Of Ghosts and Madness

On being a ghost, reading inside and outside the Western canon, and International Booker Prize nominee On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer

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Ghosts

For the record: I don’t hate men. Nor have I met a lesbian who does. I have no anger toward men; the lesbian stereotype of the angry man-hater isn’t my reality. The reality is that I don’t think of men much at all. As a concept, that is.

Men must feel the same way about me. Since I cut my hair into the short style of a teenage boy, men rarely stare or cat-call. A woman-friend told me, quite seriously, that men confer a measure of respect onto me because I’m less than a woman. Because of my sexuality, my chosen gender presentation, the precise shade of skin, and because the stereotypes that accompany all three. I’m a ghost. Tove Jansson knew this when she was deciding whether to come out: “Another group that’s few in number is the lesbians. The ghosts as we call them…¹” In The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison speaks to what Black manhood means in a majority-white society. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me².”

My invisibility also keeps me safe. If I look through my subscriber emails, I presume, reader, that you are probably a woman or queer (gender, sexuality) person. Maybe you are a men, and if so, you are few and far between here. Either way, If you reading this, I presume you have empathy such that you also know what I mean when I say safe, and maybe you’ve felt that lack of safeness yourself.

Lesbian Literature

One of Emily Dickinson’s most poems goes like this:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

History represented Emily’s queerness, and removed the name of the woman she loved³. In that poem, she writes about her feelings of being a ghost, an outsider.

At the same time, Emily asks her reader if they are like her. She invites you in. The best writing does this: the writers speaks to the reader, respects that the reader has chosen to read their words, makes the obvious not-obvious or the not-obvious obvious, helps you, reader, see yourself reflected in writers words.

It’s writing that shrinks the world and makes us all a community. Writing like Emily’s brings us ghosts back into the world of the living.

This Substack is a small way I bring myself into the land of the living, and bring queer history into the land of living. Queerness isn’t a new fad as the current bend toward conservatism would have you believe. It’s existed for hundreds, thousands, of years. Not only existed, but a lot of thinking around queerness hasn’t changed as much as we might think it has. Gay and lesbian communities were already using the word queer to describe themselves over a hundred years old (in private letters and underground spaces). People born and raised as women were using male pronouns, and vice versa. There were female husbands hundreds of years ago, ancient temples carved with same-sex sex scenes over a thousand years ago⁴…

The Western Canon

This week, I read a plea asking readers to keep reading the Western canon. It went something like: instead of seeking an education as training for a vocation, look into the beauty of the Western canon, learn for the sake of learning, followed by a few examples of writing in the Western canon he found particularly important.

I read the Western canon through high school and college. I read it dutifully, so that I could one day have a liberal education. Without that knowledge, I thought, it would be impossible to be “educated”. Here were a set of keys, so that I’d no longer be an outsider looking in. I imagine the man who pleaded with the internet to read this felt differently: that he already had the keys, that the Western canon was a map through the rooms of the castle he was welcome in.

The Western canon permeates Western thought. They are undoubtedly important; creating the foundations of republicanism and liberalism that have spread around the world. Had I not read so much of the Western canon - read Homer and Ovid, Epicurus, Virgil, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, then the later men they inspired, Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, Dickens, Marx, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and so many more dead white men - I could not have conceptualized the idea of creating an alternate canon. What I realized in reading their works was that it builds off each other: the masculinity of Socrates is passed to Plato, passed it Aristotle. It mutated over those authors and down to the later authors and philosophers. In a high school philosophy class, we studied Plato and Aristotle, and the idea that the Islamic world takes its current views of the inferiority of women from Aristotle philosophy. That’s part of the legacy that the Western canon is build from; the ideas that some people are superior to others.

Hundreds of years ago, it’s the West - the Europeans - that went to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and imposed their will upon those parts of the world. Their ideas were used as justifications to tear apart communities, and plunder resources, people, and labor. Some of what their ideas wrought : chattel-based slavery, race theory, colonization, homophobia, not acknowledging transgender folks⁵, have left long histories of violence and trauma.

I wrote this as a slightly long winded introduction to a book review (though entire books could be and have been written on this topic) to show that reading a single category of literature means you absorb a single, zig-zagging line of thought because the male Western writers were reading each other and building off of each other.

Reader, you probably already see where my argument will go next; especially if you’re a regular reader. Go outside of that Western canon line of thought and into lines of thought that from other traditions and parts of the world. Balance the Western canon with inclusion of the also imperfect⁶ East, South, and canonical works remainder of the world. The first known novel in the world was written by a woman: Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (11th century AD). For ancient and philosophical thought that’s not Western, read the Vedas, or if you prefer epic tales, Mahabharata or the Ramayama. To find lesbian themes written over a century ago and in Asia, read Cao Xueqin’s 18th century Dream of the Red Chamber. Read Shihab al-din al-Nuwayri and Ibn al-Muqaffa. Then read Edward Said’s Orientalism for an understanding of how the West views and portrays the global majority (global south) and why the literature I’ve included here was excluded, and why the canon is Western instead of international.

On a Woman’s Madness

In The Most Secret Memory of Men, Sengalese-French writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is open about the canon that inspired him: the life story of Malian-French writer Yambo Ouologuem and the structure of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives. He also draws the magical realism and dark humor of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and V.S. Naipaul. These authors are post-colonial: those authors whose countries, families, and personal histories were affected by the darker side of Western thought (colonialism, racial theories, slavery).

