Indigenous people—under the yoke of madness. Here we must hold onto the negative connotations and modes of abjection that condemn subjects to madness. Importantly, madness under such pretext is often a location—a space of confinement, adjustment, or even death. It is for this reason that Bruce argues, and here I quote at length, that:

Within Anglophone idiom, subjects go crazy, as though mad is a place or constellation of places. The ship of fools, the insane asylum, the psychiatric hospital, the carnival, the wrong side of the supposed line between genius and madness, and even the continent of Africa are frequently mapped as mad places within Western discourse…. It seems to me that madness, like diaspora, is both location and locomotion. Madness, like diaspora, is both place and process. Madness and diaspora transgress normative arrangements—of the sane and sovereign, in turn. (16–17)

The mad diaspora is a site of containment that kettles the unstable and destabilizing. The management of deviance is not only done through constant surveillance but also requires the disappearance of transgression. Yet, within the constellation of madness, infinite possibilities arise to create a diasporic mode of kinship between the mad. Diasporas, according to James Clifford, can be defined as “a loosely coherent, adaptive constellation of responses to dwelling-in-displacement” (310). The mad diaspora then is one in which its members are displaced from reason itself only to find themselves within the terrain of a mad world.

But mad worlds are not discreet pinpoints on a map. The methodological instructions of holding on/letting go is also an earnest plea to dissolve the boundaries constructed between Reason and madness. It makes no sense, or rather it is nonsense, to speak of normative arrangements without speaking to the derangements that undergird structural oppression and whiteness-as-domination. To be unmoored means also thinking about and constructing a mad black world.

For instance, while Bruce does briefly discuss the black underground presented in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, I also think it would be prudent to examine the place of madness in his 1964 essay, “Harlem Is Nowhere.” Within this work, Ellison notes the displacement and “perpetual alienation” felt by black people, through a noteworthy phrase of the time period. When greeted on the streets in Harlem, it became common to state “I’m nowhere” (54). Barred from political participation and denied economic privileges, black people are condemned to live in an unreasonable world. As Ellison writes: “The phrase ‘I’m nowhere’ expresses the feeling borne in upon many Negroes that they have no stable, recognized place in society. One’s identity drifts in a capricious reality in which even the most commonly held assumptions are questionable. One ‘is’ literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a ‘displaced person’ of American democracy” (57).

The mistake would be to assume that it is Harlem alone that is a site where black people go crazy. “Nowhere” is everywhere when black people as a whole face conditions that incite phenomenal madness or a crisis of selfhood, are pathologized through medicalized madness, are deemed crazy through showing righteous anger, or are disparaged through psychosocial madness as being off and odd. As Bruce notes: “To be black in the thick of antiblack worlds is a condition of such trauma, such chaos, such strangeness, such wonder, such alterity, such uncertainty, such antagonism, that it often feels mad. Thus…madness is an existential inheritance of most African-descended people” (137). The phrase, “I’m nowhere,” is thus an indicator that one refuses to be at home in a reasonable world for it is that same world which does not find such a predicament obscene. At the same time, this spatial nowhere while at times a “hopeless hope” is also a powder keg for the enraged and mad.

The need then is to “make generations” out of this type of deranging madness. In other words, it is to demand that both madness and blackness have a future. Such a desire is not only outlined in this manuscript but is also echoed in Therí Alyce Pickens’s Black Madness :: Mad Blackness. In this work, she argues that “What becomes clear is that one cannot get beyond either madness or Blackness but rather must find the spaces where excess, unknowability, and insanity do not account for them in all their complexity. The only way out is through” (113). To reduce madness or blackness would be to try to make them reasonable. To do so would be just to repeat the processes of epistemic and bodily capture that have “held on” too tightly to black and mad people. In such a grip, lives become deformed and crushed—misshapen beyond recognition.

Mad Love (Dwelling made of defeats)

Opposed to this desire for Reason, the mad methodology of Bruce instead centers radical compassion to allow for the thriving of “psychosocial variance and racial plurality” (29). Such compassion allows Bruce to articulate how acts of black radical creativity are not only a mode of artistry but are also representative of how one can love one’s self, others, and the world. This can be seen especially in the afterword to the text, “The Nutty Professor (A Confession).” Presenting himself as a “balmy black scholar,” “mad black scholar,” and “mad methodologist,” Bruce notes how he himself can manifest all four types of madness—as both modes of insurrection and confinement. As such, he also knows the travails of navigating an antiblack/antimad world. The balminess of How to Go Mad then lies in how it also presents means of acting and loving within these strictures. Importantly, this also means loving Without Losing Your Mind.

For Bruce, madness describes the “release and hold, hold and release” that is necessary to steady oneself and one’s mind. To hold on too tightly, without release, is to be captured by the stifling order of Reason. Letting go without holding on is to be thrown too haphazardly into chaos. Mad methodology thus requires this two-step dance: “Remember that madness is manifold, potentially a wellspring of inspiration as well as a pit of frustration—and some pits holds seeds” (230). Now although madness may have its ethical dimensions and creative possibilities, it is also true that Bruce recognizes there is no universal prescription that could cover the needs of all individuals. He writes: “For some, healing might mean banishing madness. For others, healing might mean harnessing madness and putting it to good use—a readiness to rally the voices inside one’s head rather than silence them” (35). Letting go of madness might then be a way of keeping one’s mind intact. At the same time, madness might be the balm one needs in navigating derangement.

The benefit of mad methodologies is that they navigate healing not through pathologies and stigma but through radical compassion. The decisions one makes are not automatically deemed unreasonable or reasonable but are rather circumnavigated through mad geographies. In addition, while balmy means to be “insane and soothing” (234), madness is never romanticized in this text. Rather, madness is meant to be capacious enough to hold both abject and affirming connotations. To love madly then can mean loving excessively and demandingly, or it can mean loving with fidelity. It is this spaciousness which has allowed me to continue understanding my own experiences with madness, love, and grief.

In returning to the last line of How to Go Mad, one is reminded a final time: “Now let go.” Less a declaration by Bruce than a restless question, these three words call for openness. “Now let go.” To have closure without a conclusion. “Now let go.” To have love without deficit. “Now let go.” In my own wrestling with death, I have returned to this line as a method for grieving. I have simultaneously held tightly onto memories of my friend, Dominique, while also letting her rest. I continue to make mirages of her smile. I revive her each day so that she may dissipate like Aimé Césaire’s volcano. This is my way of living and loving as you continuously “hurl yourself / into suicide to rejoin in the sea’s depths your accomplices the / pensive porpoises yet to be born and who wait” (345). This is me letting go by holding on and holding on by letting go. Loving you madly, Dom, is my way of not losing you and not losing my mind. For this lesson and many more, I am infinitely grateful for the balmy methodologies of La Marr Jurelle Bruce.

Dana Francisco Miranda

Dana Francisco Miranda is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Fellow for the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research is in political philosophy, Africana philosophy, phenomenology, and psychosocial studies. His current book manuscript, “The Coloniality of Happiness,” investigates the philosophical significance of suicide, depression, and wellbeing for members of the African Diaspora. His most recent work has been published in The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives, the Journal of World Philosophies, EntreLetras, the Journal of Global Ethics, and Disegno: The Quarterly Journal of Design. He also currently serves as the Secretary of Digital Outreach & Chair of Architectonics for the Caribbean Philosophical Association