Book Review Essay: The Keloid as Episteme—Corporeal Healing and Colonial Afterlives in Sarah Soanirina Ohmer’s The Keloids We Heal
Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: In the contemporary landscape of Black studies and trauma theory, the quest for a methodology that may adequately address the "unreferentiality of trauma" often hits the hard wall of Western secular rationalism (Ohmer, 2025, p. 6).Sarah Soanirina Ohmer's The Keloids We Heal: Trauma, Spirituality, and Black Modernity in Literature emerges as a profound intervention positioned at the nexus of African American literary criticism, critical race theory (CRT), and decolonial praxis.Ohmer identifies a significant scholarly gap: the tendency of traditional trauma studies to pathologize the survivor's body or to rely on a "Western form of abstract logic" that fails to account for the spiritual dimensions of Black and Indigenous experience (p.27).Her central research topic is how women of colour in the Americasspecifically from the United States, Brazil, Cuba, and Guadeloupe-negotiate the inherited and ongoing traumas engendered by enslavement and internal colonisation.To address this question, Ohmer underscores how decolonial literature functions as a "meaning-making keloid"-an "unfinished scar" that turns out to be a marker of both rebellion and transformation (p. 3).Unlike usual scars, the keloids stand for "scars-as-intellect" (p.9), wherein the "lifeless nerves" (Morrison, 1987, p. 6) of traumatic dissociation are re-animated through both corporeal and spiritual storytelling.Her theoretical intervention, which she dubs "theirstorituality" (Ohmer, p. 75), demands a "post-oppositional" framework (Keating, 2012, p. 109) that unites the body, mind, and spirit.A central proposition of Ohmer's The Keloids We Heal is encapsulated in the formulation "Our Keloids Made Your Modernity" (Ohmer, p. 16), which foregrounds the ways in which the historical wounds and embodied experiences of Black women have been constitutive of the modernity produced through colonialism, racial capitalism, and structures of domination.While Ohmer's auto-ethnographic theories and ontological and epistemological shifts offer a revolutionary template for literary historiography, this review explores how the hybridity of her text (a mix of academic analysis, poetry, and prologues) challenges the linearity that is conventionally expected in formal scholarly discourse.Chapter 1, "Founders of Spiritual Transnational Homes: Black Women Trailblazers of Literature in the Americas," establishes a genealogy of Black women writers, focusing on nineteenth-century figures Maria Firmina dos Reis (Brazil) and María Dámasa Jova Baró (Cuba).She argues that these authors achieved a "gendered decentering" by introducing perspectives "virtually unknown" in the "lettered city" (p.39).The methodological approach is archival and historical, successfully dislodging "patterns of unfavourable representation" by ascribing positive traits to Black literary subjects (p.40).A conceptual limitation lies in the too brief treatment of how these trailblazers navigated "theological terror" (p.45) in their specific local contexts, but the chapter effectively supports the overarching argument that Black women 1 Ohmer, S. S. (2025).The keloids we heal: Trauma, spirituality, and Black modernity in literature.
Authors: Azim, Md Samiul, Parvin, Farida
Institution: Gazole Mahavidyalaya
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7224976335