Seen through the lattice: Elleke Boehmer’s narrative poetics

Abstract Elleke Boehmer’s short stories belong to a modernist variant of the genre, showing close (sometimes textual) kinship with the stories of James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield. Read in relation to certain of her novels, they invite exploration, both formally and thematically, through their recurrent use of inferential modes. Narrative clusters and fragments act as a lattice through which the fraught geopolitical shifts of the global north-south trajectory, and in particular of Sub-Saharan Africa in the last half-century, may be viewed, not as abstractions, but as lived experience. Through close textual analysis of Boehmer’s fictions and autofictions, this essay analyses the poetics of underspecification as it is embodied in complex forms of historical kairos, and individually in moments of recognition or epiphany. (Isabella Hammad’s 2024 essay Recognising the Stranger: Palestine and Narrative is a key point of reference here.) In juxtaposition with the terms underspecification, implicature, and recognition, the poetics of the lattice metaphor may consequently be shown to point towards a deep cognitive structure—arguably, even, the deep structure of cognition.