Maafa : Fence Books : 9781944380236 : 194438023X : 19 Apr 2022 : Maafa is an epic poem about reparations and the female body.Maafa undoes the erasure of trauma and of black femininity. Maafa has killedher father and been granted eternal life. Maafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust, and echoes theHebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure isalways in progress. Maafa killed her father in the barracoons because the sightof him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero'sjourney which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longingand forgetting that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases herinto all manners of light and darkness. Through an accumulation of images sheexorcises her own haunts, and is healed into complete being.