Paper short abstract:

Being attentive to the historical trajectories of slavery's history in the West African region and the regimes of silencing imposed on its narrative, the paper foregrounds the ways in which West African authors return back to the event of transatlantic slavery and reinstate slave voices into history

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the relation between history and fiction from the perspective of a constituted forgetting of the history of slavery and its consequences on the formation of the West African imaginary. Shifting the centre of Black Atlantic studies by setting Africa as constitutive of slavery's narrative rather than its silent counterpart, it will explore the ways through which West African texts memorialize the loss of an irretrievable past that haunts the present. Taking Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments (1970) as a symptomatic instantiation of a text that pushes for new configurations of re-membering slavery, it renders visible the different formal and memorial strategies of African texts.

Situating the novel within Ghana's nationalistic discourse in the Nkrumah years, and the ways this discourse shaped the modes of remembering and forgetting that inform literary production, it will read Armah's retrieval of slavery's history as an act that interrupts the homogenizing tendencies of the nation's narrative towards the silenced aspects of its past. It will then turn to the novel's references to the slave castles that overshadow Accra and read the depictions of its urban landscape as a palimpsestic text in which silenced historical traces become apparent. Having exposed how Armah's text generates productive models for re-evaluating the role of literature as a vehicle of counter-memory, it will argue that post-independence Ghana exists in what Saidiya Hartman calls the "time of slavery" that is the persistent unfolding of slavery in the sustained stories of loss, violence and dehumanisation that characterise the neo-colonial present.