This project intervenes in the ‘decolonising trauma theory’ debate around the question of difference on the one hand, and what I call the artliness of the African literary text, on the other. I hone in on the primary material of literary artmaking, of representation (language) as a philosophical device to help me create an uncanny connection between trauma and intimacy, while simultaneously trying to rescue us from the failure of the written word not only in representing trauma, but in also representing the self. A closer look at postcolonial African literature as art disintegrates the colonial stratification of humanity imposed by imperialist discourse (itself a mythological construct) by presenting us with an African psychological subject, rather than a purely socio-political one, who is legible only as surface, and illegible as inner self.
I frame my own discussion around the existential question of being: I posit that among the four elements that compose our being are the somatic (to do with skin and bodies), the psychic (to do with psychological processes and states), with the spiritual, and with our respective positions as subjects in language (our linguistic subjectivity). My method here is informed by and builds on existing existential work on the postcolonial condition in the areas of psychology and race, specifically Frantz Fanon and N. Chabani Manganyi. Finally, I posit that to think of postcolonial African trauma fiction through the framework of intimacy is to open up the plurality of African psychological subjectivities that do not rely on a singular conception of the subject, that embraces the complexity of being in the world even when our tools fail us.
2026
