Yesterday, I wrote something on mourning, intergenerationality and decoloniality, continuing to develop Afroanalytics.
So for the past few weeks, I have been reflecting on the losses inherent to decolonial work, to racial trauma work, and to the confrontation of historical and contemporary violence.
As part of that, I have been thinking about mourning and grieving as essential components of a decolonial praxis.
I posited then that since colonialism involves a double movement; both of extraction of what is most valuable in the colonial subject starting from life and projection which is an act of discharge both psychic and moral then, decolonial inquiry must seek both reclamation and recognition or seeing.
But seeing inexorably means confronting loss. The more we reclaim, the more we are forced to see, the more we see, the more we are bound to connect to loss (Kinouani, 2026).
The dialectic of liberation and mourning is something I propose should thus be considered a key part of decolonial work. It really also speaks to the dialectics of life and death or again absence and presence.
I start the present chapter from the above dialectics to introduce another paradox: mourning is rendered more complex because what we see often cannot be clearly seen. It cannot be identified due to the violence of the archive and processes of erasure, revisionism and disavowal.
This has led me to think that decolonial work involves a more complex mourning process not only because its encounter with loss is chronic but because ancestral objects of loss cannot be fully seen (also why we cannot only see with our eyes) thus; fully reclaimed integrated and consequently cannot be fully mourned either.
I think I started this work with this fantasy of closure or of putting things to rest.
It is much harder to mourn what is both present and absent, what is here without quite being here, to let go of something perhaps that you sense but cannot touch or something that you can see but only from afar.
Something vague shapeless or that lacks grains details or specificities but whose outline you can make out.
I have used the image of bodies floating at sea or rather shapes of corpses which can be recognised from a distance in the dark.
It is an image that crossed the threshold of my consciousness and that has kept returning to me as part of my work on racial trauma in fact well before I started my PhD research. But, I am not sure when it first entered my mind. I could not tell you for certain, either when it crossed the line or even which line it precisely crossed to emerge inside the space within my head.
This is part of the current (spatio) temporal problematic its unboundedness.
You therefore know there are or have been dead bodies but you cannot see their faces, distinguishing features or even establish their number.
They are bodies without these human and individualising details.
Thus, on the one hand mourning is suspended and on the other, you are forced to mourn a collective systemic rather than a biographical loss.
The loss becomes a mass of grief without full presence, devoid of human factors remaining just at the surface of consciousness.
Mirroring exactly the movements of those bodies that linger at the surface of the water, perhaps awaiting to be reclaimed to be in some way recognised in their humanity.
Confronting the mass
This short piece led me to consider various iterations of mass, to capture the process engaged in undertaking racial trauma and decolonial work, beginning with the image of a mass of bodies corpses floating at sea.
I found the word mass profoundly evocative and generative so continued with its imagery and symbolism. Each iteration was helpful.
Mass as in mass atrocities, the weight and quantity of them decolonisation as carrying work as containing the weight of these atrocities.
Mass as in an undistinguishable mass of bodies, the shapeless amalgamation of corpses, what I originally had in mind. Decolonisation as decrypting the mass.
Mass as terror, not as malevolent but as potentially persecutory because agentic and requiring attention on its own terms beyond the ego.
Tom Fielder (personal communication 16–17 June 2026) noted echoes here of how in Freud’s paper Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, mass was initially translated into group by Strachey in Freud 1922/1955; sanitising the constitutive terror and the fascistic potential of groups already recognised within early psychoanalysis Freud 1922/2011.
While the group particularly when anxious or traumatised according to both Freud 1922/2011 and Hopper 2023 can become a haunting hunting mass as it removes agentic power and freedom from the individual, I propose that the ghostly mass of unindividuated bodies when loaded with anxiety or traumatic stress can become an internal site of terror a hunting and haunting internal object.
Decolonisation thus as alleviation or as remitting the mass. As addressing any undue persecutory and terror inducing fantasies produced by that amalgam of dead bodies.
Mass as in medicine, both as in malignant tumour lump or growth and as the residual tissues in and around it often interfering with the normal functioning of adjacent organs but which cannot be completely excised and so can only be subjected to debridement.
Decolonisation as surgical intervention, as the slow gradual painful and repeated cleaning of a chronically infected site, to give a chance to healthy tissues damaged by a cancerous mass to survive or stop the malignancy from further spreading.
