Repetition and Feminist Agency in Selected Contemporary African Women’s Poetry

Abstract

Uzma Aslam Khan's The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali (2019) excavates a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the Indian subcontinent: the experience of the convicts, their island-born descendants and the colonised inhabitants of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands under British penal rule and, from 1942 to 1945, under Japanese military occupation. This article argues that the novel presents the archipelago as a crucible of coloniality, a space in which successive regimes of domination are tested, refined and handed on, and in which the replacement of one coloniser by another produces not liberation but a renewed form of the same violence. Drawing on Aníbal Quijano's concept of the coloniality of power, Michel Foucault's analysis of panoptic discipline, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's account of the subaltern and Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory, the article reads the novel in four movements: its historiographic method, which sets fiction against an archive, Khan regards as written by and for the privileged; its rendering of kaalapaani and the Cellular Jail as an architecture of total surveillance; its figuration of the unnamed Prisoner 218 D, whose body and memory become the last territories of resistance; and its depiction of the Japanese occupation as a continuation rather than a rupture of colonial rule. The article concludes that Khan's novel performs a decolonisation of history, recovering the archipelago's silenced lives while refusing the comforting binaries of coloniser and colonised, and of oppression and liberation, on which official national narratives depend.