Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature

Laura T. Murphy is an assistant professor of English at Loyola University in New Orleans. Her work has appeared in Research in African Literatures and in Studies in the Novel.

"Metaphor and the Slave Trade is a book that is long overdue in African literary studies. Using many of the literary canon's most read texts, the author has presented a new perspective in the reading of these and other texts of African literature, opening the way forward for readers to nuance each and every African text for the subtle metaphors that point to a people's memory of the slave trade." (African Studies Quarterly) "Original and challenging…(Murphy) argues that while it has been acknowledged that the oral tradition registers the traumatic effect of the slave trade, scholars have been slow to recognize its deep imprint on the collective imaginary and the way in which it has been reflected in the modern literature in English." "Murphy brings to the foreground a hitherto concealed trove of metaphors that, while inspired by the dark, long and gruesome history of slavery in West Africa, will prove to be a highly suggestive resource for re-thinking African literary history. A timely and highly innovative work." "Drawing on the writings of Tutuola, Okri, Armah and Aidoo, Laura Murphy demonstrates how modern authors of fiction in Africa employ metaphors of the slave trade to reflect cultural memory of a past that is always alive in the present, no matter how obscure." "A well-researched and beautifully written textual study…authoritative and carefully argued."

• * Acknowledgments * Introduction * One: Against Amnesia Metaphor and Memory in West Africa * Two: Magical Capture in a Landscape of Terror The Trope of the Body in the Bag in Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts * Three: Geographies of Memory Mapping Slavery's Recurrence in Ben Okri's The Famished Road * Four: The Curse of Constant Remembrance The Belated Trauma of the Slave Trade in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments * Five: Childless Mothers and Dead Husbands The Enslavement of Intimacy and Ama Ata Aidoo's Secret Language of Memory * Six: The Suffering of Survival * Epilogue: The Future of the Past The New Historical Fiction * Notes * Bibliography * Index