Author Rachel Marie Niehuus draws on her academic backgrounds in surgery and anthropology to shape this work. Terms such as wounds and sutures feature in her analysis of life in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. She begins with the scars left by centuries of (recurring) violence and insecurity. Rather than solely centering these instabilities, she shifts attention to repair and healing among Congolese people as primary conceptual lenses and “lines of potential” (17). In doing so, Niehuus constructs An Archive of Possibilities highlighting the transformative potential of repair and healing within everyday life characterized by ongoing harm. Across five chapters, an Introduction and a Conclusion, the author seamlessly stitches together intimate ethnographic material and conceptual analysis. Personal interludes reflecting fear, uncertainty, and hope accompany the chapters. Together, these elements substantiate her central thesis: even in scarred presents, possibilities not only exist but are actively lived.
Based on ethnographic work conducted between 2010 and 2020, in and around Goma, Niehuus demonstrates the potential for healing and repair, while also suggesting that these possibilities have received less sustained attention within Black critical theory’s readings of aporetic Blackness under antiblack regimes. Each of the five chapters advances this broader argument by examining distinct thematic contexts in which these possibilities emerge.
Amid ongoing war and ecological instability, the soil appears precarious. In Chapter One, however, Niehuus shows the potential of the land and the soil. Some people continue to farm and mine, and even when war or climate forces them to suspend these activities, many return to the ground. Despite the paradox between the land’s instability and its fertility, she argues that the relationship between people and soil could be an opening toward healing and a way to move through the impasse that structures this tension.
In Chapter Two, displacement and insecurity are the thematic wounds, while the potential for repair and healing emerges through the forms of return that take place. Niehuus points to newly formed communities in which citizens live in close relationships to armed groups, and how such arrangements open spaces for alternative ways of inhabiting the present individually and collectively.
Chapter Three turns to the body and the hospital, reflecting Niehuus’s surgical background. Despite the literal and figurative scars of war endured by Congolese bodies, hospitals still serve as places of hope and possibility. Sutures, and sometimes secondary sutures, repair physical wounds. Moreover, hospitals (where stitching wounds is an everyday practice) also become spaces of resilience, enabling people to bear suffering in ways that go beyond just the physical body.
Other than resilience, Chapter Four engages with Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, in which subjecthood is systematically suppressed. By confronting violence directly, Niehuus asks whether certain acts, such as killing, might paradoxically be a way of healing. Hereby an actor refutes death as the outcome, reclaiming what has been denied by structural oppression within “the regime that has otherwise confined him to nothingness” (117). This chapter makes a profound impact. It is not a functional analysis of violence, nor should it be read as a justification of it. Yet to ignore the possibilities that actors themselves perceive as emerging from violence would be analytically insufficient. The chapter’s point is precisely to consider this tension: to examine how violence may be framed as a path out of aporia, even when that includes dangers.
While the first four chapters describe possible and actual trajectories from themes such as land, displacement, the body, and violence toward alternative ways of living in the present, the fifth chapter looks at the future. It concentrates on imagining a world that does not yet exist. It poses questions on how Congolese people envision an entirely different reality, one that goes beyond stitching and healing wounds.
Emphasizing that much has been written about postcolonial violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the book offers a new perspective by reflecting on these issues using Black critical theory. In doing so, it repeatedly troubles the understanding of aporia as a path with a roadblock. Yet the book maintains a productive ambivalence. Can these possibilities truly interrupt the aporetic structure they seek to move beyond? This raises a broader question when rupture becomes repetitive: how many times can a wound reopen after being sutured and resutured? During Niehuus’s research, the M23 insurgency was a persistent presence in the region, which makes the book feel especially relevant today amid the group’s ongoing campaign and its control over major eastern cities like Goma. On the book’s third unnumbered page, the dedication is addressed to “those who live in war.” Still, even as the book highlights possibilities, the agency within these remains uncertain. Is the return to the ground an act of hopeful renewal, or a response to the exhaustion of alternatives? Niehuus approaches these questions without providing definitive answers, critically reflecting on both the argument and the risks it entails. For example, in Chapter Four, she considers the danger in treating violence as a potential possibility out of aporia. Some readers will find this self-awareness to be the book’s strength, while others may seek more satisfaction. By embracing ambiguity, An Archive of Possibilities opens conversations on the region and on contexts where people “live in war.”