Mass as in chemistry. As in decay calcification or petrification; the actual chemical processes by which the blood tears sweat urine and faeces of those petrified captives crammed into Elmina castle merged with the elements and carbon to form a cement like mass covering the ground and the ambient stench of rot which forces us all to see.
Forty centimetres or so of stratified decay accumulated over three hundred years. Decolonisation as abjection, as viscerally encountering the pungent smell of decomposed and massified human waste. Ecological evidence of the suffering these tortured bodies left to mark their presence on the very ground we walk. The environment as their perpetual witness.
Petrified souls perpetually witnessed by petrified soils.
Mass in the theological sense, as a spiritual encounter with the otherworldly or an actual mourning ceremony decolonisation as therefore mourning ritual.
Post writing I reflected I had written mass of grief when I actually meant grieving mass or more precisely grieving a mass.
Although my preoccupation at this point was with the structure of the mass or its contours and the psychic processes it engendered, we can read here, a communication about what may have been contained below the line of my consciousness: boundless grief establishing a crucial link between structure and content.
We can therefore summarise that confronting the mass at a fundamental level is the process of attempting to see and decrypt the accumulated presence of those invisibilised by colonial atrocities and, the inherent mourning that emerges as a result. It involves I argue, intellectual sensory and affective inquiry located within intuitive communal and spiritual forms of knowing.
Links to Critical Fabulation and Wake Work
Starting with the main similarities, I see with Christina Sharpe (Sharpe, 2016). Firstly, the imagery and symbolism of the water/ocean as a container and site of past atrocities. For Sharpe, the ocean holds memory of what has been, but it is also a site of present Black subjugation.
My use of the bodies floating at sea evokes this. The Atlantic ocean as Necropolis (Mbembe, 2019). As an open morgue, which continues to be filled with the purposefully drowned, those not allowed to live.
However, I use the image not only as a symbol of geopolitical realities, or even as an ecological residual of past atrocities, though I do that too. I see the image of the floating bodies, as internally generated, as communicative.
I move from ecological and geopolitical residuals to mapping their consequent internality. I also move from symbolism in the representative sense, to an immaterial reading of what is transferred. What is remembered, in some ways, because it is communicated or inherited, in part through spiritual means.
I think these are two of the biggest departures, perhaps extensions, in relation to our use of the dead and their relationship with the environment and with the cosmos. I add the spiritual, and I add the communal functions of what we can see, as I say, without our eyes.
As I reminded the reader in earlier writing;
‘in African metaphysics, seeing and recognising are ontological, communal, and spiritual acts. What is seen is not only accessed through the eye. What is seen may not even be accessed through the senses or the body, in fact in Kikongo, the verb to see (Mona), is multi [and trans] sensorial, you can see with your body, you can see with your heart, you can see with your head, you can even see with your ears…the same goes with the other sensory modalities like hearing (Wa)’ (Kinouani, 2026).
In terms of our relationship with the living, wake work, versus what I call confronting the mass or masses, again there is much overlap.
Wake work encapsulates the intellectual, political, and ethical work Blackness must do to exist in the wake of enslavement. This includes attending to its continuities and the conditions they impose on Black life.
The core difference I see is the centrality of the dialectic of loss and reclamation I see in decolonial work. Once more, I emphasise the relationship between the conditions of Blackness and the inexorable internal structures and processes they produce in our search for freedom which I attempt to map.
In terms of Saidiya Hartman’s, here too there is a huge overlap. I am thinking in particular about the Venus in Two Acts and her formulation of critical fabulation.
Like her, my formulation of the dead mass, of unidentifiable faces, features, and human factors, as I have called them, finds its roots in the violence of the archive, in erasure, disavowal, and epistemic violence (Hartman, 2008). Certainly, her work on the archive provides the starting point for mine.
Where she notes the brutality of the absence of biographical details about the enslaved in the physical documents about enslavement, and proposes that mourning is complicated by temporal merging and the contemporary reproduction of the plantation, I add, largely using Freud’s (1917/1957) ideas in Mourning and Melancholia, and in particular;
the idea ‘that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious’ (Freud, 1917/1957, p 143).
