Fragmented Selves: Psychoanalysis, Stigma, and the Politics of Memory in Ikpi and Verissimo

Abstract

This article examines the intersections of trauma, memory, and the stigma of mental illness in Bassey Ikpi’s I’m Telling the Truth but I’m Lying (2019) and Jumoke Verissimo’s A Small Silence (2019), situating them within African literary and philosophical contexts. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and indigenous African epistemologies, the study argues that these texts disrupt conventional binaries of sanity and madness, normalcy and deviance, by reframing psychological fragmentation as adaptive survival rather than pathology. Ikpi’s fragmented essays mirror the oscillations of bipolar disorder, foregrounding the performance of normalcy as both protective mask and internal violence. Verissimo’s Professor Eniolorunda, traumatized by political imprisonment, embodies the psychic toll of authoritarian brutality, his retreat into darkness dramatizing repression and the fluidity of memory. Both texts expose the inadequacies of rigid diagnostic categories, showing how psychiatric models risk erasing cultural and historical dimensions of distress. By juxtaposing psychoanalytic concepts of repression and belated memory with Yoruba, Igbo, and Ubuntu philosophies of personhood, the article highlights how African literature resists the universalization of Western psychiatry. Instead, it reveals mental health as a dynamic negotiation between personal survival, communal belonging, and historical trauma. Ultimately, these works contribute to destigmatizing mental illness by centring lived experience, destabilizing the illusion of normalcy, and reclaiming fragmented narratives as forms of resilience. The study demonstrates how African literature becomes a crucial space for reimagining mental health discourse, integrating cultural philosophies with global frameworks of trauma and healing.