[t]he act of writing . . . makes up a shelter, allows space to what would otherwise be hidden, crossed out, mutilated. Sometimes writing can work toward a reparation, making a sheltering space for the mind. Yet it feeds off ruptures, tears in what might otherwise seem a seamless, oppressive fabric. (3)

2Alexander’s conception of writing as sheltering and reparative—or, potentially so—frames the process of visibilisation that Daley-Ward undertakes in her memoir, a process this article seeks to explore. The text presents a resolutely hybrid form that operates at the intersection of memoir, prose poetry, and, to some extent, the Künstlerroman. Its singularity lies less in the exceptional nature of the experiences it recounts than in the formal strategies through which these experiences are mediated.

3As an echo to Alexander’s description of the ‘act of writing’, one year before the publication of her memoir, Daley-Ward explained that it would be ‘“[t]he truest thing [she would] maybe ever write”’ (Barlow 2017). Through the use of the superlative, and therefore hyperbolical, form—‘the truest thing’—Daley-Ward warns/prepares the reader vis-à-vis her upcoming memoir and, in so doing, she deflates what Miranda Fricker calls

testimonial injustice [that] is caused by prejudice in the economy of credibility [,] the injustice that a speaker suffers in receiving deflated credibility from the hearer owing to identity prejudice on the hearer’s part, as in the case where the police don’t believe someone because he is black. Thus the central case of testimonial injustice can be defined . . . as identity-prejudicial credibility deficit. This definition captures the kind of testimonial injustice that is connected with other forms of social injustice that the subject is likely to suffer, and this is what makes it the central case—it is central from the point of view of revealing the place of epistemic injustice in the broader pattern of social injustice. (1, 4)

4In Daley-Ward’s case, the ‘testimonial injustice that is connected with other forms of social injustice’ is related to her being born, in 1989, to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father—at the time of the writing of the memoir she had never known the latter—in (post-colonial) white-dominated Britain.

The In/visibility of Daley-Ward’s’Black [, female,] and British’ Self and (the Limits of) Autobiography/Memoir

When I was a child, growing up on a council estate in the North-East of England, I imbibed enough of the background racial tensions of the late 1970s and 1980s to feel profoundly unwelcome in Britain. My right, not just to regard myself as a British citizen, but even to be in Britain seemed contested. . . . The phrase ‘Black British’, with which we are so familiar today, was little heard in those years. In the minds of some it spoke of an impossible duality. (xv–xvii)

7The reference to a ‘council estate in the North East of England’ is significant: it anchors racial exclusion within a specific classed geography, one historically associated with economic deprivation, limited social mobility, and heightened exposure to both racialised and class-based hostility, elements that can be found in Daley-Ward’s memoir as well. Olusoga’s—and Daley-Ward’s—sense of being ‘unwelcome’ is thus not solely the result of racial othering but is intensified by his location within a working-class space often portrayed as socially disposable. His account foregrounds how race and class intersect to produce a particularly acute form of precarity, in which belonging—national, civic, and social—appears perpetually conditional. The enduring impact of such exclusion is echoed in Olusoga’s later reflections in the ‘Foreword’ to David Harewood’s Maybe I Don’t Belong Here: A Memoir of Race, Identity, Breakdown and Recovery (2021):

By being open about my own experiences I was able to demonstrate to viewers how deep the wounds left by racism can run, lingering on decades after the events in question. . . . Like many Black people who had encountered the racism of Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, David and I had locked away not just our memories of racist incidents but also, and perhaps more importantly, our memories of how these events had been damaging assaults on our sense of self. (xii–xiii)

I was a black girl living in a market town, alien to everything. There were so many things I wanted to be other than what I was. I wanted to be white, have different hair, have parents who were home, know my father, not be religious. When I watched TV, everything from Disney to Coronation Street, there was never a representation of me. (Barlow 2017; emphasis added)

9Daley-Ward’s enumeration of desires—each a negation of her reality—intersects with a politics of visibility: the absence of ‘representation’ is not merely cultural, but existential, shaping the child’s sense of what is possible, permissible, and acknowledged in British society. The repetition of ‘I wanted’ mirrors the recursive and internalised process of self-othering, foregrounding the psychic labour imposed by racialised erasure. In this way, her memoir not only records a personal history but also stages a political and ethical reflection on the ‘Black [, female,] and British’ self, one that is acutely aware of the constraints imposed by a society that marginalises her existence, as female, working-class, and Black. Daley-Ward laments the near-total absence of Black people—and especially Black women—in mainstream British television and in global cultural productions targeting children, a reality that shaped her formative sense of visibility and belonging. In the 1990s, as she grew up, whiteness functioned as the default universal position, a standard against which she and other minoritised children measured themselves, often unfavourably.

