The Haunting Poetics of May Ayim's “die zeit danach” (1995) and Ada Diagne's “Der Sturm” (2021)

Abstract This article focuses on May Ayim's poem “die zeit danach” (“the time thereafter”) and Ada Diagne's short story “Der Sturm” (“The Storm”) to explore the ways Black worldmaking is expressed through poetics to establish Black humanity as an ontological given. The author argues that the temporalities in Ayim's poem and Diagne's story construct a poetic praxis that folds and collapses divisions between past, present, and imagined future, drawing together references from across the Black diaspora and centuries. The spectral legacy of colonialism and imperialism constitute a haunting that becomes a part of Black existence, but, in naming the ghosts, Ayim and Diagne construct narrative landscapes rife with the potential for world- and knowledge-making beyond the confines of (lived) reality.