N°021_Vol.2_02

Introduction: African Post-colonial countries have been confronted to socio-political upheavals, particularly civil wars which have left, through history, indelible marks of trauma on individuals, communities, and national psyches.  This persistent reality compels some African writers to challenge the complexities of pain, loss, and memory, not only by a simple depiction of events but, most importantly, by using significant aesthetic means susceptible to convey unspeakable dimensions. In this regard, Preeti Asatin and Dr. Soumya Tiwar accordingly write:

• « Trauma-focused narratives often serve as testimonies, exposing historical injustices and personal hardships. These narratives can also function as healing mechanisms, assisting both writers and readers in processing and interpreting traumatic occurrences. Through the exploration of trauma in literature, authors can create a space for collective healing and understanding. This shared experience can foster a sense of community and solidarity among readers who may have encountered similar experiences. » [Preeti Asatin and Dr. Soumya Tiwar, 2025:39]

Put in the civil-war-trauma context, this assertion suggests that writers, through essential aesthetic choices, create in their narratives some important spaces to reconstruct historical events, injustices, personal and communities’ sufferings, and invite readers to get involved into psychological comprehension of trauma as a contribution to communal healing. This research work is an in-depth analysis of Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love and The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest, focusing on the aesthetics of trauma with reference to Sierra Leone’s civil conflict. It aims at showing how Aminatta Forna depicts traumatic experiences as a way to convey the profound psychological and historical impacts of civil war. Hence, this study explores the motivations behind her stylistic decisions and narrative strategies in shaping the reader’s understanding of resilience, memory, and human condition.

In this perspective, the central question of this research work can be stated as follow: How does Aminatta Forna use her writing style, in both The Devil that Danced on the Water and The Memory of Love, to show the complex and painful impacts of trauma from civil war? It can be hypothesized that Aminatta Forna narrates issues of trauma in her books through literary mechanisms, devices, and aesthetic elements. Yet, she uses different narrative techniques like multiple perspectives, memory flashbacks, and symbolic spaces to show how trauma affects both individuals and societies.

Before scrutinizing the subject matter, it would be prominent to deal with conceptual analysis of ‘catharsis’ and ‘trauma’ to facilitate the reader’s understanding of the topic. Trauma, to start with, derives from the Ancient Greek ‘traûma (τραῦμα)’, carrying connotations of ‘wound’ or ‘injury.’ It first entered English in the late 1600s to describe physical wounds, and by the late 19th century it expanded to mean psychological injury or emotional shock. In the literary context, by reading Bombay, Matheson and Anisman (2009:8), one understands that trauma can manifest through intrusive memories, dissociation, emotional numbness, and a disrupted sense of self, often defying conventional linguistic and cognitive processing. The Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology (2009: 552) defines ‘trauma’ as “any event which inflicts physical damage on the body or severe shock on the mind or both”. In the same connection, the Concise Dictionary of Psychology (200:133) furthers that a trauma is “a physical or psychological shock resulting from an injury of violent incident”. Trauma is therefore, an emotional wound leading to psychological injury, that is to say, an event that causes a great distress. Therefore, the ‘aesthetics of trauma’ emerges as a field of study which “examines how literary depictions reflect the psychological, social, and cultural impacts of traumatic events (Asatin and Tiwar, 2025:39).” A. D. Makosso (2020:165) even furthers that the notion ‘trauma’ is “an emotional shock, that is to say, an extremely distressing experience that causes emotional shock and may have long-lasting psychological effects.”

As for ‘catharsis’, it is an interdisciplinary concept with deep roots in philosophy, literature, and psychology. Indeed, deriving from the Ancient Greek word ‘katharsis (κάθαρσις)’, meaning purification or cleansing, ‘catharsis’ originally referred to medical purging, later expanded to emotional and spiritual release in literature and psychology. This concept has psychological connotations for it refers to the process of releasing repressed emotions. Freud and Breuer, for example, saw it as a therapeutic act expressing hidden feelings to relieve inner tension. In the literary context, ‘catharsis’, would be better understood through the Greek philosopher, Aristotle’s Poetics. Though Aristotle’s ‘catharsis’ mostly appears in drama, it can be generalized to other literary works when a narrative creates feelings of pity and fear leading readers or viewers to a powerful emotional climax, enabling them to process complex feelings and then let these feelings go as they feel relieved at the end. The current study helps buttress the forgoing since in Forna’s The Memory of Love and The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest the pain of Post-War Sierra Leone and personal loss resonates with readers, offering both sorrow and a form of emotional clarity and relief.  Studying the catharsis of trauma in both a memoir and a novel, offers a unique and intertextual analysis of two different fictional settings. In effect, the memoir shares the author’s direct, personal experiences and memories, presenting an authentic look at trauma. The novel, however, as a work of fiction, provides many characters’ viewpoints and deeper psychological feelings, constructing symbolic representations of trauma. In the same stance, Anthony Oha et al. suitably opine:

• « Fiction is an imaginative recreation of real-life experiences. This means that the subject matters in every fiction must reflect the experiences of the society from which it emanated. […] The novel is a product of society and tries to direct the society by using the aesthetic medium. » [Anthony Oha et al. 2008:4, 36]

This assertion indicates how the novel is a powerful medium to reflect the psychological and historical impact on the society from which it emerges. This means that when a novel explores trauma, it uses its artistic style, not just to tell a story about suffering, but to enable readers understand and engage with those difficult realities, showing how this literary genre is a direct mirror that talks to readers.

