Decolonising violence through the ineffable: the case of Africa's world war

Some aspects of violent experiences seem difficult to express.
Furthermore, directly describing what one knows about these experiences
seems to be of limited value in enhancing one’s understanding
of them. Thus, merely representing what one already knows about
violence and conflict seems inadequate. To overcome this, this paper
proposes the accommodation of the ineffable in representations of
violence and trauma to destabilise reductive, binary representations
of violence and trauma common within colonial discourse. It argues
that one fruitful area in which to engage the ineffable without
explaining it away, is through examining aesthetic representations
of violence and trauma. Furthermore, such aesthetic representations,
because they are affective and facilitate both reflective and performative
truth also support political engagement and may thus be
effective in combatting epistemic erasure of marginal positions in
a way that helps to open up spaces to hear the ‘Other’ on his/her own
terms. This argument is applied to an analysis of Okeowo’s (2017)
novel, A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting
Extremism in Africa and Axe and Hamilton’s graphic narrative Army of
God: Joseph Kony’s War in Africa, which both deal with conflict in and
around the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1997–2003). The close
consideration of alternative representations of violence that brings
the ineffable into the frame is crucial to moving beyond the impasse
presented by the legacy of prejudice inherent in the West’s interpretations
of Africa, where the ‘Other’ is still too often written out of
an ongoing colonial discourse.