Review: Robert Lee Williams on Astrid Roemer
Bedlam Claims Many St*ars
When I agreed to review On A Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer, one of the finalists for Freedom Reads’ 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize judged solely by incarcerated readers, I didn’t know what I signed up for. Inside prison, we don’t have access to the internet, so all I knew was the title of the book. Over the past two years, I've been making my bones as a professional writer, and had wanted to try my hand at criticism for quite some time. In my ignorance, I figured any book I was assigned would present me with an equal level of difficulty. Lord was I wrong. On the trip back from the prison package room, I read the book’s back cover thinking I’d been set up. Immediately, I worried that I might not be the best person to review a story about a queer black woman living in Suriname, South America. Blackness, I can identify with. But as I read further, what reached out to me was the “traumatic powerlessness” that weighs upon a prisoner of inescapable circumstance. So I leaned into that visceral reaction, and then unblinkingly leapt into the eye of her unravelling.
The book opens with a letter from Gabrielle to Noenka, our protagonist, who replies with a letter written on Gabrielle’s fiftieth birthday. Noenka’s drips with poetic longing, lascivious innuendo couched in metaphors of serpents and sopping plant life. We learn that Noenka’s lover Gabrielle is serving time in prison and “takes care of the kitchen garden … losing her angelic hands to the coarse rope that she turns into remarkable macramé.” What malevolent circumstances possessed “angelic hands” to labor within purgatorial gates?
Now the novel takes a step back in time, Noenka wants a divorce from her husband of nine days, Louis, but her inability to give him a reason crushes his fragile ego and infuriates him and the interrogation turns violent. This is the first in a succession of blows slowly annulling Noenka’s search for agency. To escape further abuse, she ditches her hometown and moves to the capital city of Paramaribo, where she meets Gabrielle, a mother of two children who suffer from cognitive issues. We learn Gabrielle has a drinking problem and, like our protagonist, is trapped in a loveless marriage.
