This essay is a love letter to those who live in such a specific relation to time that very few can truly comprehend, let alone empathise with: those who live with bipolar. I refuse to use the term “disorder” or “illness” as it is always in relation to “order” and “wellness”, both of which are functionalities that serve capitalism: being productive bodies in late stage capitalism. Though, to be very honest, there are many times at which it does feel like a disorder, where it does feel like an illness, and I will not judge those who use these terms to articulate what they experience. Instead, here I will try to explore and expand upon the work of cultural and literary critic La Marr Jurelle Bruce, and, through this, try to situate where I am in relation to this condition. We will look at the stories of four artists, including myself, who all have something in common, yet their artistic expressions that we will focus on come from different spaces, circumstances and contexts.

I was 18 years old, in 2009, when I first sought a diagnosis. After a conversation with my psychology professor at university, I came to realise that I was experiencing a spell of depression. I was unable to attend classes that semester, and I would not be allowed to sit for the examinations. I tried to make the case that I was unwell, and, so, I sought a diagnosis to use as a medical explanation. My mother accompanied me as I went to a psychiatrist recommended to us by our family physician. Having listened to my experience, looked at my family’s history, as well as my own history, he said that I was very likely experiencing bipolar disorder. I remember distinctly how I felt in that moment. No, it could not be. This was a condition I was aware of because some of my favourite musicians lived with it, and succumbed to it. It was too drastic a conclusion to arrive at. So I pushed back.

I asked my mother to take me to a counseling psychologist instead. Her approach was less clinical. She claimed to understand that I had artistic sensibilities, and I felt a little more comfortable. After a few sessions, she recommended that I go to the neurologist at the same hospital she practiced at, and he gave me medication to treat anxiety and depression. This was at a time when mental health awareness began to see an uptick, particularly the phrase “anxiety and depression” became popularly used and identified with. And that was how I coped with the tides that pulled me under.

Every tide will rise, every wave will crash

Despite the medication and therapy, I would still experience lows. What is important to note about diagnoses is that you start to see your life through a certain framework. Here, I was cultivating a sense for what made me anxious and what made me depressed. Anxiety was almost always about either the immediate future, or any attempt to project forwards. I would find myself unable to get out of bed, because the overwhelming feeling of anxiety would tie up my muscles, my stomach, my mind, in knots. Poetry helped. The writing and the reading of it. It is how I untie knots. Even with the lows, it was the poetry in songs. Lyrics would comfort me, make me feel heard. Yet, amidst all of this, there was an aspect that was overlooked for its capacity to cause harm: my happiness.

In 2012, I was awarded a scholarship to study journalism in Chennai. I did well in my first semester. One of the top students, in fact. I was loved by my batch mates. We would gather every night. Smoke a few joints and plenty of cigarettes, taking swigs from our water bottles filled with cheap whisky diluted with water. I would sing for them. They would sing for me. It was lovely. Yet, gradually, the reality of being perceived began to disturb me. I did not notice how it was ramping up: my energy. I was doing too much. I was experiencing too much, or too intensely, what was going on around me. I was manic, and I did not know it. It was not part of the framework through which I understood my life. Eventually, I snapped. I experienced a psychotic break.

It was one of the scariest experiences of my life. I fell into rabbit holes on the internet. I came to believe things that were untrue. I became paranoid. And, eventually, I completely shut down. I stayed in my dorm room. I could not go to the canteen to eat because I was too sensitive to the sound of cutlery. I did not speak. For two whole months, I did not use my vocal cords. I would walk out before dawn to buy bread and bananas from the gutter market, while my batch mates were still asleep. I would split the banana and make a sandwich. Why banana? Because the mobile game Fruit Ninja claimed it had antidepressant qualities. Eventually, when I did use my voice, having written my first spoken word poem, my voice cracked, crumbled, and croaked. It was a poem about Muslimness and violence against Muslims by Sinhala Buddhists and their representative monks in Sri Lanka. This was at a time when the media was not reporting the many incidents across the island. I came to know about them through contacts I had acquainted as a journalist. The poem was written in a mad rush. It seemed to come from somewhere else altogether. No one would have expected it to arise from a bedridden ghost.

I dropped out of journalism school as I was not in any shape to see it through. I returned home to dismayed parents. This was not the first time I had dropped out. High school, university, now journalism school. It seemed that I could never complete anything. Except for poems, songs, drawings. Eventually, I took up a job as a subeditor, as I felt that would keep me away from being perceived, and I could still contribute to the work being done by journalists who were more reliably productive. Years later, I heard from a prospective employer that a former colleague had described me as “scatty”. This is the reality of living with such a condition. You are desirable when you are productive, efficient, sharp. You are unreliable otherwise.