The police is, essentially, the law, generally implicit, that defines a party’s share or lack of it. But to define this, you first must define the configuration of the perceptible in which one or the other is inscribed. The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task. . . . Policing is not so much the ‘disciplining’ of bodies as a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed. (1998, 29; original emphasis)

12Daley-Ward’s memoir not only negotiates the politics of visibility and structural marginalisation, but also interrogates the constraints of autobiography as a genre. As Leigh Gilmore observes in Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation:

Autobiography as a genre . . . has come to be identified . . . with master narratives of conflict resolution and development, whose hero—the overrepresented Western white male—identifies his perspective with God’s-eye view and, from that divine height, sums up his life. Scholars of autobiography have developed this master narrative into an interpretive grid and judged as worthy those autobiographers who represent themselves within its limits. (17)

13This critique highlights how traditional forms of life writing have historically centred the Western white male as the normative subject, whose life trajectory—linear, coherent, and sovereign—sets the standard against which all other autobiographical work is judged. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe it, this figure embodies ‘the constant or standard [that] is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language . . . that assumes the standard measure’ (2005, 105), while Laura S. Brown similarly defines it as ‘men of the dominant class: white, young, able-bodied, educated, middle-class, Christian men’ (1995, 101). Moreover, as ‘Gayatri [Chakravorty] Spivak argues [,] postcolonial women writers in particular [have found] autobiography has not been a congenial genre for women’s self-reflexivity, given its traditional associations with universal individualism and possessive masculinity’ (Smith and Watson 2010, 129). Daley-Ward’s reflections in her memoir can be read not only as testimony to social and cultural marginalisation, but also as part of a broader redefinition of autobiography and memoir. As Gilmore notes, ‘[p]reviously associated with elder statesmen reporting on the way their public lives parallel historical events, memoir is now dominated by the young, or at least youngish in memoir’s terms, whose private lives are emblematic of a cultural moment’ (2001, 1). Memoir, then, provides a space for Daley-Ward to document experiences that are simultaneously intimate and socially representative, in a way that traditional autobiography—centred on the rational, universal ‘I’ (Gilmore 2001, 2)—has often excluded. The memoir form, ‘more malleable’ (Smith and Watson 2010, 3–4) than autobiography, allows Daley-Ward to foreground her marginality, her intersectional identity, and her situated knowledge, while engaging the reader in a negotiation of recognition and visibility.

Memoir Under Strain

15While the form of memoir offers Daley-Ward a platform to articulate what has been structurally erased, it simultaneously confronts her with the limits of narrating a self whose visibility has long been constrained. In this sense, The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir does not merely inhabit the genre; it places it under pressure, asking not only what is recounted, but how one can write when the available narrative forms are insufficient to hold experiences that resist coherence, continuity, and normative recognition.

