Perceiving Pain in African Literature

Ways of knowing civil war: human rights and the traction of complicity in Aminatta Forna's The Hired Man

“…At a book group in Oxford in November 2010 she told me that in many ways her subsequent work has formed an ongoing exploration of how and why it was possible for him to die. 10 Forna experienced the most terrifying of human rights violations as a childthe unjust, inexplicable, violent loss of a parent. And her subsequent writing -even, I would suggest, her most recent novel, The Hired Man -repeatedly returns to this early trauma, asking questions about the nature of complicity in civil war and how situations are created where human rights can be so irrevocably violated.…”

“…The Devil that Danced on the Water – subtitled A Daughter's Memoir – tells the story of her childhood and the betrayals that led to her father's death. At a book group in Oxford in November 2010 she told me that in many ways her subsequent work has formed an ongoing exploration of how and why it was possible for him to die . Forna experienced the most terrifying of human rights violations as a child – the unjust, inexplicable, violent loss of a parent.…”

Emotional (Un)Belonging in Aminatta Forna's "The Memory of Love"

“…War and its aftermaths are, thus, at the kernel of The Memory of Love and, for this reason, the novel has been analysed focusing on pain and human rights claims (Norridge 2013) and through the lenses of trauma studies (Gunning 2015;Craps 2014), which, as Stef Craps and Gert Buelens claim, are "almost exclusively concerned with traumatic experiences of white Westerners [….] ignoring or marginalizing non-Western traumatic events and histories " (2008: 2).…”

Book Review: From Surviving to Living: Voice, Trauma and Witness in Rwandan Women’s Writing

“…Yet the key defining moments she cites foreground individual and regional specificity over any universal or common experience of the horrors of the genocide. Crucially, the testimonies speak of the ongoing struggles these women face, including the continued impact of trauma on survivors’ lives and the particularity of that pain (Norridge, 2013). Gilbert presents testimonial writing as an act of solidarity with all genocide survivors whose diverse and often difficult (ongoing) experiences are not accounted for in the government’s official narrative.…”