In other words, that partial seeing turns mourning into melancholia, a more chronic, protracted form of mourning, a state of mourning, turned ontological. Accordingly, coming to terms with the lost object, here the ancestors, is more complex because the object of that loss has become vague, shapeless and cannot fully reach our consciousness, affecting our capacity to grieve those gone.
How can we bury what we cannot clearly see?
Nevertheless, while for Freud the ambiguity of the lost object is located primarily within the shadows of the ego, Afroanalytics propose that the lost object is obscured not by the fortress of the Black ego but by whiteness, and its ongoing manoeuvring to bury transatlantic realities.
The white burial of those dead bodies, prevents Blackness from burying her dead.
This leads to the state of chronic grief or melancholia inherent to a seeing which can only ever be partial, a condition which would persist even if there were a stricter boundary between the past and the present. I accept though, that the temporal unboundedness of racialised atrocities complicates forward movement, and renders linearity redundant.
Hartman uses critical fabulation to attempt to fill these historical gaps turned epistemic, turned psychic gaps. A form of epistemic resistance. And so, for her, strategic imagination is a tool of reclamation and humanisation. Critical fabulation is Hartman’s literary method of using imaginative formations together with archival evidence to reconstruct the lives of enslaved people and address the silences and absences produced by erasure.
This is where things become a little more complex in terms of our differences, in existence perhaps mainly in nuance and emphasis, because I centre intuition in the reconstruction process, in the knowing, in the understanding of what has been.
Hence, my position is not in opposition. Of course, there is invariably a level of intuitive direction in critical fabulation. However, I would say that the process of critical fabulation is active, conscious for the most part, deliberate, and formulated, at least as individually instigated.
Whereas intuitive knowing is generated irrespective of our active will, or even our conscious engagement with the archive. It is the image of the bodies that float at sea to which the mind returns.
It is what I call the knot of not knowing (Kinouani, 2025), that visceral feeling in your gut when encountering historical accounts which you know, without knowing, or without verification, hold some truth because they resonate in your bones and, where the archive cannot or will not confirm whether they reflect real happenings or ‘objective’ reality.
It is the child who somehow recognises an ancestral vulnerability to theft and who awakes in the middle of the night screaming to forewarn the family of an impending dispossession risk, minutes before disaster strikes, in the absence of their will, capacity to understand or previous exposure to extraction.
And, where projective or unconscious processes, cannot be sustained as an explanatory model, e.g. to account for the capacity to foresee what may be communally wounding and has ancestral echoes.
Hence, while Hartman (2022) also engaging with Mourning and Melancholia (Freud, 2017) sees ancestral overidentification, or overidentification with the lost object, as an explanation for the transmission, or cannibalisation, of ancestral suffering, which she warns against, I argue departing from both, for a communal and, once more, spiritual role designation of memory bearers, griots, and Nzonzis.
They are those who become sites of remembrance, continuity, and knowing. In the Kongo, the Nzonzis are mediators, spiritual intermediaries and guardians of community harmony, memory and knowledge. Their role overlaps with the West African Griot, the custodian of community memory shared through storytelling. Both function as living archives.
For me, reconstruction and resistance start here.
With the re-establishing of the required infrastructures of recognition of these roles, so that the fundamental connection between the living and the dead, the functions of community containment, protection and continuation held by those charged with seeing, remembering and knowing, is honoured.
The mass is therefore decrypted, at least in part, by intuitive knowing, by that ancestral gift of recognition bestowed upon those bodies, I propose using very explicitly, African metaphysics. Philosophies neither scholar directly engages with.
There are a few more differences, but these are the main ones.
To be clear, I can never show sufficient gratitude to these two Black women scholars, for their intellectual brilliance which has provided a solid foundation for Afroanalytics to be formed.
I hope that as a French woman of Congolese ancestry, my contributions to our collective understanding of trauma, intergenerationality, Black consciousness, memory, and of living in the afterlives of colonialism, imperialism, and enslavement; can help disrupt the Anglo/US hegemony by making space for other ways of understanding of the world.
For broader theoretical contextualisation, I define Afroanalytics as an interdisciplinary framework which functions as a clinical lens, a philosophical approach, and a critical research methodology.
It provides a structured method to conceptualise and investigate racial traumatisation, healing, and resistance within Black communities as shaped by colonialism, enslavement, and structural inequalities.