16One of the memoir’s most unsettling reflections on representation and self-exposure occurs in the chapters ‘Data’ and ‘The Animals’, which narrate Daley-Ward’s involvement in paid BDSM encounters. Significantly, these two chapters mark a formal rupture: while ‘Data’ is written in the first person, ‘The Animals’ shifts to the second-person pronoun. This pronominal transition signals not only a stylistic variation but a strain placed on autobiographical enunciation itself, as the memoir grapples with experiences that resist assimilation into a stable, coherent ‘I’. Read through Philippe Lejeune’s notion of the ‘autobiographical pact’ (1975)—the implicit agreement by which author, narrator, and protagonist are aligned—this shift exposes a fissure in that pact, suggesting the difficulty, or even impossibility, of sustaining a unified narrating subject across certain lived experiences. The passage recounting the encounters with ‘Fredrick Stimpson’ foregrounds the transactional nature of the relationship—‘Fredrick Stimpson always has the money. And that’s why you see him, of course’ (188)—thereby situating intimacy within an explicitly commodified exchange. The recurring detail of the ‘brown envelope’ literalises this economy of desire and complicates any reading of the scene as a space of unambiguous empowerment or playful role reversal. While the scenario might superficially suggest a subversion of racialised and gendered hierarchies—through the figure of a Black woman dominating a white male client—the text repeatedly undercuts such reversal by emphasising routine, fatigue, and emotional distance. Rather than confirming the memoir’s promise of self-disclosure and narrative mastery, the scene exposes the cost of making oneself legible within forms that demand coherence, agency, and consent as narrative givens. Crucially, the use of the second-person pronoun intensifies this sense of estrangement. As Sandrine Sorlin notes, ‘the second-person pronoun performs a dramatisation of the enunciation [that] [p]ut[s] distance between oneself and the self about whom one is talking via the second person. . . . [It] is one possible means to address the ungraspable traumatic ordeal of one’s existence’ (83–85). As Philippe Lejeune observes, when a subject addresses herself as ‘you’, the discourse simultaneously implies an ‘I’, a ‘you’, and a concealed ‘he’ or ‘she’, producing a doubled scene of address in which the reader becomes an implicit witness: ‘if I talk to myself using “you”, I also unfold this enunciation as a show for a third party, the potential listener or reader: the latter attends a discourse that is designed for her, even if it is not addressed to her’ (quoted in Sorlin 84). The narration thus unfolds as both self-address and spectacle. In Daley-Ward’s case, this dramatisation destabilises the autobiographical pact itself, foregrounding the memoir not as transparent testimony but as a staged negotiation between proximity and distance, exposure and self-protection.

17This dynamic is reinforced by the proximity of these chapters to the later dramatic scene involving Malcolm, staged explicitly as a play. In both instances, sexual labour is framed as performance, governed by scripts, costumes, and expectations. The stage direction ‘YOU pop [the brown envelope] into your handbag. YOU study yourself in the mirror. You’re an actress, and you’re wonderful’ (189) is deeply ambivalent. Rather than affirming joyful self-recognition, the mirror functions as a site of self-surveillance, where the subject must reassure herself of her own coherence after having been rendered consumable. By naming herself an ‘actress’, Daley-Ward openly thematises the performative labour required not only by sexual work but by autobiographical narration itself, which demands that lived experience be reshaped into a legible, convincing self. Read through Paul Gilroy’s reflections in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (1993), this scene also foregrounds the burden of representation placed on minoritised subjects, for whom individual acts are often overdetermined by collective histories. In a memoir—a genre poised between the story of a singular life and the symbolic weight of history—the narrated self risks becoming exemplary, asked to stand in for a broader social truth. Daley-Ward’s recourse to dissociative narration can thus be read as a refusal of this burden: the second person disperses responsibility and resists the conflation of personal experience with representative identity. Here, the memoir reflects critically on its own genre, exposing how the autobiographical pact itself can become a mechanism of constraint rather than liberation. Rather than discovering a stable or emancipated self through these encounters, The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir exposes the limits of memoir as a form capable of containing experiences shaped by racialised commodification and structural precarity. The oscillation between ‘I’ and ‘you’, between prose, drama, and poetic fragmentation, reveals formal strain. By placing the autobiographical pact under pressure, Daley-Ward transforms memoir into a metatextual site where the very conditions of self-narration are interrogated. The sex scenes do not resolve the question of representation; they make visible its cost. Memoir here emerges not as a transparent vehicle of truth, but as a contested apparatus in which speaking, performing, and surviving remain inseparable.

18What this scene ultimately stages, then, is a point at which self-representation falters and must be displaced onto form. The shift from ‘I’ to ‘you’, the theatrical framing, and the emotionally flattened tone do not simply diversify Daley-Ward’s narrative techniques; they mark a limit beyond which the autobiographical ‘I’ can no longer fully assume what it recounts. In this sense, the episode exposes how certain experiences—here shaped by racialised sexuality, economic precarity, and transactional intimacy—resist incorporation into a coherent, sovereign narrative voice. The memoir thus begins to register the strain placed on autobiography when it is tasked with bearing experiences that exceed its traditional truth-telling protocols. Rather than resolving this tension, The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir makes it formally visible: the instability of voice, genre, and address becomes a way of signalling that something in the experience itself cannot be seamlessly narrated. It is at this point that questions of trauma become unavoidable—not as thematic content alone, but as a structuring force acting upon narrative form. If the memoir repeatedly fractures voice, linearity, and generic convention, this is not merely an aesthetic choice but a response to experiences that disrupt continuity, memory, and self-coherence. As such, Daley-Ward’s text invites a reading informed by trauma theory, which has precisely sought to account for the ways in which certain forms of violence, exclusion, and othering make themselves discernible only through formal disturbance.

