The Creation of Half-Broken People is all about visions and visitations. In it, an unnamed heroine, who lives most of her life in an attic, travels to a castle where she encounters The Misremembered Woman, The Misbegotten Woman, and The Forgotten Woman. In listening to and writing about these women’s life stories, the heroine learns about herself and her place in the world, and uses this knowledge to empower her as she journeys towards freedom. The first character that visited me was The Misremembered Woman, Elizabeth Chalmers, a mixed-race woman living in colonial southern Africa. Elizabeth sees visions, believes herself to be on a mission, wanders about the city, and, as result, is diagnosed as schizophrenic by the colonial authorities and placed in an asylum. I wanted the novel to explore how colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy came together to visit certain traumas on the psyche and body of the colonized woman.

However, even though I knew what I wanted to write about, the actual process of writing the story eluded me for many years … until I realized that in many ways, I was trying to write about my own journey towards freedom. The characters whose stories I wanted to tell were products of encounters and visitations I had had throughout my own reading history—I had not been on this journey alone. In much the same way that the Misremembered Woman, the Misbegotten Woman and the Forgotten Woman teach the unnamed heroine in The Creation of Half-Broken People about herself and her place in the world, so too had Gagool in King Solomon’s Mines, Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, and the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” —all women considered or driven mad by the systems that they lived under—allowed me to learn about myself and my place in the world.

I must have been around ten or eleven when I first encountered Gagool. The edition of King Solomon’s Mines that I borrowed from the Hillside Junior School library was illustrated and so not only did I read the dehumanizing portrayal of the monkey-like, irrational, evil Gagool, I also saw depictions of her. She was written to be the stuff of nightmares and so she, rather easily, became part of mine. For years she haunted me as this thing that I could not fully comprehend let alone empathize with, so imagine my absolute horror at discovering that H.R. Haggard had used my people, the Matabele, to construct the atavistic and animalistic Kukuanas in King Solomon’s Mines. Gagool was, therefore, one of my ancestors. I had been a faithful reader of books since the age of three; I would like to think that the first crack in my foolhardy notion that stories are just stories—innocent things simply meant to entertain—appeared the moment I realized that I was a descendant of Gagool.

When I was seventeen, I read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre for my Cambridge A-Level English Literature exams and was officially introduced to the Gothic genre. By then, I had come to understand how violent, extractive, and damaging the colonial enterprise—which Haggard had championed and written as an entertaining romp—had truly been. But I was still seventeen and so my first impulse was to read the novel as a wonderful, albeit tragic, love story between Jane and Mr. Rochester. These were the 1990s: I hadn’t, as yet, learnt how to recognize gaslighting, breadcrumbing, and love bombing for what they were. I approached Jane Eyre with incredible credulity. The story was focalized through Jane and so, good and gentle reader that I was, I sympathized with her and her plight. I too was afraid of the thing that went bump in the night that turned out to be Bertha Mason. Luckily, I had a wonderful teacher, Mrs Madonko. By focusing our attention on issues of class, race, and gender in the novel, she made me realize the exploitative nature of the relationship between Mr. Rochester and his first wife: a relationship that can be read as a microcosmic simulacrum of Britain’s own relationship with its colonies. As a result, I ended up feeling an affinity to Bertha Mason.

Gagool now had company. She and Bertha Mason both haunted me, not in nightmares but in my everyday life, as I came to understand that there was a collusion between extractive colonialism and exploitative capitalism that traumatized and sometimes rendered mad the ‘others,’ especially women, that were the inconvenient truths in the narratives these two systems liked to tell about themselves. While I completely commiserated with Gagool and Bertha Mason, I also could not help but suspect that the Jane Eyres of the world, although placed on pedestals as desired objects, were not really in the privileged position that the narratives appeared to have placed them in. And then, at twenty-one, I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and learned that the pedestal was, of course, a trap. In many cultures, women are meant to vie for the pedestal (first prized as sexual objects and then for being good wives and mothers) not understanding that what awaits them may very well be a Pyrrhic victory.

Just as my encounter with Gagool taught me much about the workings of colonialism, and my encounter with Bertha Mason taught me much about the workings of capitalism, my encounter with the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” taught me much about the workings of patriarchy. Without these encounters I could not have written The Creation of Half-Broken People. Gagool, Bertha Mason, and the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper”—whose traces can be found in The Misremembered Woman, The Misbegotten Woman, and The Forgotten Woman—taught me not only about myself and my place in the world, but also about my place in literature, first as a reader and now as a writer. These “mad women” empowered me along my own journey towards freedom.