In 2017, I had quit my job as a food writer and I wanted to be a full-time artist. I had just returned from an artist residency in Germany, and I was starved for the exuberance of its arts scene. I attempted to put together an entire solo exhibition, my first, in the span of 24 hours. I created all the work, installed it, and gave tours to every visitor. I do not feel comfortable disclosing every detail of this event, as it was quite traumatic, not just for myself, but for some present as well. The night culminated with one last tour of the work, at the end of which I decided to spontaneously recite poetry. I do not know where the words came from. It was in mad time, certainly. It was all over the place. I said things that may have hurt some. I said things that I do not even remember. I was experiencing a psychotic break in front of an audience and some did not know where the line was between performance and reality.

A close friend and my partner at the time took me to my therapist, only to find out that she had been sharing my personal details with my family. They helped me cut that off and took me to a respected psychiatrist. Having listened to my history, he insisted that I was exhibiting bipolar symptoms. I was then introduced to anti-psychotic medication. It saved my life. Nothing returned to normal for a long time, though. I took a hiatus of two years. I did not keep in touch with so many of my friends. I could barely speak. It was a pattern that had repeated, yet I never understood that it was the heights that I reached that lead to such tragic falls. In those two years, I had a different framework to understand my experience through. I began to sensitise myself to the sensations of mania. But enough about me.

Go slow! Too slow?

While slowness has helped me find a healthier rhythm to move through the days, months, and years, it is also a tricky proposition. What does it mean to ask someone to slow down? Under which conditions, and against what forces, are they ramping up? Let us now shift our focus to a different time, a different mind, to help answer these questions.

It came as a rush of fury.… My explanation didn’t make sense because the words tumbled out in a rush—I couldn’t speak quickly enough to release the torrents inside my head.… I had it in my mind to kill someone, I didn’t know who, but someone I could identify as being in the way of my people getting some justice for the first time in three hundred years. [My husband] didn’t try to stop me, but just stood there for a while and said, “Nina, you don’t know anything about killing. The only thing you’ve got is music.” … I sat down at my piano. An hour later I came out of my apartment with the sheet music for “Mississippi Goddam” in my hand. It was my first civil rights song and it erupted from me quicker than I could write it down.

Nina Simone, I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone (1992)

In his exemplary book, How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, La Marr Jurelle Bruce writes: “leaders of America’s white liberal establishment, purported allies of racial progress, admonished civil rights leaders to slowly seek justice. Into the din of terrorist explosions and liberalist admonitions, Nina Simone raised her resounding contralto and spit this searing malediction.”

This whole country is full of lies
You’re all gonna die and die like flies
I don’t trust you anymore
You keep on saying “Go slow!”
“Go slow!” But that’s just the trouble
[Band:] Too slow!
Desegregation
[Band:] Too slow!
Mass participation
[Band:] Too slow!
Reunification
[Band:] Too slow!
Do things gradually
[Band:] Too slow!
But bring more tragedy
[Band:] Too slow!

Nina Simone, Mississippi Goddamn (1964)

Referencing video footage of Simone performing “Mississippi Goddam,” Bruce notes that “fury seems to inflect her voice, furrow her brow, and propel her arms as she pounds the piano in thunderous fortissimo.” While rage is certainly on display, he charts three other modes of madness: phenomenal madness, psychosocial madness, and medicalised madness.

Simone invokes phenomenal madness when she sings of existential turmoil in the face of antiblackness. She manifests psychosocial madness as a brazen black woman shouting “Goddam!” into the snarling face of Jim Crow, defying white supremacist, antiblack psychonorms of mid-twentieth-century America. Furthermore, Simone lived with medicalized madness. In her autobiography, she details episodes of psychosis in the 1960s and describes symptoms later diagnosed as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. While it would be an error to reduce Simone’s performance to symptom, we cannot preclude the possibility that mental illness impacted “Mississippi Goddam.” It is possible, for example, that manic impulsivity and racing thoughts hastened her impatience, intensified her passion, emboldened her audacity, diminished her inhibition, and otherwise stoked her poignant delivery in the song. The copresence of mental illness does not disqualify Simone’s artistry. Nor does it negate the immanent genius, revolutionary politics, and radical love that might interanimate her performance—along with madness, against madness, through madness, in madness, as madness.