19From this perspective, one can argue, alongside Alan Gibbs and Stef Craps, that trauma does not merely appear within narrative but exerts pressure upon narrative form itself. It is what Gibbs terms the ‘trauma genre’ (2014, 33), that is, modes of writing in which conventional structures of coherence, chronology, and stable voice prove insufficient. According to Irene Kacandes, life writers may ‘employ [as] a technique [formal disruption] for the purposes of fact or of enhancing, reinforcing or drawing attention to the referential level’; such writers ‘aim to convey some aspect of the “realness” of certain life experiences that could not be conveyed as well without pushing at the form itself’ (2012, 382). What is therefore at stake is a literature that develops an aesthetics of fragmentation as one of the means through which trauma may be borne witness to. This emphasis on fragmented aesthetics has become, since early Caruthian definitions of trauma and its aftermaths, a hallmark of what Gibbs identifies as trauma writing: unconventional form testifies to the destabilising effects of trauma on subjectivity. Yet, as Craps argues in Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age, trauma cannot be reduced to a single, punctual, catastrophic event. Such a model risks rendering invisible forms of harm that are cumulative, systemic, and historically sedimented. Alternative frameworks—such as Lisa B. Spanierman and V. Paul Poteat’s ‘oppression-based trauma’ (2005) or Tariana Turia’s notion of ‘postcolonial traumatic stress disorder’ (2000)—allow for an understanding of trauma as slow, ongoing, and socially produced. From this perspective, what is at stake in The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir is a form of ‘insidious trauma’ (Root 1992, 240), linked to the lived experience of racialisation, sexism, classed vulnerability, and queer marginalisation within a white-dominated, heteronormative British society. This ‘insidious trauma’ is signalled even before the memoir proper begins, through a paratextual fragment that frames the text:

20The adjective ‘terrible’ appears twice before the narrative unfolds, foregrounding chaos and harm as constitutive rather than incidental elements of Daley-Ward’s coming of age. Significantly, The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir resists syntactic completion: ‘terrible’ is not a noun, and the title gestures toward an absent object—the terrible what? This grammatical incompleteness announces from the outset that the memoir will not conform to expectations of narrative resolution or semantic stability. Something is missing, unsayable, or structurally resistant to articulation. The broken—or incomplete?—syntax thus anticipates a broader rhetoric of fragmentation that runs throughout the memoir.

21Daley-Ward explicitly thematises this struggle to articulate experience when she writes: ‘there is something underneath your seams; you remember poetry. They say write your thoughts out. So you do, and you do, and you do’ (2018, 203). The repetition enacts compulsion rather than mastery, echoing trauma’s insistence rather than narrative control. In contrast to the poem ‘Community’ from Bone, where rage is described as something women are socialised to repress—‘As if we never learned to eroticise our / rage, / to block out the screaming of the gut’ (15)—The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir allows that scream to surface. The memoir does not aestheticise rage into containment; it lets it disturb form. Towards the end of the text, Daley-Ward writes:

You may not run away from the thing that you are
because it comes and comes and comes as sure as you
breathe. As certain. The thing is deep inside your linings, way down the marrow. People have a lot of words for it.
There are ten thousand names for it and you. Wherever you are, it catches you up. It catches you in South Africa. Wherever you are and whatever it is, the terrible is trying to grip you and sometimes you’re walking down the street and it tries to knock you clean off your feet and send you right underground. The terrible comes like a bang in the night. . . . The terrible needs to eat and it eats whole lives up in one sitting. (196)

22Here, repetition hinders linear progression: ‘the thing’, ‘wherever you are’, and ‘it catches you’ recur insistently, while polyptoton (‘eat’ / ‘eats’) and the alliterative force of ‘comes and comes and comes’ mimic a stuttering rhythm. These stylistic choices draw attention to what Kacandes calls the ‘referential level’: trauma does not merely interrupt Daley-Ward’s life; it repeatedly destabilises the narrative itself, preventing smooth temporal development. Such disruption directly challenges the model of life writing traditionally associated with autobiography. As Anita Rupprecht notes, autobiography—‘[b]orn from Enlightenment secular humanism’—presupposes ‘the narrative inscription of an abstract and unique individual agent moving through time and space’ (35). By fracturing chronology, destabilising voice, and foregrounding embodied sensation—‘deep inside your linings, way down the marrow’ (2018, 196)—Daley-Ward explicitly rejects this abstraction. Her subject is not sovereign or self-transparent, but situated, embodied, and shaped by forces that resist narrative containment.