By building an archive of the various ways ancestral knowledge may endure and surface, it honours African ways of knowing and being and restores epistemic authority, dignity, and connection to the continent, thereby disrupting the colonial erasure and maligning of the African foundations of Western analytic thought.
A deeply personal autoethnographic post-writing reflection on confronting the mass
How much has my thinking on the mass been influenced by the death of my mother?
I had missed her passing largely because I refused to accept she was passing.
Hence, I wanted to see her in private posthumously, to speak to her, hold her and say a proper goodbye before any ceremonial happening.
I am not good with social performances, particularly when it comes to grief and misery.
But people were discouraging me from seeing her corpse; they hinted it would be traumatic. That by going to the morgue, I would inflict some sort of injury on myself, that I would, in other words, be confronting death and terror on my own, without support or mitigation. Even people very close to me dissuaded me.
I was not scared, but because warnings came from all fronts, it did make me hesitate though not change my mind.
I went to the morgue.
I was not hesitant to approach her, to touch her and to hold her at all.
And this is where there may be a link to the mass… She was of course rock solid, ice cold and fixed in time.
I felt immense gratitude to be alone in her presence, to tell her I loved her.
I gently kissed most parts of her body; this is how my lips realised her soft body, which I used to bury my head in as a child, had become stone like.
She was still beautiful, as so many commented at the funeral. In fact, I would say she was more beautiful in death than she had been in the last months of her life. The rigidity of death even accentuated her tall and statuesque physique.
She wore the white satin Gele I had brought her from England and onto which I had painstakingly hand sewn hundreds of miniature white satin lilies and tulips on my way to her, just a few days prior. She loved flowers and had told me, when I was still a child, she wanted to be buried in white and the kind of attires she wanted to be her last.
Over the course of the preparations, it became obvious I had been the only one in the confidence. Though I felt the heaviness of remembering, I was moved and honoured. I instantly understood why she had designated me, to hold that memory and to share that knowledge, decades later.
This was the context of the Gele, which led to my collapsing publicly, for the first time under the weight of sorrow, unable to answer, when that Nigerian auntie who sold it to me asked who the headwrap was for.
It was the very first time I felt the weight of that mass of grief I was carrying, alone, in a crowded market, disconnected from time and space.
I so desperately needed to be held.
Though I was not, I got a tender touch on my arm and some timely gentle care from a surrogate African mother. “My daughter,” she had called me repeatedly, trying to gently probe the reason for the tears while offering reassurance. Her warm maternal touch was not enough, but it was something to take with me.
In the morgue, you could have thought she was sleeping, as she looked so peaceful, but contact with her body made you certain there was no life in her.
And so though she had been turned into a piece of art, almost floating on air, suspended in an invisible bubble, her body was firmly contained in that casket.
She was a solid mass; there is no escaping this reality.
She had been reclaimed.
The links with my thinking on confronting the mass are uncanny. Not only in the most obvious sense: confronting her death, and the solid mass she had become, but also in my iteration of grieving a mass and more importantly, in my conception of mass as terror, certainly as an object onto which terror can be projected.
When I proposed that the unindividuated amalgam of floating dead bodies can become internally persecutory, in part because we cannot see their faces, in part because of the potent agency of masses, and in part because they can be loaded with anxiety or traumatic stress, which turn them ghostly.
We see this in the communal responses to my mother’s very own death: so many wanted to avoid proximity, feared contact and refused to see it. They had indeed projected terror onto her body and she had been disappeared once more.
And again, that same dialectic of reclamation and loss: to touch her, see her, hold her, even smell her, allowed me to fully claim her in a way I was discouraged from doing. It helped me to say goodbye and paradoxically here too, let her go as I was taking her in. To see her up close, touch her, hold her and smell her into my memory, and through my senses, into my body.
To internalise her with intentionality.
And at the same time face the reality of her death and of my immense loss, the inescapable void she was leaving behind.
Had I not followed my gut, my grieving journey would have looked different; I would have been badly affected by her double disappearance in every sense, from her going from present to absent with no transition, with no time to absorb either life or death corporeally and psychically.
The mourning process likely would have been stalled in some ways, suspended as I say in confronting the mass…
When I propose, in the case of Blackness and historical atrocities, that it is not that the Black ego hides the lost object from consciousness, but rather that whiteness makes it inaccessible in its totality, this acquires resonance here.
