When Noenka's husband refuses her request for divorce, she flees her small hometown for the city, where life is simultaneously free and unfree: an open book; a closed door.
Pulled between societal conventions and the aspirations of a woman with new opportunities, Noenka is stuck juggling her sexuality, her religion, and her culture. She misses her dead mother and her feelings toward her father, a descendant of slaves turned successful plantation owners, are complicated. She loves, or has loved, Ramses, the enigmatic orchid collector; maybe her white tennis partner Alek; and finally Gabrielle, a woman in prison for a crime of passion with whom Noenka exchanges letters. When it all becomes too much for her to take, desperation leads to disaster, and Noenka is left exposed in the brutal white light of Suriname.
Wrestling with God, tradition, and sexuality in hallucinatory fragments, Astrid Roemer's On a Woman's Madness is a contemporary classic of postcolonialism and sexual freedom. Artfully translated from Dutch by Lucy Scott, the novel unspools to reveal a shocking portrait of this radically elusive woman who speaks like an incantation: "I am Noenka, which means Not Again. Born of two opposites, a woman and a man who pull even my dreams wide open. I am a woman, even if I don't know where that begins and where being a woman ends, and in other people's eyes I am black, and I keep wondering what that means." Each step Noenka takes--for stability, for pleasure, for opportunity--is saturated with meaning ascribed without her consent. Her movements echo through an impatient world as her Madness.