23In this respect, The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir participates in what Laura Marcus identifies as a critique of universalised subjectivity within autobiography, a tradition that has historically marginalised ethnic, gendered, and classed differences in favour of an abstract notion of the self (183). Daley-Ward displaces this paradigm by weaving prose and verse, foregrounding bodily vulnerability, and experimenting with language itself. Her use of the neologism ‘powerfear’ (2018, 84)—a term that fuses agency and threat—signals both the paradoxical position of her racialised, sexualised body and the insufficiency of existing linguistic resources to articulate that position. The word’s internal tension mirrors the strain placed on memoir as a genre when tasked with narrating such experiences. This vulnerability extends to the form of the memoir itself, which may be read, following Ganteau, as a ‘vulnerable form’ (2013)—one that exposes its own limits in order to register lived and embodied precarity. The proliferation of invented words—‘blackshining’, ‘diediedie’—typographical experimentation, italics, capitalisation, and visual fragmentation reinforces the sense that no single, stable form can adequately hold the narrative. Daley-Ward’s preference for fragments—‘these parents of ours / our makers / our stars’ (2018, 190)—over complete sentences further signals a fractured subjectivity. As Alain Montandon reminds us, fragmentum derives from frango, to break or shatter, implying ‘an endured violence, an intolerable disintegration’ (1992, 77). These fractures are not merely stylistic flourishes; they are the visible traces of harm inscribed onto form.

24In The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir, there is thus no unified self and no linear developmental arc. Instead, the memoir persistently foregrounds rupture, interruption, and incompleteness. By placing memoir under such strain, Daley-Ward does not abandon self-representation; rather, she reconfigures it, demonstrating how lives shaped by racialised, gendered, and traumatic precarity require new modes of telling—modes that accept fragmentation not as failure, but as the condition of speaking at all. What emerges from this sustained formal strain is not only a traumatised subject but a deeper interrogation of the epistemological and political assumptions embedded in memoir as a genre. If The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir exposes the limits of autobiographical coherence, narrative sovereignty, and stable selfhood, it does so in ways that are inseparable from the racialised and colonial histories that have shaped whose lives are deemed narratable, and under what conditions. The pressures placed on the autobiographical pact, the fragmentation of voice, and the refusal of narrative mastery cannot therefore be understood solely through trauma theory, but must also be read as interventions into a literary tradition historically grounded in Eurocentric models of personhood, agency, and visibility. In this sense, Daley-Ward’s memoir does more than strain the genre from within: it gestures toward the need to rethink memoir itself as a colonial form. The question that follows is no longer only how trauma disrupts narrative, but how memoir might be reconfigured to accommodate lives shaped by histories of racialisation, dispossession, and structural exclusion. It is to this project of formal and epistemic reworking—what might be called the decolonisation of memoir—that the next section now turns.

Decolonising Life Writing

25In his article ‘To be is to be perceived, not to be is not to be perceived’ (2021), Le Blanc analyses what he calls ‘ethical violence’:

The refusal to apprehend a life as a dignified, decent, legitimate, and fully-lived life is made possible by the refusal to perceive it as a life worthy of being apprehended, of being narrated. Ethical violence reaches its paroxysm when the disqualification of certain subjects is made possible by the decision not to perceive them. Not hearing a voice, not seeing a face, leads to depriving a subject of her actual capacities, of her art of doing as well as of her narrative abilities. The unlivable life is then the life made unlivable, impossible, by the absence of perceptual consideration and even more of perceptual care: this constitutes the heart of ethical violence. (2021)

26‘Ethical violence’ is present in the aforementioned scene in which Daley-Ward explains that ‘Gillibrand County Primary School was a sea of white, but for my black face’ (26). In Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, Emmanuel Levinas explains that:

the relation to the face is straightaway ethical. The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying: ‘thou shalt not kill.’ . . . The first word of the face is the ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It is an order. There is a commandment in the appearance of the face. (2011, 87; 89)

27The reference to the ‘face’ is therefore central to raising awareness about the ethical stakes in this memoir. By using the seemingly simple image of a ‘sea of white’ in which a ‘black face’ attempts to exist and survive, Daley-Ward develops what Ganteau has called a ‘poetics and ethics of attention’ (2023, 16):

• 11 Writing upside down is a way of ‘undoing’ and it is an experimental practice—and unusual reading ex (...)

