ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the Euro-centric explanatory frameworks used to order and interpret embodied expressions of trauma. It places in dialogue two texts that demand a decolonial practice of attending to expressions of trauma. This involves an ethics of reading the body – specifically, skin-based practices – as traumatic testimony in ‘post-colonial’ texts, one that resists a singular Western frame of selfhood, and the attendant linear wellness narrative couched in a discourse of pathology and cure. It first considers autobiographical accounts of Canadian skin grafting on Inuit children, part of a vexed history of colonial medical experimentation from the 1950s–70s. It further explores the re-narrativisation of traumatic testimony through Igbo-Tamil writer Akwaeke Emezi’s semi-autobiographical literary debut, Freshwater, where the protagonist’s experiences of hearing voices and self-mutilation complicate a DSM-based psychiatric reading, framed as the text is through the Igbo ontology of the malevolent born-to-die ogbanje child. Drawing from these accounts, the chapter interrogates both the corporeal and epistemic violence enacted within a (neo)colonial circulation of biopower. Ultimately, it illuminates the agentive potential in these narrative acts that address and redress such violence.
Keywords: Decolonial; intersectionality; medical humanities; race; African literature; mental health; psychiatry, mythology; body studies
