Erica Still's Prophetic Remembrance: Black Subjectivity in African American and South African Trauma Narratives makes an important contribution to trauma studies in literature and to the exploration of black subjectivity in contemporary literature by African American and black South African writers. Although there have been numerous studies of the relationship between the two countries by historians such as George M. Fredrickson and Robert K. Massie, few literary scholars have done comparatist work focussed on race in the contemporary literature.Footnote ¹ One reason for this dearth of scholarship is the recognition that the crucial importance of national racial formations can get lost in an effort to create transnational claims. Although they share important characteristics, US slavery and apartheid are distinct and different. Erica Still carefully threads her way through the minefields of an argument about trauma, mourning, and black subjectivity in African American and black South African literature to make a compelling case for what she calls “prophetic remembrance” that involves writers in the process of grappling with racial trauma in order to open up through storytelling, although not to guarantee, future possibilities. Describing her method, Still says,

as if they are narratives engaged in “perpetually mourning the past while embracing the renewed prospect of the future” (38).

In chapter 1, Still brings together Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother (1998), two powerful novels that deal with wounded motherhood and the trauma of black subjectivity on the body. She views these narratives as literary representations of “ruptured wounds” (39), with the mothers’ attempts at healing narratives interrupted and unfinished – yet offering promise. Neither of these narratives can contain the past trauma, but it is “the promise of prophetic remembrance that makes such retelling more than morbid repetition” (80).

Still deals with “spatial belonging” in “Fugitive Homes: The Space of Prophetic Remembrance,” a chapter that pairs Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990) and K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001). The chapter takes up issues of black masculine subjectivity and the fugitive status of black men, who are depicted as both avoiding the confinement of domestic spaces and being barred from spaces they wish to inhabit. The characters eventually come “to inhabit a space in between belonging and displacement, a space that allows for alternative ways of performing racialized masculinities” (39–40).

The third chapter, “Artful Mourning: The Language of Prophetic Remembrance,” uses David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981) and Zake Mda's Ways of Dying (1995) to demonstrate the constructive and regenerative power of language to counteract the traumatizing effects of language on black subjectivity. A key component of prophetic remembrance is the acknowledgment of unending grief, but grief that is not so pervasive as to destroy possibilities of imagining a different future. Artful mourning in these two novels “is intentional, creative, and generative” (127) and serves profound communal and social needs.

Still's aim in the final chapter, “Resurrection Scars: The Time of Prophetic Remembrance,” is to explain how prophetic remembrance can represent the possibility of agency in the present as an ethical response that is accountable both to the trauma of the past and to the hopes of the future. She has chosen novels, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing (1996) and Zake Mda's The Heart of Redness (2000), that use the 1856 event of an Eastern Cape woman, Nongkawuse, who delivered a tragic message to the amaXhosa people from their ancestors, instructing them to slaughter their cattle and cease cultivating their fields to prepare for the return of the ancestors, who would come with new cattle and grain after the amaXhosa had driven the white colonials into the sea. In what Still calls “textual resurrection” (158), Wideman and Mda fictionalize the historical event to conflate past trauma with present experience to reveal the incompletion of the past, with the past not simply returning, but “return[ing] with a difference” (175) and offering the possibility of reimagining the future.

Erica Still presents a compelling argument, avoiding both a political agenda and a therapeutic claim for the power of literature to erase the scars of trauma. Instead, in her carefully constructed comparatist project, she has used the concept of prophetic remembrance to juxtapose African American and black South African texts that reveal in their proximity new meaning and ethical significance.