As far as the review of the related literature is concerned, it is essential to note that the bibliographical analysis through internet shows a few documentations about this topic. While several studies have been orientated to issues of trauma, few of them tackled the catharsis of trauma in both books under consideration. For instance, Ernest Cole (2014) states that Forna’s work investigates the historical and political landscape of Sierra Leone and traces the growth and development of the nation from the pre-colonial to post-colonial independence era. In fact, according to her, Forna engages the legacies of colonialism, post-independence betrayal and disillusionment, political instability, violence and oppression, leading to the civil wars of the 1990s. Then, Irene Perez Fernandez (2017) notes, in her study, that the novel The Memory of Love encourages the reader who has not experienced first-hard such distressing events to recognize the emotional spaces of others. He adds that Forna’s novel emphasizes the fact that emotions, such as identity and spaces, are malleable and in the process of being created and recreated. They are neither static nor fixed positions from where to stand.

Additionally, Charles Mwangi Njanjo (2017) scrutinizes Forna’s work and its implication in trauma, in terms of space. He affirms that, in post-colonial societies, space defines limits and freedoms. For him, physical space such as borders, prisons or homes can reflect both oppression and the possibility of freedom. For example, Forna’s father is physically confined when he is imprisoned, this symbolizes the restrictions imposed on those who challenge power. He scans space in a psychological dimension and confirms it through Aminatta Forna’s personal journey to uncover the truth about her father’s execution, reclaiming a space of understanding, a space of memory that was denied to her. In a related development, Merve Sarikaya-Sen (2018) establishes the correlations between poetics of western trauma and Sierra Leonean modes of healing in Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love. According to him, Sierra Leoneans are left with no other choice than to remember and deal with their traumatic memories. He thinks that there are different strategies of coping with traumatic experiences employed by Sierra Leoneans such as maintaining an intact sense of purpose, controlling their traumatic memories and establishing lose contact with the social environment. Furthermore, Makosso et al. (2023), in their paper, highlight how Aminatta Forna intertwines personal trauma with historical events, showing how survivors cope with past atrocities. The study positions the novel as a powerful testimony of post-war psychological scars, emphasizing the role of literature in preserving memory and understanding trauma.

This research is conducted through the prism of the Psychobiographical approach and the stylistic criticism.  Since it purports to analyse trauma, particularly in the context of civil war.  The first approach proves helpful for it enables the reader to probe into the author’s life through the lens of psychological theories for the sake of illuminating their literary output. It bridges psychology to an author’s biography and allows the reader understand how an author’s personal experience shapes the themes, narrative structures, and aesthetic choices used to represent traumatic events in the work, as the Ghanaian critic Kofi Agyekum accordingly puts:

• « Psychoanalytic critics analyse a work of literature from the point of the author’s mind, personality, mental and emotional characteristics. […] They employ symbolism to identify, explain and interpret the meaning of some psychological state of minds of writers and characters they create. » [Kofi Agyekum, 2013:30]

This statement supports the idea that literature can reflect unconscious psychological processes. It suggests that the authors’ inner psychological world profoundly influences what and especially how they write. Applying this approach on Forna’s books is useful because they both deal with civil war trauma, trying to inspect how Forna’s own mind and experiences shape her stories and characters, revealing deeper meanings behind their portrayal of trauma.

The stylistic criticism, on the other hand, helps to identify the aesthetic strategies the author employs, such as imagery, symbolism, fragmented narration, and shifts in perspective, to represent emotional and psychological distress. In this regard, Katie Wales (2001:437) renders: “the study of style in language, especially in literary works. It involves the analysis of various elements such ass tone, diction, and syntax to understand how they contribute to the meaning and effect of a text.” In fact, this approach helps uncover how Forna’s specific linguistic choices reflect and intensify the traumatic experience of her characters, and how the narrative structure, imagery, and voice participate in the construction of meaning. Since this research work is essentially centred on Aminatta Forna’s ‘Forna’s traumatic experience and literary investigation by scrutinizing how her writing functions as a cathartic and investigative process across her memoir and novel, two main points are considered in its completion. Prior to scrutinizing some aspects related to the poetics of setting in which the authoress explores the temporal shifts and the use of space, it is worth focussing on the ‘Narrative Architecture’ of both novels, especially with specific narrative techniques like plot, character development, disrupted chronologies that reflect trauma’s non-linearity, tackling both the use of focalization.