The 150th anniversary of Fort England Psychiatric Hospital makes it South Africa's oldest psychiatric facility. Rory du Plessis's poetry collection, Automaton(tik), memorialises the lives of 25 individuals who were institutionalised there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The 150th anniversary of Fort England Psychiatric Hospital makes it South Africa's oldest psychiatric facility. Rory du Plessis's poetry collection, Automaton(tik), memorialises the lives of 25 individuals who were institutionalised there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Published in 1961 in French, Michel Foucault's study, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, is a compelling challenge to a falsely divided world.
Who determines what is sane, what insane? What is the reasoning behind this divide, if not to ensure the truth and power of those deemed sane? It is the "othering" of those deemed insane, their isolation from society, which, for Foucault, informs a neurotic and policed modern or so-called civilised state.
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In his finely probing collection of poems, Automaton(tik): In Remembrance of the Patients of the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital, Rory du Plessis reimagines the lives of those exiled from a wider society, those deemed null and void - "chronically mad".
This diagnosis, by the medical superintendent Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees (1890 to 1907), appears in records now housed in the Cory Library at Rhodes University. These are the inspirational sources for Du Plessis's poems.
As the poet writes - "I...
