Connecting Diasporas: Reading Erna Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat through African Fractal Theory

Abstract

AbstractErna Brodber’s 2015 novel Nothing’s Mat foregrounds the African diaspora in ways that differ from the treatment of diaspora in her previous novels, and in her nonfiction work, The Continent of Black Consciousness: On the History of the African Diaspora from Slavery to the Present Day (2003). Her theorization of black ontology takes in a wider swath of Afrodiasporic space, encompassing personal, psychic, and philosophical journeying. She utilizes a fractal paradigm, based on African-inflected cosmogony and aesthetics, to probe how ontology and identity operate across space and time. Examining Afro-Caribbean existence through the construct of African fractal geometry, and focalizing “woman” narratives of history within a liberatory schematic, I discuss how Nothing’s Mat extends the expressive range of the project of emancipation in literary representation. Fractal tropology presents a meta-discursive model that offers possibilities for understanding African and African diaspora cultural phenomena and identity and, specifically, what it means to be woman, black, human. Nothing’s Mat broadens the diasporic terrain significantly, encompassing Britain, Jamaica, Panama (Central America), and the United States, focalizes the genealogy and meaning of the term “African diaspora” and presents a theory for reading Afro-Caribbean realities.