Automaton(tik): In Remembrance of the Patients of the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital

In 2025, the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital will celebrate its 150th anniversary. This milestone marks the Hospital as the oldest South African psychiatric facility that is still in use today. To help us remember the patients, I composed poems for 25 individuals who were institutionalised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 25 individuals form part of a larger set of 200 patients whose case files were recently discovered in one of the Hospital’s cabinets and are now in the custody of the Cory Library, Rhodes University. All the case files pertain to white male patients who were suffering from chronic mental illness and who remained institutionalised until their passing. In investigating the case files, I discerned that as the men grew older and their health deteriorated, the doctors’ reporting declared them to be ‘mentally dead’. At the time of their passing, the case files stripped the men’s existence of any value and laid them to an undignified rest with words detailing their infirmity, illness, idleness and incoherence. To restore the humanity of the men, as well as to memorialise their lives, I investigated their case files to find fragments of information that aid us in appreciating their individuality: their connections with family and friends; their leisure and vocational interests; and their personality and agency. I used these fragments as inspiration for writing my poems. Thus, while the fragments are a historical fact, I embedded them into a larger fictional narrative that captures my imagined impressions of each individual.