The study of attention, whether in real-life situations or in fictional representations, is precisely of interest because it allows for the observation of ethical, social and political relations and phenomena. In the case of the narrative of fiction—and this extends to non-fictional narratives—this is often made through various types of focalisation, and through telepathic access to the consciousness of characters. Such devices allow for the sharing of perception and attention from the singular, incarnated perspectives of characters, which favours the communication of intimacy and experience. (16)11

28By re-appropriating the genre of memoir, Daley-Ward shows that ‘the part who have no part’ (Rancière 1998, 30) have something to say. Writing this memoir creates a counter-discourse and asserts a specific ‘incarnated’ voice, one that cannot be captured by abstract, universalised notions of selfhood. By mixing first-, second-, and third-person narration, the memoir produces a sense of plural selves and multiplicity, which makes her memoir a ‘dialogic’ (Egan 1999, 225) one, partly anchored in magic, and therefore outside the Cartesian (Western) world. For instance, she recounts that she and her brother saw a unicorn in the garden in the late nineties (2018, 1), and considers her brother a ‘seer of things’ (2018, 181). These elements disrupt the exclusionary practices of traditional life writing and can be interpreted as acts of decolonial intervention.

Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. Here is the house it is green and white it has a red door it is very pretty here is the family mother father dick and jane live in the green-and-white house they are very happy. Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhiteithasareddooritisveryprettyhereisthefamilymotherfaherdickandjaneliveinthegreenandwhitehousetheyareveryhappy. (Morrison 1970, 2)

30Through the reading of the story of Dick and Jane in the school curriculum, the Black character, named Pecola, perceives ‘what is beauty’ and becomes aware of the fact that she is constructed as ‘ugly and miserable, or at least [her] family is’ (Morrison 5). In his analysis of Morrison’s novel, Donald B. Gibson explains that:

[t]he Dick and Jane text implies one of the primary and most insidious ways that the dominant culture exercises its hegemony, through the educational system. It reveals the role of education in both oppressing the victim—and more to the point—teaching the victim how to oppress her own black self by internalising the values that dictate standards of beauty. (20)

31The issues of representation—or lack, thereof—and (Black) beauty, are central in the chapter entitled ‘10.1’ in The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir. Daley-Ward muses on beauty, particularly in the school environment (when she is about 10 years old, as the title of the chapter indicates):

Beauty makes people stay, I thought. Beauty makes people listen to you. Beauty makes people fall in love with you and not know what to do with themselves. It was all in the songs and it was in the Disney films. It was even in the Bible. Song of Solomon, my favorite book of the Bible so far, was all about beauty and lovers and love. I couldn’t wait till my life changed and I looked more like a thing that people liked. The boys at school made a list of the most beautiful girls in the class from 1 to 15. I did not make the list but that’s because they all agreed that I didn’t need to
because I was more of a Cool Black Friend,
not a girlfriend, you understand,
but a Cool Black Girl Friend
with spongy hair that was dead cool.
I had been praying for beauty for two years straight, with no real success, no concrete results. . . .
Plan one. Ask Grandma about hair relaxer. Or a perm. The white girls used Pantene Pro-V in their hair. I needed to get hold of that and mix it with our horrible shampoo to make hair come out straighter, shinier, LONGER.
 . . . Dream/idol look:
Kelly Kapowski from Saved by the Bell
Or
Pamela Anderson
Or one of the Sweet Valley High twins. (67–68)

[t]he battle becomes, for the critic and novelist of Afro-American literature, to de-center the white logos, to create a universe of critical and fictional meanings where blackness will no longer connote absence, negation, and evil but will come to stand instead for affirmation, presence, and good. . . . It is a quest not only to de-center the white logos but finally to rebuild the center, to dis-cover the powers which lie hidden in the black logos. (748–749)

33Daley-Ward aims at decentring ‘the white logos’ so as to ‘rebuild the center’ through deconstruction, the decolonisation of (Black) beauty and (literary) ‘reconstruction’, the latter being achievable by re-appropriating the norms of the writing of the self in the literary memoir, as strategies against invisibility. To quote Bernardine Evaristo in another context, Daley-Ward is ‘putting presence into absence’ (Sethi 2019). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue that ‘[a]utobiography has been employed by many women writers to write themselves into history’ (1998, 5). In this context, Daley-Ward’s emphasis on her own face is linked to what Emmanuel Renault calls ‘recognition’ (2001).

