The Keloids We Heal

Keloid as an episteme, a knowledge and understanding grounded in captivity and mutilation, is also an episteme of resistance, empowerment, and unification. The Keloids We Heal defines literature by women of colors as corporeal and spiritual scars that redefine Modernity and its foundational medium—printed text. By tracing the impact of colonization and enslavement on Black women, along with the contributions of Black women in colonial and nineteenth-century literature, Sarah Soanirina Ohmer creates a decolonial framework to analyze literature by women of colors from the United States, Brazil, and Cuba, as corporeal and spiritual healing. She builds on the current shift to focus on Africana religions and spirituality in Black studies, Afro-Latin American studies, and gender studies, with an intersectional analysis of novels, poetry, testimonio literature, and auto-ethnography. With a focus on the portrayal of trauma and the role of spirituality in works by Toni Morrison, Conceição Evaristo, Maryse Condé, Gloria Anzaldúa, Quilombhoje poets, and María de los Reyes Castillo, the analysis compares literature from different countries in each chapter organized by theme: ghosts, mirrors, naming, and motherhood. Decolonial literature written by women of colors has the power to heal through gut-wrenching descriptions of wounds and goose bump–inducing passages of hope and liberation. With a multigenre or hybrid text, this book offers a different take on literary analysis as the author weaves in her own life story as a Black woman. She reflects on the impact of colonialism, racism, sexism, and capitalism on her scholarly writing, and on her own traumas and faith journey.