Laura T. Murphy is an assistant professor of English at Loyola University in New Orleans. Her work has appeared in Research in African Literatures and in Studies in the Novel.

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One: Against Amnesia
  Metaphor and Memory in West Africa
• Two: Magical Capture in a Landscape of Terror
  The Trope of the Body in the Bag in Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
• Three: Geographies of Memory
  Mapping Slavery's Recurrence in Ben Okri's The Famished Road
• Four: The Curse of Constant Remembrance
  The Belated Trauma of the Slave Trade in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments
• Five: Childless Mothers and Dead Husbands
  The Enslavement of Intimacy and Ama Ata Aidoo's Secret Language of Memory
• Six: The Suffering of Survival
• Epilogue: The Future of the Past
  The New Historical Fiction
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Metaphor and the Slave Trade provides compelling evidence of the hidden but unmistakable traces of the transatlantic slave trade that persist in West African discourse. Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the commerce in human lives, this book shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation.

Laura T. Murphy's insightful new readings of canonical West African fiction, autobiography, drama, and poetry explore the relationship between memory and metaphor and emphasize how repressed or otherwise marginalized memories can be transmitted through images, tropes, rumors, and fears. By analyzing the unique codes through which West Africans have represented the slave trade, this work foregrounds African literary contributions to Black Atlantic discourse and draws attention to the archive that metaphor unlocks for scholars of all disciplines and fields of study.