Michael Rothberg has suggested that there cannot be an ahistorical, all-encompassing

trauma theory, and that our theorization of trauma must constantly evolve towards a

model which better meets the needs of the current globalized world, in which structural

violence and traumatic events often occur in close conjunction to one another.

Along these lines, this article’s analysis of Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah’s

Fragments and Somali author Nuruddin Farah’s Maps moves away from the concept

of singular trauma and towards the notion of insidious trauma, and further suggests

that Rothberg’s notion of implicated subject positions, which goes beyond the notions

of victims and perpetrators, better illustrates the complicated subject positions these

novels depict in their fictionalized postcolonial settings. It further argues that the

novels, in contrast to the violent forms of the postcolony they represent, are committed

to an ethical vision of multidirectionality, in which the interrelations between conflicting

claims on history will become apparent, and those affected by them can

begin the process of “working through”.