The Decolonial Options in CRAZYWISE

Abstract

Kevin Tomilson and Phil Borges’s documentary CRAZYWISE explores how spiritual practices should be considered medical alternatives to healing people’s mental health. By examining primarily through the adversities of two individuals—Adam, a white American, and Ekhaya, a Black woman—and other interviewees, Tomilson and Borges’s documentation comments on how Western medicine can have deleterious effects precisely because there are always alternative approaches to reconciling with mental health crisis. Despite the documentary being accessible and consumable, it is precisely because of those qualities that CRAZYWISE offers a lens and introduces decolonial conversations, alternatives, and practices. By documenting not only the violence that occurs in the juxtaposing perspectives in medicine but also the individual experiences that have been given the opportunity to explore their cosmological mapping, Tomilson and Borges’s CRAZYWISE incentivizes ‘interculturality’ as a way of decolonial theory and praxis. As defined by Abya Yala, Catherine Walsh articulates how “[i]nterculturality […] signifies more than an interrelation or dialogue among cultures. More critically, it points toward the building of radically different societies, of an ‘other’ social ordering, and of structural economic, social, political, and cultural transformations” (Mignolo & Walsh 57). When Tomilson and Borges’s examines how Adam and Ekhaya’s journeys, despite their different cultural backgrounds, come to reconcile and heal from their grief and trauma through their own ways, the directors intentionally put these two individuals’ experiences together to create the intercultural discourse necessary for viewers to consider decolonial paths from Western coloniality. In reviewing Tomilson and Borges’s documentary, then, I will be arguing how CRAZYWISE can be ethnographic in revealing how colonial and modern facets like Western medicine can perpetuate the oppression of individuals precisely because of its totalizing and positivistic nature. To recognize how coloniality permeates within the documentary, then, I first ground the essay by delving into Ana Durazo’s chapter on the “Medical Violence Against People of Color and the Medicalization of Domestic Violence” to contextualize the medical violence that Adam and Ekhaya’s underwent when trying to understand their identities and the world they belonged in. From there, I will be putting Durazo’s articulations on medical violence in conversation with decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and other scholars to read more closely on how Tomilson and Borges’s documentary alludes to how Western coloniality and modernity occupy Western medicine and its epistemology. Afterwards, I will be discussing the kinds of decolonial interventions that CRAZYWISE offers by delineating how its interweaving of voices throughout the documentary on Western medicine only opens a discourse for decolonial options.