Description

Book Synopsis

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.

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Voelker Award for Poetry Collection

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.

MAAFA

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    A Paperback by Harmony Holiday

    £13.49

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    RRP £14.99 – you save £1.50 (10%)

    Order before 4pm on Monday for delivery by Wed 18 Nov 2026.

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      Book details

      Publisher The 87 Press
      Published 13 February 2025
      ISBN-13 9781068644696
      978-1068644696
      ISBN-10 1068644699
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      Description

      Book Synopsis

      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.

      Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Voelker Award for Poetry Collection

      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.

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