Maafa

Maafa is an epic poem about reparations and the female body.

Maafa undoes the erasure of trauma and of black femininity. Maafa has killed

her father and been granted eternal life.

Maafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust, and echoes the

Hebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure is

always in progress. Maafa killed her father in the barracoons because the sight

of him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero's

journey which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longing

and forgetting that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases her

into all manners of light and darkness. Through an accumulation of images she

exorcises her own haunts, and is healed into complete being.