Di madri e d’acqua. Fratture e ricostruzioni dopo il middle passage

The centrality of travel in African narratives develops from the Black diaspora as a radical rupture that tends to be reflected in different types of stories, all of them linked to a deportation whose trauma has yet to be fully worked through. Saidiya Hartman’s reflections in Lose Your Mother (2007) are invaluable, as they combine the perception of a fractured individual history with a broader, collective history that is articulated in different ways. In my work, I consider the genre of speculative fiction, examining the ways in which — within the framework of a formulaic system that is strongly marked as white, male, and Western — certain women writers rewrite the paths of a return articulated across the dimensions of time and space. They do so by using familiar compositional strategies functionally and from a decolonial perspective, combining them in unusual ways. From Octavia Butler to Rivers Solomon, women storytellers and activists, I explore a complex legacy that belongs to African fantasy, never absent even from so-called realist literature and clearly explained by Soyinka himself in “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy” (1990). Intact in all these narratives remains the wound of a journey in which drowning signifies loss but also — as Alexis Pauline Gumbs suggests — recovery of a matrix of sharing and a moment of rebirth.