The chapter starts with Fanon’s criticism of the so-called dependency complex of the colonized and ends with him playing the Arab Doctor in Blida--Joinville, devising forms of social therapy and ergotherapy. In between, I read fiction by Aminatta Forna which examines forms of resilience in the dispossessed not graspable by ubiquitous psychiatric paradigms.

This chapter examines contemporary African fiction through the lens of food and foodways, highlighting the ways that recent writers have deployed agriculture, cooking, and eating to highlight the traumas of history, the emptiness of displacement, and the power of community. In We Need New Names (2013) NoViolet Bulawayo uses a piece of half-eaten discarded pizza to indicate the cultural and economic distance between those Zimbabweans with access to America and Europe and those without. Rosa’s District 6 (2004) by Rozena Maart shows the way food acts to bring people of different faiths and races together in a community facing erasure under apartheid. In Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones (2006), the revival of a coffee plantation serves as a metaphor for the rebuilding of Sierra Leone after decades of military coups and a civil war. In all three novels, food is used to chart political and social history unique to each region. Foodways and food security can serve as important markers in ascertaining how liberation is proceeding because access to food is a basic human necessity and foodways serve as cultural and social markers that speak to a community’s comfort with its access to food.

In this chapter, I examine a singular instance of affective form in postcolonial fiction, which puts the body back in the body while also sustaining affect as a virtual substance, a potentiality that exceeds material and formal embodiments. Drawing on Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love (2010) and Happiness (2018), I examine key psychoanalytic and psychiatric categories such as PTSD, trauma, fugue, and narrative memory as they are transported globally. Focusing on fraught contexts such as the Sierra Leonian Civil War evoked by Forna, the essay examines the entrenched assumptions and soulmaking politics of Western epistemologies of consciousness, offering the affect of Forna’s novels as an alternative depiction of the concrete and abstract materialities of traumatic states.