Remembering the Disremembered

Abstract

Abstract This article reads Abubakar Ibrahim’s short story “The Book of Remembered Things” as an anti-jihadist narrative that meditates on the traumatic effects of violent jihadism on the postcolonial Muslim domestic space and a counternarrative to the dominant body of Western fictional responses to the 9/11 terror attacks. Situated at the intersection of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and postcolonial trauma theory, the article argues that Ibrahim mourns and remembers the traumas of the disremembered postcolonial subaltern African Muslim woman elided in the dominant discourses on the WoT and also subtly critiques fundamentalists ideologies like Boko Haram. Ibrahim shows that Jihadists’ quest for an Islamic theocracy or caliphate is doomed to fail because it revolves around a sacrificial structure wherein the Muslin woman is sacrificed on the altar of ideological incoherence. By focusing on the nexus between WoT and gendered trauma, the article explores how Ibrahim reclaims the subaltern woman’s voice in the wake of violent jihadism.