The blurb for On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer compares her writing to Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. In part, I believe, because all three are Black women writers. Walker and Roemer included lesbianism in their work, Morrison wrote of slavery, Roemer writes of the legacy of slavery. Unlike Morrison or Walker, Roemer grew up in Suriname and immigrated to the Netherlands (which has colonized Suriname) when she was nineteen. Her work shares the legacy of post-colonization with Marquez, Borges, and Naipaul. On a Woman’s Madness is set in Suriname. The complicated history of Suriname is unlike that of the United States: the country is majority-Asian, followed by Black. It shares a legacy with other countries like Kenya and South Africa: that South Asians were taken to those countries to be intermediaries and bureaucrats, a middle class between the upper class white colonialists and the enslaved or oppressed Blacks.

I sympathized with him…I became his sister because I understood: the anxiety disorder of the slave - forced to share his wife with the master - makes him look, three generations later, like a confident lover. Free, but with the slave’s fear and the master’s hunger. (p. 217)

This is the protagonist’s, Noenka’s, response to a man telling her that he raped a lesbian couple. Raped both, forced each woman to watch her lover be raped. In response to this story, the main character laughs. Roemer’s handling of this is too too simple, her sympathy with the rapist too one-sided. The protagonist forgets the oppression of women by men, the desire to correct women’s behavior when it doesn’t conform to society’s, and men’s expectations.

The story: Noenka is born to a father whose father had been enslaved a few generations before. He follows the old gods. Her mother is a Christian, taking on the slaveowner’s religion. The society carries these sorts of splits, and bears the scars of colonization and enslavement: over and over, the few white people left in Suriname force compliance to white values, and devalue Black folks. “My child, never trust a white man, they hate anything colored, and they’ve falsified history.” (p. 58). Noenka wants to live the life she wants. She runs away from her husband of nine days. Yes, for the reason might presume a young woman would run away from her new husband, because he is not safe. Her mother and a white doctor try to force her to return to her husband. Noenka tells a lover:

I’m Noenka, which means Never Again. Born of two polar opposites, a woman and a man who pull even my dreams apart. I’m a woman, even thought I don’t know where being female begins and where it ends, and in the eyes of everyone else, I’m black, and I’m still waiting to discover what that means.” (p. 214)

On a Woman’s Madness was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. The Booker has longlisted or shortlisted a lesbian work for the past few years (eg, The Safekeep and Boulder); the inclusion of On a Woman’s Madness is line with that. The prize’s blurb and the few reviews made the book sound like something I’d love: it’s a “lesbian classic” and “queer classic”, written by an immigrant who is also a Black women, and brings in non-Western, post colonial thought. It’s the sort of the “outside the Western canon” book I thought I’d love.

Reader, I did not. It’s very much a post-colonialist novel, but I wouldn’t consider it a “queer”⁷. Roemer is not a lesbian⁸, and it shows. Through over three-quarters of the book, Noenke’s lovers are men. She adamantly denies being a lesbian to her female lover, Gabrielle. The outdated tropes include: the predatory lesbian, lesbians are attracted to women because of their unhealthy codependence on their mothers, and the doomed, unhappy ending. In the first chapter, Roemer tells us that Gabrielle and Noenke will be separated because Gabrielle is in prison.

Roemer is a poet, and it shows through the lyricism of her writing. That lyricism becomes at times as confusing and suffocating as the orchids Roemer symbolically, frequently references through the novel. The story is non-linear, and the shifts uneven. Your mileage may vary with this novel, but by the second chapter, I was forcing myself to finish it because it’s been called a “queer classic”.

1. Jansson, Tove. ed. Westin, Boel & Svensson, Helen; trans. Death, Sarah. Letters from Tove. 2014. University of Minnesota Press. p. 239

2. Ellison, Ralph. The Invisible Man. 1953. p.1

3. Emily Dickinson electronic archives. Sue’s Name Removed. https://www.emilydickinson.org/mutilations/susans-name-removed

4. This is a reference to Hindu temples in what’s now Southern India. South India is more liberal/progressive than Northern India nowadays. Two South Indian states - Tamil-Nadu and Kerala - have higher literacy rates, lower maternal mortality and lower infant mortality than the U.S. I would like to think that the history of education and some early form of inclusivity is the root of why. It’s a deeper topic; one that needs more research and writing than this essay allows for.

5. I’m drawing upon my knowledge of Asian (particularly India and Hinduism) here - Hinduism (the religion I was brought up in) acknowledges a third gender. The conservative Indian government acknowledges a third gender today. Ancient texts in Hinduism (eg, the Vedas) and some in China (eg, Dream of a Red Chamber) were accepting of homosexuality, though these were not perfect (see next footnote).

6. I say “imperfect” because the history of China, the Islamic world and especially India (which are the parts I know better than the indigenous Americas, and so, am speaking directly of) were also problematic, eg, misogynistic, and India was historically one of the most class-stratified societies in the history of the world.

7. I wrote about the criteria I use for inclusion here. I’m excluding this “queer classic” because the author doesn’t identify as a lesbian.

8. Tepper, Anderson. You Know Marlon James and Edwidge Danticat. Now Meet Astrid Roemer. The New York Times. April 7, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/07/books/booksupdate/astrid-roemer-off-white.html

It also “shows” in that Roemer doesn’t empathize or even consider the viewpoint or feelings of the lesbians who were raped. I’ve written about novels that include rape and one that focuses on it; the lack of sensitivity in Roemer’s writing made this much more difficult to read.