‘The animality of her body’: a material-discursive reading of disidentification in Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland

Rivers Solomon's Sorrowland unfolds against the backdrop of traumas inflicted on Black people through medical experimentation in America. Vern, the protagonist, escapes such an experiment but undergoes a metamorphosis due to fungal contamination. The fungus transforms her body and becomes central to uncovering the legacy of violence embedded in the colonized land. This article examines Vern's entanglement with the fungus as it gradually transforms her. Addressing the material kinship between Vern and the fungus, this article employs Karen Barad's material-discursive practices to explore how the narrative traces the nightmarish past through the manifestation of memories in the form of hauntings and foregrounds the role of a nonhuman entity like the fungus in shaping the narrative. The article explores how Vern's spatiotemporal entanglements dismantle her past indoctrination and reconfigure her identity through Rosi Braidotti's concept of disidentification. These readings examine the complexities of the diasporic African identity and, through Mark Dery and Ytasha Womack's Afrofuturist frameworks, show how Vern's relational and non-normative existence reveals that notions of identity, temporality and nationhood are produced through material entanglements.