La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind (2021)

Simone herself has described her desire to drive audiences crazy: “I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I’ve performed, I just want them to be to pieces! … I want to go in that den of those elegant people with their old ideas, smugness, and just drive them insane!” According to Bruce, she longs to do “righteous violence to smug audiences” to “shatter their complacency and topple their sanity.” Yet, this is not some frivolous desire towards no particular end than simply madness. For Simone, it is “making way for transformation.” Thus, Bruce seeks to make the case that “Mississippi Goddam” does not just describe violence; “it does an aesthetic and epistemic violence that Simone wants to leverage toward revolution.”

Performance theorist Malik Gaines notes that Simone plays “over a bouncy 2/4 piano beat in a quick and witty pitter-patter” and that the “up-beat Vaudevillian quality belies the anger of the lyrical content and the earthy ferocity of [her] performance.” Bruce challenges this reading: “a quick cadence and jaunty delivery do not necessarily suggest levity.”

Bounciness might characterize a cheery skip through blooming pastures, but it might also mark a frenzied scramble through bloody trenches. I propose that Simone’s “pitter patter” echoes the beat of a racing heart that is flustered and restless for change. I contend that Simone’s “up-beat Vaudevillian” style does not belie but rather amplifies the mad, manic, impatient content of the lyrics. With her rapid-fire delivery, she performs the refusal to “go slow” that she describes. Simone’s autobiographical phrase, “a rush of fury,” captures both the quickening and maddening momentum of the song.

La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind (2021)

What follows is that madness is the song’s impetus, its method, its theme, its key, and, according to Bruce, perhaps its existential time signature. He proposes that Simone performs “Mississippi Goddam” in manic time, within a broader matrix that he calls madtime. It is doing time and feeling time that coincides with spasms and rhythms of madness. It is “multidirectional” and “polymorphous”, “deranged” and “dreamy”, “unruly” and “askew”, “capacious” and “kaleidoscopic”.

It tears calendars, smashes clocks, ignores calls for timeliness, builds makeshift time machines, writes “poetry from the future,” sings showtunes for the future, and dances to the lilt of the voices in your head. It might leap, twirl, moonwalk, or sit still when prompted to march in teleological lockstep. In the process, madtime defies the Eurocentric, heteronormative, capitalist, rationalist clock-time that reigns in the modern West.

La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind (2021)

Bruce calls this dominant chronology Western Standard Time.

Is it time to take back time?

He expands upon this by drawing from the work of queer and trans theorist Jack Halberstam, literary theorist Elizabeth Freeman, feminist disability studies scholars like Alison Kafer and Ellen Samuels, and black nihilist philosopher Calvin Warren. The concept of Western Standard Time is critiqued for its imposition of normative timelines and benchmarks for life events, tailored to white, heteronormative, middle-class individuals. This temporal framework excludes marginalized groups such as black people, queer individuals, and those with mental health challenges, relegating them to the sidelines or token participation. Madtime disrupts this normative procession, offering a metaphysical syncopation that challenges the perceived prestige of Western Standard Time.

Madtime intersects with other alternative temporalities such as queer time, crip time, and black time. Queer time disrupts dominant narratives of belonging and becoming by embracing non-conforming lifestyles and projecting futures outside heteronormative schedules. Crip time centers on lived experiences of impairment, challenging the hegemony of clock time by bending it to accommodate disabled bodies and minds. Black time, born out of the temporal violence of slavery, offers a nuanced perspective on black temporality, resisting the tyranny of clocks and asserting agency through practices like “colored people’s time,” which recalibrates time to suit black experiences.

In contrast to pessimistic views, the author sees blackness and time as inherently resistant and empowering. “Colored people’s time” emerges as a form of praxis imbued with agency, challenging the notion of lateness by asserting the relevance and significance of black experiences within temporal frameworks. This perspective suggests that while the abyss of oppression may seem bottomless, blackness transcends limitations, offering a unique and powerful form of temporal resistance and resilience.

Epitomized in “Mississippi Goddam,” manic time is a mad dash that outruns the speed limit of Western Standard Time. Zooming about with frantic force, this mode of madtime entails the racing thoughts, restlessness, hyperactivity, exhilaration, and impulsivity that mainstream psychiatry ascribes to mania. As a provocation for protest, manic time resists hegemonic calls for passive patience and refuses to “go slow.” It is a locus of energetic impatience and audacity that might be harnessed to expedite change.

La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind (2021)

Why don’t you have a look at your room?

