Where The Watermelons Grow

Content Warning: This section contains discussion of mental illness and its accurate and inaccurate portrayals in media.

The way schizophrenia is largely discussed, stigmatized, and portrayed in the media is, at best, ignorant of the realities of the condition, and at worst, actively perpetuating harmful stereotypes that make it more difficult for those dealing with schizophrenia and similar illnesses to get the proper information and treatment. Cindy Baldwin’s Where the Watermelons Grow seeks to subvert the harmful tropes surrounding schizophrenia while still portraying the realities of being around someone who is disconnecting from reality.

Schizophrenia is classified as a psychotic disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. The DSM characterizes schizophrenia through the presence of delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and catatonic behavior. When diagnosing schizophrenia, a psychiatrist will examine how long a patient’s symptoms have persisted and in what ways a patient’s symptoms have impacted their lives, socially, emotionally, and professionally. Schizophrenia most often first appears in men in their early twenties, and women in their late twenties. Schizophrenia can be co-morbid with a multitude of other disorders such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and Major Depressive Disorder, and, like in Della’s mother’s case, can be triggered by intense hormonal or emotional events, like pregnancy and grief.

In popular media, schizophrenia is often romanticized, like in Academy Award-winning film, A Beautiful Mind, which is a biopic of Nobel-prize-winning mathematician John Nash. The film’s popularity is responsible for misconceptions about schizophrenia, like the belief that visual hallucinations are a common occurrence with the disorder. However, most schizophrenic patients experience auditory hallucinations, and the voices only they can hear are often not accompanied by a visual form. Additionally, Nash is portrayed as maintaining enough mental awareness to manage his auditory and visual hallucinations as a regular part of his life, opting to stay off medication. This is an atypical means of managing schizophrenia, and it stigmatizes the use of medication for those who need it.

In Where the Watermelons Grow, Cindy Baldwin’s portrayal of schizophrenia is more nuanced, and in the book’s Acknowledgements section, Baldwin states she worked with multiple sources to ensure Mama’s illness had the most accurate and sensitive portrayal possible. Mama’s illness has many characteristics described in the DSM, including its onset in what was likely Mama’s late twenties, after college and right as she had Della. Throughout the novel, Mama experiences breaks with reality that include auditory hallucinations of her dead father’s voice, delusions about the dangers of watermelon seeds and air conditioning, disorganized speech as she expresses her fears, and catatonic behavior when she lies on the bed and stares at the ceiling.

Despite Mama’s behavior, the character of Daddy actively works to fight against the stereotypes associated with schizophrenia, including the use of words like “crazy,” which he scolds Della for using. Daddy’s stance on treating Mama with dignity and allowing Mama to make her own choices subverts many of the tropes associated with schizophrenic characters, who often experience others calling them “crazy,” but never experience empathy, understanding, or agency.

The sensitive yet realistic portrayal of loving someone with schizophrenia that Cindy Baldwin cautiously weaves into the pages of Where the Watermelons Grow is an important step for all media to begin to examine schizophrenia not through the eyes of fear and romanticism, but through the eyes of compassion, empathy, and true understanding of the ways the disorder impacts those who have it and their loved ones.