Fragmented Voices of Survival

This article examines how lyric fragmentation in Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon (2023) and Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks (2021) functions as a feminist, postcolonial method. It asks how non-linear montage, strategic silence, and recurring motifs redistribute narrative authority and protect opacity in memoirs that stage survival under intersecting regimes of patriarchy, colonial afterlives, and migratory precarity. Methodologically, the study undertakes a comparative close reading of form—tempo, address, and figure—through intersectional feminism (Crenshaw; Collins), postcolonial/diaspora theory (Bhabha; Hall; Gilroy; Glissant), and trauma/postmemory studies (Caruth; Hirsch). The article argues that both memoirs convert private narrative into calibrated political practice: Sinclair’s figures of hair, silence, and the “woman in white” unthread religious patriarchy, while Owusu’s seismic lexicon (foreshocks/aftershocks), blue-chair intervals, and “fault-zone voice” formally register diaspora’s uneven tempos. Together, these texts re-script inherited trauma as curated transmission rather than confessional disclosure. The contribution is twofold: it specifies lyric fragmentation as a postcolonial feminist technique and models a comparative protocol that preserves non-alignment rather than forcing synthesis—thereby foregrounding form as political method in contemporary diasporic life writing.