It is a lot to take in, perhaps. Yet, rarely do I ever feel as seen and heard than I have with this book. What I feel is so crucial and important about this work is that it offers a way forward for those who live differently. And I do not mean that just in the sense of those who have chosen lifestyles for themselves that go against capitalism. There is a very real privilege that neuronormative folks, particularly the affluent, have towards say, espousing an environmentally conscious, sustainable lifestyle, over those who have no choice but to live differently. In that their experience of life itself is phenomenologically different. From these lessons in Black radical creativity, we can learn ways to fight, to struggle upwards and outwards.

The world that we live in can feel like a prison. If you are queer, neurodivergent, a woman, or marginalised in so many ways, and, often, as in my case, at the intersections. And this prison has been deliberately constructed. It is not an inevitable consequence of “market forces”. So how do we break out of it? How do we imagine lives free from it?

I distinctly recall an experience I had when I was just 20 years old, in 2011, where I had experienced a psychotic break, and my parents took me to our hometown in the East of the island. There, I was taken to a psychiatrist. He asked me a few questions, to which I responded sparingly. He then said that I seem to be high-functioning from what my mother had described. So he said I should be able to help him with the other patients at the psychiatric ward. He asked me to view a slideshow that he was going to show them.

Slide by slide, it presented examples of behaviours, and he asked me whether they were “antisocial” or not. I began to feel more and more uncomfortable with each slide, as it grew more and more authoritarian as it went on. I felt unsafe. I stopped responding. He became so frustrated that for a second his hands pulled at his hairs and then he returned to normal and said: “Why don’t you have a look at your room?”. I remember examining what would have been my prison cell. It was so clinical. The colours so deliberate. They heard that I was a musician, so they included a small battery-operated keyboard. I turned to my mother and said: “Please, I will do as you say. I will try to get better. Just, please, don’t leave me here.”

Amidst his storied career, jazz luminary Charles Mingus grappled with personal turmoil, culminating in a pivotal moment during 1958 when he sought solace within the confines of Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital. It was here that he birthed “All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother,” a composition that would defy conventional boundaries. La Marr Jurelle Bruce uses this as a means of exploring manic time, particularly in relation to confinement.

Mingus’s introduction to the piece, delivered in a frenetic and cryptic manner, set the stage for the manic tempo that would ensue. Departing from Jerome Kern’s classic “All the Things You Are,” Mingus catapulted the melody into an unrecognizable realm, fueled by improvisation and propelled by a relentless urgency. The ensemble’s performance, marked by Ted Curson’s trumpet and Eric Dolphy’s saxophone, mirrors the tumultuous dialogue within Mingus’s own psyche.

This frenzied reinterpretation, born within the confines of a psychiatric institution under the “care” of an antiblack doctor, reflects Mingus’s inner turmoil and existential uncertainty. In renaming the piece to reflect a hypothetical scenario involving Sigmund Freud’s wife, Mingus navigates themes of identity, uncertainty, and the pervasive influence of antiblackness of the time. The breakneck pace of the composition embodies the restless yearning for freedom and liberation, mirroring Mingus’s own longing to transcend the constraints of his environment.

In “All the Things,” Mingus captures the essence of manic time — an urgent, feverish rhythm that defies conventional understanding. Through his artistry, Mingus channels the chaos of his inner world into a transcendent musical expression, inviting listeners to embark on a journey through the turbulent landscapes of the human psyche.

Modernism and modern prisons post-Miseducation

In July 2013, Ms. Lauryn Hill faced a tax evasion conviction, serving three months in a Connecticut federal women’s prison. Remarkably, on her October 4, 2013 release, she unveiled “Consumerism,” echoing Mingus’s artistic resilience amidst confinement. Despite carceral constraints, Hill’s music surged forth, a testament to her creativity amidst stagnation. This composition, born behind prison walls, symbolized her liberation, swiftly reaching the airwaves upon her freedom.

Accompanied by a pounding drumbeat, a blaring electric guitar, and a sinuous flute that brings to mind “showdown” leitmotifs in film Westerns, Hill rhymes

Television running through them like an organism

Mechanism, despotism, poisoning the ecosystem

Satanism running through them like a politician

Hedonism, hypocrism, nihilism, narcissism

Egotism running through them, need an exorcism

…

European fetishisms, terrorism running through them, on their television

Introversion, extra prison

…

Paranoia, skepticism, schizophrenic masochism

Modernism has created modern prisons

Neo-McCarthyisms, new colonialisms …

Ms. Lauryn Hill, Consumerism (2013)

Bruce feels that this form of “showdown music” is apt as Hill names, articulates, and takes on, “a many-headed hydra of global structural evils.” Consumerism is just one of the many evils here, as she points to the many structural violences of this prison-like world we live in, calling out “despotism,” “terrorism,” and “new colonialisms.” Bruce draws attention to how Hill repeatedly uses the term “running through them” to indicating that they course through the core of the corrupt world order. “Like an organism,” these “isms” resemble “viral agents infesting a body politic, generating social ills.”

