A Fragmentary Novel that Glimmers with Light
Reviews
By Elizabeth Gonzalez James
“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 though 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.”
This brief soliloquy is delivered by the tortured narrator of Astrid Roemer’s groundbreaking 1982 novel On a Woman’s Madness, a classic in lesbian literature that is now available in English for the first time through Two Lines Press. In this scene, Noenka and her lover Gabrielle struggle to make sense of themselves and their relationship in a world that hates their very existence. Noenka pauses before she continues: “Oh, maybe I don’t know who I am . . . I’m what you experience because you’re what heals me.”
On a Woman’s Madness is a stunning tale of love and survival anchored by Noenka’s unflagging honesty and Roemer’s embrace of the contradictions, ambiguity, and mystery that characterize real life and are generally avoided in novels in favor of firm endings and tidy plots. Set in post-colonial Suriname and told in fragments, the novel begins with a letter from Noenka to Gabrielle, who is incarcerated in a women’s prison and hoping for parole. The story then flashes back some years, to a young Noenka running through the rainy darkness to her parents’ house. She’s fleeing her abusive husband—a man she’s been married to for only nine days—an action she says will set her adrift for the rest of her life.
The novel then travels further back in time to Noenka’s childhood, then forward again to her bad marriage, revealing the trouble that comes when a woman will not submit to abuse and degradation and recognizes that she deserves tenderness and love. When Noenka refuses to reconcile with her husband, she is forced from her teaching job and must move to Suriname’s capital, Paramaribo. There she meets the enigmatic Ramses, an orchid grower and friend of the family with whom Noenka enters a tense romance, the feelings of the young lovers existing always under the shadow of Noenka’s husband. His threatening presence is a storm cloud always on the horizon. Ramses is by turns eager and saturnine, unable to accept Noenka’s repeated refusals to marry him. Her fragile status as a Black woman living apart from her husband escapes his full comprehension, as does her understandable desire to never marry again.
When her employers learn Noenka is living with Ramses and his elderly mother, she is threatened again with losing her job and forced to move in with a married couple and their disabled children. It is here that Noenka meets the true love of her life, Gabrielle.
Outwardly, Gabrielle lives according to the strict social codes of the 1960s. But behind the façade of a devoted wife and mother, Gabrielle is an alcoholic who has had female lovers. She blows in and out of scenes in the novel like a curtain billowing into a room with one breeze only to be sucked back outside again with another. Even Roemer’s description of her is scant and vague: “More breast than body. More hair than face. More sunlight than white. Most of all, she was voice. Sometimes motion.” When Gabrielle and Noenka finally connect physically after Noenka is frightened by men outside on the street (“How does a vagina close,” Noenka asks as she runs home, “when it never opened?”), the two women share a brief moment of safety and solace in their home, an interior sphere that is both shelter and prison.
As time passes and Noenka and Gabrielle grow closer, they develop the courage to recognize the depth of their love. But they are increasingly squeezed in by the hostilities of the world. Finally, a last desperate act sends Gabrielle to prison and possibly shatters any hope of happiness. The ending, like much of the book, is ambiguous.
By its very nature, the novel’s fragmentary form leaves important parts of the story unsaid. Scenes blink in and out; the camera focuses on an orchid, a glance, a caress, before dimming to black and opening again on some other scene. “Fragments are the dominant literature of today,” argues Lincoln Michel in BOMB Magazine. “Our text diet is composed of tossed-off tweets, Instagram updates, and the two sentences of articles that autofill a Facebook post. Texts from a friend. A snippet of a novel read between subway stops.” Although On a Woman’s Madness was written over forty years ago, it feels very contemporary. It possesses an urgency, and the voids between the paragraphs give it propulsion. Roemer’s omissions and dips in and out of the story remind me of Virginia Woolf’s revolutionary disposal of Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, her death barely noted in a subordinate clause midway through the book. But Roemer’s erasures serve a different purpose. Woolf wanted to underscore the impermanence of human life, whereas Roemer seems to take a more textural and accretive approach. With its many overlaps and jagged edges, her prose often reads like a collage.
“I have an inborn urge to look at everything from multiple perspectives,” says Roemer in an interview Two Lines has reprinted in this edition. “I made a writing plan: to compose a fictional biography in a form that would symbolize the ruins of Noenka’s existence . . . A fictional biography [that is] layered like sediment.”
Viewed in this light, the novel’s fragments work exactly as intended, placing Noenka’s many hardships and indignities one atop the other. By the end of On a Woman’s Madness, we know who Noenka is and why she waits, clinging to hope, for Gabrielle to come back to her. Noenke is “better banished in love than bound in hate.”
Roemer had another aim with this novel aside from formal experimentation. She says she wanted to ask the question: “For a woman in post-colonial Suriname, is it possible to be happy?” This expansive question receives an expansive answer, but I will offer only my thoughts to keep this review brief. A queer Black woman is, at any time past or present, a threat to many paradigms. The miracle of Roemer’s novel is not only the beauty with which she narrates Noenka’s life but also the strength of spirit displayed by her characters. Finding beauty and love within any imprisonment is a glimpse of the divine in a person. Roemer’s novel glimmers with this holy light even in the darkest night.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novels Mona at Sea (SFWP, 2021) and The Bullet Swallower (Simon & Schuster, 2024), as well as the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (Texas Review Press, 2023).
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