Postcolonial Trauma and The Female Body: Rewriting Women's Subjectivities and Identity in Post-Conflict African Literature.

This article examines the representation of the female body in post-conflict African literature, focusing on Yvonne Vera's *The Stone Virgins* and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's *Half of a Yellow Sun*. It argues that these works move beyond Western psychoanalytic trauma models by depicting the female body as both a site of colonial and wartime violence and a space of survival, resilience, and feminist agency. Using postcolonial feminist theory, nego-feminism (a framework emphasizing negotiation and survival strategies within patriarchal constraints), and trauma studies, the study highlights how Vera and Adichie reconfigure women's bodies as archives of memory and testimony rather than mere symbols of victimhood. The analysis reveals that these narratives challenge patriarchal and militarized masculinities by portraying women as active agents who negotiate identity reconstruction and community survival in the aftermath of conflict.