The Extracted Memory (in the Form of the African Portrait)

This chapter concerns the extraction of ‘African memory’. A missing photographic portrait haunts the living in Lindokhule Sobekwa’s I carry Her photo with Me (2024). I read the lack of photographic record in this work as simultaneously a horror created by and an evasion of racial capitalism. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, in La Plus Sècrete Mémoire des Hommes (2021), a novel about a young Senegalese writer in search of his lost literary heritage, similarly both problematizes and unwrites colonial erasure. Subversion of memory also informs Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Grey Matter (2011), a film within a film about Rwandan siblings post-genocide. Abdallah Zrika’s short story ‘ṣrẖẗ aẖtī bālʾabīḍ wālʾasūd’ ‘Le Cri de ma sœur en noir et blanc’ (‘My Sister’s Cry in Black and White’) (1998), in which a missing photographic portrait turns the narrator against faces and toward things, plumbs the blur between human and nonhuman. Scarry’s writing on torture, Derrida’s preoccupation with hauntology, and what Hugo Ka Canham calls a Blackness of unbounded, riotous life forms, inform my reading of Sobekwa, Sarr, Ruhorahoza, and Zrika’s works, wherein nothing is scripted in stone and the dead vibrate.