Class Otherness and Pathology: The Fragmented Self and Madness in the Coronavirus Pandemic and Contemporary African Fiction

This chapter discusses the impact of socioeconomic status on mental health with reference to the COVID-19 pandemic and literary representations in Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing (1950) and Chikwava’s Harare North (2009). Studies attribute cases of pathology to heredity and othering conditions that involve violence, for example, deliberate stigmatization based on race, gender, and age. Postcolonial studies (that focus on the contest between marginal and dominant groups) demonstrate how colonial regimes in Africa subject the colonized to political and racial othering that adversely affect their mental health—racial othering turns Algerian freedom fighters into schizophrenics (Fanon, 1961, p 182). Radical feminists censure patriarchal oppression and isolate it as the prime cause of pathology among women and female characters (Sonika, 2016, p. 82; Celeli, 2001, p 27). Taking cognizant of the influence of racial, ethnic, age, and gender othering on mental ill-health, this chapter incorporates class or socioeconomic factors as equally disabling on people during the COVID-19 pandemic and major characters in Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing and Chikwava’s Harare North. It is the contention of this study that besides politics, race, and gender, class has the potential to institute binaries that adversely affect the mental health of the poor. Using an eclectic assortment of theories, the study interrogates the impact of socioeconomic factors on mental health of people and characters regardless of race and gender. This analytical study is, therefore, a close textual reading of the primary and secondary texts while Quayson (2003)’s calibrations constitute the theoretical model of interpretation.