Q. In Return to Arcadia, Joshua, the protagonist, partly rebels against the psychiatric treatment he undergoes at Montreal’s Douglas Hospital. Nevertheless, he is partly healed here, and then helped further by a quiet, admirable, shaman-like spiritual healer who leads him through nature-based rituals, back in the Caribbean. Jerome in Spirits in the Dark also goes through a similar experience of native healing. What is your own perspective of these two very different processes and contexts? I am posing this question with the understanding that native healing is at best ignored and at worst much reviled by Western medicine.



A. Jerome’s and Joshua’s fundamental illness is alienation from their community, and, to some extent, from their authentic selves. Jerome is ashamed of the class he was born into. Colonial education has taught him to despise it. He is afraid as well to interact with the community as a whole because it is brutal to homosexuals. He has no friends and no community. Joshua is told by his plantocrat adopted mother that he must cut all links with his biological family; she even wants him to believe that he is white. But as a mixed-race person, he is unwelcome in the plantocracy. He is therefore bereft of a community, a situation that is worsened by his pariah status of being homosexual.

Because African religions emphasize an inextricable spiritual and physical wholeness, community and belonging, they are, I think, very therapeutic for healing this sort of pathology. By becoming a member of his father’s religion, Jerome leaves the desert of self-isolation and comes back to the community he’d been ashamed of. In it he finds healing support, even someone who understands his homosexuality and encourages him to begin to live it. By the time Joshua returns to Isabella Island his problem is more than community. [Isabella Island is fictional location featured in much of Dr. Thomas’ work.] Something in him has shut down. The persona he’d created to cope with the guilt he is carrying has supplanted his authentic self, and it’s by making him connect with the earth—and all of nature in fact—that his authentic self is resurrected. Pointer Francis and Healer André are my two favourite characters in these books. I have always been an admirer of Afrocentric religions. For their members they were like a very large family. Within their folds their members found the dignity denied them in the broader society.

In his novel Return to Arcadia, H. Nigel Thomas takes his reader on an intimate healing journey into Joshua Éclair’s psyche. Upon awakening in a Montreal hospital with partial amnesia, Joshua soon realizes that the road to recovery is actually backwards. He is placed in the ambiguous position of having to recover the very memories that are so painful his consciousness is trying to obliterate them. If we are the sum of everything we have experienced, and our bodies their mirrors, then Joshua is the indecipherable addition of scars upon scars that are found like a map on his back. And it is this unreadable chart that he must unlock in order to be healed, like an Oedipal riddle.