ABSTRACT
This chapter seems to have begun in the moment, almost 20 years ago, when an elongated tangle of lush black locks, once a fulsome jora (topknot), eminently well-loved and cared for in its time but shorn of diasporic necessity and sadly packed away, thrust itself into my consciousness. Stunned by the sheer physicality and magnitude of the encounter in the instant, I have often pondered it since, for this uncanny incident was at the same time deeply compelling, incongruous and painful. In Sigmund Freud’s notion of the “unheimlich” (Freud, 1919), objects and experiences with which we are routinely familiar become estranged from their original contexts, effecting dissonance between subjects and the uncanny phenomena thus encountered, and in the process drawing attention to the normative repression of such strangeness in heimlich or everyday contexts. While fear, repulsion and the stuff of nightmares are central to Freud’s theory of the unheimlich, I would emphasize instead its haunted nature, so imbued with uneasy and painful memories, regret, remorse and recrimination, the ghostly traces of other realities and potentials. Setting aside scholarly critiques of Freud’s work, and the problem of applying Western psychoanalytic theory to non-Western contexts (especially those not manifesting clinical disorders), it is nevertheless worth observing that Freud’s essay considers dread over bodily trauma, the fractured ego, the uneasy presence of the double or imposter, and the repression of the familiar or homely. Although I set Freud largely aside here, each of these themes makes an appearance in what follows.