Hill’s swift release of “Consumerism” paralleled the rapid pace of her lyrical delivery on the track itself. The song showcases her impressive verbal agility, with tongue-twisting words delivered at an average of 6.5 syllables per second. Laden with esoteric and polysyllabic terms, densely packed without pauses, Hill’s rapid-fire rhyming creates a sonic barrage likely to disorient and overwhelm listeners, mirroring the impact of societal injustices on vulnerable populations. In essence, her musical onslaught vividly portrays the sociopolitical onslaught of corrupt systems.

“Consumerism” is not Hill’s first foray into manic music. Hill’s live performances, especially since 2007, often feature manic remakes of Miseducation-era hits, including her catchy homily, “Doo-Wop (That Thing),” and her infectious fight song, “Lost Ones.” Hill accelerates these popular tracks so dramatically that their lyrics are sometimes difficult to discern, and their beats are too rapid for casual dancing and easy grooving. Instead, Hill leads listeners on a high-speed chase: away from her “forbiddingly perfect” former persona and toward the reinvented Ms. Hill who is radically honest and unabashedly flawed. Hill has expressed a desire to see her audiences “jump that battery and start living.”³³ With these manic renditions, it seems that Hill hopes to jolt and jump-start those audiences to full throttle at warp speed. Hill’s manic delivery, like her occasionally hoarse vocals and cacophonous arrangements, resists easy listening. She solicits a nimble, attentive, difficult listening instead.

Noting this manic quality in a 2010 concert, the Atlantic reported that Hill “opened her set with a manic rendition of ‘Lost Ones,’ dancing and rhyming at spitfire speed. ‘Ex-Factor’ was not the same nuanced song of pain as it is on the album, but it had its own furious energy about it.” In 2012, the Washington Post described a performance that “ended in a speedy punk-rock rave-up and a primal howl.”³⁴ Remarkably, both reviews link observations about Hill’s quickness and comments about her purported madness, as though her speed is symptom. In the Atlantic, her “manic” performance and “furious energy” are linked to “speed”; in the Washington Post, her “speedy” singing culminates in a “primal howl.”

La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind (2021)

Hill’s frenetic performances heighten the uniqueness, immediacy, and challenge central to her post-“Miseducation” musical approach. She employs manic timing to denounce structural injustices, vividly portray their impact, defy easy listening, overhaul songs, distance herself from past personas, spur audience reflection, and showcase her impressive verbal skill.

The space to make the great mistakes

In 2015, a collaborator shared a beat he had produced and asked me to “let loose” on it. It was at a time when I was in a good groove. I would eventually go on to do so many things that, looking back, I wonder how I had the energy for all of them. It was also a time when I did not have a bipolar diagnosis, nor the framework to identify what was going on. I hurt a lot of people, I lost close friends, and I ended relationships in ways I am not proud of. Yet, there are certain works of art I produced in that time that at least survive somewhat unscathed. Yes, there are certain perspectives and usages of words that I might do differently now, but I understand that for who that version of myself was, it was a radical thing to do.

I stopped rapping in 2017. The conversation around cultural appropriation was reaching a fever pitch and along with my psychotic break, a part of myself that I lost was the persona of the rapper. I have experienced depersonalisation so many times in my life because of the ways that the waves crash, the tides rise and fall, and the currents pull. Reading this book, I feel more comfortable about my past as a rapper and spoken word artist. I was, indeed, inspired by Black radical creativity, yet I did not understand my relationship to time in the way that this book has helped me to. I have always felt a sense of an amorphous time, in how I have experienced it. Perhaps that is why I could welcome it.

In the future of my dua,
we will no longer live in a prison-world.
In the future of my dua,
we will no longer be stigmatised.
In the future of my dua,
we will all be able to afford to live sustainable lives.
In the future of my dua,
we will not be institutionalised.
In the future of my dua,
we will not be compelled to die by suicide.
In the future of my dua,
we will care for those who live otherwise.
In the future of my dua,
we will escape Western Standard Time.
In the future of my dua,
all forms and modes of time will be respected.
In the future of my dua,
all worlds and modes of being will coexist.