My intuition stopped me from experiencing that psychic partiality and obscurity based melancholia, well before I would eventually translate this experience theoretically, using different levels of analysis and functioning: the geopolitical and the sociohistorical.
We see too how one’s refusal to see death can translate into denying others access to full mourning, full visibility of the loss, and full meeting with the lost object, which is also a full meeting with ourselves.
And how that refusal is rooted in the fear of confronting terror, a terror that is in part material, in part psychical and in part cultural, but all the same cannot be separated from Eurocentric formations of death, separated from whiteness.
Notions of death as the ultimate other, the ultimate unknown, the undomesticated terrain, the empty dead end, align closely with the use of the African as receptacle of colonial projections, and yet contrast so profoundly with traditional African cosmologies, whereby the lost object is transformed rather than reduced to nihilism.
For the Kongolese notably, the dead only cross the Kalunga line, the threshold point or fluid boundary between the physical world and the spiritual world, between the material and that which cannot be seen only with the eyes.
Of note, the Kalunga line is often referred to as the Kalunga river, as in Kongo metaphysics it represents a shiftable yet tangible boundary between the living and the dead, where ancestral spirits interact with the living through bodies of water. The oceans are inhabited by the unseen.
Floating bodies at sea speak more than to the symbolism of the murderous transatlantic materialities, and even more than to that almost eternal residence time of human flesh and bones in the ocean (Sharpe, 2016).
Their persistence in our consciousness holds a deep spiritual significance. It calls us to recognise the communication so many Africans and indigenous groups believe exists between different realms of existence. It calls us to reclaim that disavowed spiritual presence, one of the many consequences of colonialism and modernity led epistemicide.
The dead remain energetically and spiritually as full members of the community. Indeed, the greatest amongst those gone, the ancestors, may retain communicative powers within the unified field of communion and relations, the Afroanalytic matrix, and continue to shape the living and their understanding of the present, notably through designated memory bearers such as the Nzonzis.
My grieving across multiple planes needs acknowledgement. This personal context takes us back to Hartman (2007).
Maternal loss or disrupted attachment as the fundamental trauma enforced by enslavement and its afterlife. The loss of connection to the motherly breast, to the womb, is also of course the loss of connection to lineage, the loss of land, soil, living communities and of ancestral belief systems, as she poignantly reminds us.
The parallel between me losing my mother and Hartman’s theorisation in Losing Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route does not only turn confronting the mass into a profoundly personal encounter with death. It provides a multi layered bridge: a bridge between the personal and the political, a bridge between different diasporic mourning contexts, a bridge between different timespaces and thus necessarily a bridge between these different realms of existence.
These bridges have theoretical significance; they are empirical triangulation.
Echoes, alignment, mirroring, concordant embodied responses, diasporic recognition and ancestral resonance are core methodological criteria Afroanalytics employs to evaluate significance and validity, in line with African communal and inter-relational ethics.
I invite you to use them to evaluate what you have read.
I am not sure how much of this I will use in my final chapter, but given my Afroanalytic autoethnographic methodology, I may.
Regardless, it is useful to me and I hope it is useful to those who may also be struggling through grief.
References
Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe, 12(2), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/smallaxe.12.2.0075
Hartman, S. (2007). Losing your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Hartman, S. (2002). The time of slavery. South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(4), 757–777. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-101-4-757
Hopper, E. (2003). Traumatic experience in the unconscious life of groups: The fourth basic assumption: Incohesion: Aggregation/massification or (ba) I:A/M. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Freud, S. (1957). Mourning and melancholia. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 237–258). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1917)
Freud, S. (1955). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 65–143). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1922)
Freud, S. (2011). Mass psychology and the analysis of the ego (J. A. Underwood, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1922)
Kinouani, G. (2025, December 22). The knot of not knowing and reflections on historical trauma. Race Reflections. https://racereflections.co.uk/theknotofnotknowing/
Kinouani, G. (2026, May 30). Seeing, recognising and Afroanalytics. Race Reflections. https://racereflections.co.uk/seeing-recognising-and-afroanalytics/
Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics (S. Corcoran, Trans.). Duke University Press.
Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press.
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