An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo. By R. M.Niehuus, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023. 201 pp. $102.95 (cloth); $26.95 (paperback); $26.95 (ebook). Paper ISBN: 978‐1‐4780‐2575‐7; Cloth ISBN:

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereinafter, Congo) is one of the most volatile countries in the world. In An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo, Rachel Marie Niehuus presents a compelling, disruptive and theoretically informed ethnography of healing, spotlighting presents and futures otherwise and rejecting the disposability of Congolese life in the context of dense global antiblackness which characterises Congo as an ‘enduring heart of darkness’ (page 10). Drawing on her background as a surgeon and anthropologist working in Congo for over a decade, her text explores the processes of wounding, scarring, healing and repairing in eastern Congo, amidst chronic war, displacement, corruption and poverty. Niehuus sets the scene by contextualising and historicising current social, political, economic and health challenges in eastern Congo and the profit-making humanitarian-industrial complex that has expanded its tentacles to fill the gaps created by state failure. Each chapter focuses on a register of healing and repair, anchored to the lives of ordinary Congolese folk whom she encounters and whose lived experiences are woven through the book as illuminating case studies. She draws on key ideas in Black critical studies literature such as Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Franz Fanon and others, and explores registers of healing that centre Black/Congolese epistemology to communicate a language of possibilities, archived in this book. Niehuus focuses on six areas through her chapters: Congolese land as a site of violence and displacement and renegotiation as a form of public healing; the constant insecurity which governs Congo and mutual affective attunement as a register of healing; the hospital as a site of socialisation of pain where visions of presents otherwise validate and affirm subjecthood; the healing potential of necropolitical violence which begets an emphasis on a future otherwise; Afrofuturism and performing arts creating a poetic register imagining that other futures beyond survival and pain are possible; and the radical nature of cohabiting with violence as a commitment to survive. Each chapter draws on lived experiences with vivid storytelling of registers of healing. The movement trajectories of her Congolese residence guard who is constantly fleeing the land is contrasted with a nurse-midwife friend who chooses to stay and farm her ancestral land as ‘to be Congolese is to have soil on your hands’ (34). Tales of heart-breaking maternity experiences, where labouring women say ‘Nifanka: I am dying’ (page 79) and are told to ‘close their heart’ (page 80) as bundles of stillbirth babies accumulate on the floor raise the question of whether hospitals harm or heal as suffering becomes survival. Violent phenomena of children who stop eating, youths who mock death and armed groups who commit brutal massacres are re-imagined as a rejection of the present and hope for a better future. Vibrant poetry festivals, space programmes and ecological entrepreneurship open ‘ways of seeing, speaking, being, creating otherwise’. Niehuus asks profound and difficult questions around identity, values, motivation, belonging and, fundamentally, whose life matters and what it means to be human and alive, with urgency and compassion. She highlights the extraordinary strength and resilience of the human spirit through the Congolese experience which finds healing and repair in a violent world committed to Black death with originality and authenticity, whilst remaining reflexive of her privileged position as a White researcher. Whilst attention to surgery and public health is surprisingly limited given the author's clinical background, Niehuus reflects on how the shift in her focus away from global surgery and burden of disease in the book to centre social and political action and registers of healing helped teach her the difference between health and healing by looking ‘beyond the physical body, towards the metaphysical wounds that antiblackness creates’ (page 153). This is a thought-provoking ethnography grounded in radical compassion and a concern for Black/Congolese aliveneness, with dynamic human stories of hope and survival that have the potential to profoundly transform not just conflict studies, researchers or humanitarians but also healthcare professionals and students in how they view the nexus of trauma, health and healing, and to appreciate its complex human and sociopolitical dimensions, which are often overlooked. The author has nothing to report.