34Central to this decolonial intervention is Daley-Ward’s engagement with temporal freedom, which destabilises Western linearity. In the chapter ‘Physics and Magic’, she reflects on a childhood fascination with a book her mother owned about ‘“jumping timelines”, documenting various scientists who say that you can jump into whatever reality you can conceive with positive activations’ (2018, 75). She links this to the series ‘Quantum Leap’ (2018, 75), and her sense that time ‘is molecular, it is bendable or liquid, it is soldered metal’ (2018, 76). Here, Daley-Ward articulates what Thabolwethu Tema Maphosa and Refiloe Makama call ‘decolonial temporalities’:

Decolonial temporalities are any notions and theorizations of time that lie outside the hegemonic nature of linear, colonial/Western conceptualization of time. They are temporalities that are built on an understanding that time is determined by the human experience and not the other way around. . . . Decolonial temporalities are pluriversal. They are built on the acceptance of the multiplicity of subjective hoods [sic] and the need for their coexistence. [D]ecolonial temporalities are drawn from the pluriversal archive that exists outside of the colonial canon. . . . Decolonial temporalities are timescapes that gesture towards a reorientation towards rhythm. . . . A reorientation that takes seriously what Agamben . . . terms the human’s poetic status on Earth. That is, our unique ability to be creative beyond what we know and have been forced to acculturate to. (2024)

35Daley-Ward’s playful, fluid, and rhizomatic approach to time enacts precisely such a ‘reorientation’. Her articulation of decolonial temporality is most explicitly staged in the passage where she reflects on the powder-blue book and its challenge to Western linear time:

The powder-blue book is amazing. I love magic science. The book takes a dim view on the West and its trapping, limiting concept of time. Burn all the clocks. I am free. . . . Our timeline has totally collapsed. . . . If Scott Bakula aka Sam can jump from the future to a nightclub in the sixties to being sheriff of a small town in the forties to teaching Michael Jackson the moonwalk, I can deal with a mean deadweight disappearing from my life. There are always new people to touch and be touched by. . . . I am porous, I am bold. I am a space-time traveling expert.
I am close to twelve, you know (in theory;
in your Western linear time concept at least),
and this is how it goes. (2018, 76–77)

The fluid time of the postcolonial seems to follow in the wake of Eurochronology, that fateful, fatal tethering of teleological progress to centrifugal modernity. This hallucinatory form images time shot forward and space radiated outward, both departing from some mystical, continental-scale Greenwich. Mean time, indeed. And what, to reverse my order, does time mean? (396)

37Daley-Ward’s bending of temporality resonates with these critical interventions: her memoir is not merely a personal account but a deliberate, decolonial negotiation of time, memory, and experience. It allows for a disruption of the (exclusionary) practices of traditional life writing. Anchoring elements from outside the Cartesian centre can be interpreted as a decolonial act. A form of ‘dewesternization’ (Mignolo 2012) of life writing is taking place.

38Crucially, this reconfiguration of time does not remain confined to the realm of lived experience and/or aesthetic experimentation. By directly implicating the reader in its temporal dislocations, The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir transforms experience into a form of pedagogical intervention, using formal disruption not only to represent decolonial temporality but to teach the reader how to inhabit it differently. ‘Re-existence’, healing, and empowerment are thus cardinal in the aforementioned passage, where Daley-Ward reflects on a newly found freedom that proves productive both for her sense of self and for her art as a ‘storyteller’. In this respect, she gestures toward a holistic perspective in which identity, creativity, and recovery are inseparable. In The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir, she presents herself as a ‘vulnerable’ yet ‘willful subject’ (Ahmed 2014), one who actively distances herself from the ‘master narrative’ (Lyotard 1979) traditionally associated with autobiography and memoir. This resistance is furthered in the chapter ‘Physics and Magic’, where she directly addresses the reader: ‘So maybe as you are reading this I am already twenty-nine or fifty or something, or two and still reading on the worktop with Mummy. I am also very unmistakably here and you are so unmistakably there—only we aren’t. We are anywhere we want to be’ (75). By collapsing temporal and spatial distinctions between writer and reader, the memoir foregrounds reading as a shared, embodied experience rather than the passive consumption of a completed life story. This gesture can be related to what Ganteau describes as literature’s ethical capacity to promote the sharing of experience:

We can thus see how literature, which privileges singular and embodied situations, gives a concrete account of and promotes the sharing of experiences. In this way, it is able to do ethical work by sharpening attention to what matters and by inviting readers to decide what matters in turn after whetting their capacities to perceive the ordinary. (2023, 22)

39Daley-Ward’s metatextual engagement with the reader can also be interpreted as an echo of Alexandre Gefen’s analysis of twenty-first-century literature, which he characterises as increasingly ‘therapeutic’—that is, oriented toward care, repair, and ethical engagement: ‘the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a notion of writing and reading I would describe as “therapeutic”—of a literature that heals, that cares for, that helps, or at least that “does good”’ (Gefen 2024, 1). This therapeutic dimension becomes explicit in Daley-Ward’s later work, The How: Notes on the Great Work of Meeting Yourself (2021), where the ‘storyteller’, reflects directly on the transformative power of writing:

BECAUSE WHEN YOU MAKE ART YOU PLACE YOURSELF IN A BLESSED STATE OF POWER, POWER TO CREATE, POWER TO CHANGE THE WORLD BY CHANGING HEARTS, POWER TO REACH OUT, POWER TO SUBVERT, POWER TO TELL, THE TRUTH FOR ONCE, POWER TO BIRTH A NEW TRUTH, POWER TO BE IN LOVE WITH AN UNTAMED AND MOVING THING. POWER NOT TO BE WEIGHED DOWN BY WHAT HAS BEEN, WHAT ALMOST WAS, AND WHAT MIGHT NEVER BE. BECAUSE WHEN YOU WRITE YOU AWAKEN THE DEEP, ALL-KNOWING POWER, THE CREATOR, THE EVER-PRESENT NARRATOR. (2021, 122–123; original emphasis)

40This passage reads as a literary manifesto, marked by the insistent repetition of the word ‘power’ and by an emphasis on writing’s capacity to ‘change the world’, ‘reach out’, and ‘tell the truth’. These elements foreground the ethical stakes of storytelling and directly counter what Le Blanc identifies as ‘ethical violence’. When Daley-Ward claims that through writing ‘YOU AWAKEN THE DEEP, ALL-KNOWING POWER, THE CREATOR, THE EVER-PRESENT NARRATOR’, she appropriates what Gilmore terms the ‘God’s-eye view’, [a narrative position historically associated with the ‘Western white male’ subject (1994, 17). Her decision to re-appropriate life writing from this marginalised position is therefore deeply political. As Gefen argues, recourse to literary writing enables the recovery of personal identity in situations marked by invisibility and/or trauma, while also granting increased visibility and durability through literariness itself (Gefen 2024, 26). In this sense, the chapter ‘Physics and Magic’ gestures toward possibilities that are future-oriented rather than confined to trauma-based paradigms. Daley-Ward thus belongs to a broader group of ‘practitioners of life histories [who] emphasize that retrospective narratives must be oriented towards the future and its potentialization’ (Gefen 2024, 25), positioning memoir as an ongoing practice of (decolonial) re-existence. Returning to Butler’s claim that ‘when the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist’ (2005, 7–8; emphasis added), one may argue that in explaining herself Daley-Ward is compelled to explain the social world that renders her intelligible. Self-accounting thus necessarily becomes a form of social analysis, positioning Daley-Ward not only as a ‘social theorist’ but also as a literary theorist, insofar as her memoir elaborates a new paradigm for life writing.

Conclusion

41This article has shown that the political and ethical force of The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir lies not in the experiences it recounts but in the formal pressures it places on memoir as a genre. By fragmenting narrative voice, unsettling temporal coherence, and repeatedly foregrounding the conditions of visibility under which a racialised, gendered subject is compelled to speak, Daley-Ward exposes memoir as a site of strain rather than resolution.

42Rather than assuming the burden of exemplarity often imposed on minoritised writers, The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir resists being read as representative, dispersing narrative authority through dissociation, fragmentation, and generic hybridity. In doing so, it reveals the limits of autobiography as form grounded in coherence, continuity, and sovereign selfhood. By placing memoir itself under pressure, The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir participates in a broader decolonial reconfiguration of life writing, one that shifts attention from what is told to how telling becomes possible—or impossible—within inherited literary forms.