The novel resists resolution at every turn, repeatedly identifying a satisfying story arc and then refusing to take the exit.
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, the debut novel by Indian-Irish-American author Nina McConigley, critiques the ever-more-popular trauma plot – but with a twist. In her first collection of short stories, Cowboys and East Indians, McConigley portrays the life of Indian immigrants in the rural American West, a setting she returns to in her new novel. In 1980s Wyoming, a young girl named Georgie and her sister Agatha Krishna, or AK, navigate girlhood as members of the Indian diaspora and daughters of an oil worker. After extended family comes to live with them, their mother’s brother, Vinny Uncle, begins sexually abusing the two girls—a crime for which they have no words and no rejoinder until they decide to respond to violence with violence and kill him. Piercing the oft-stated belief that acknowledgment (whatever that might mean, whatever form it may take) is the first step to healing from trauma, Georgie explains to her readers, “no rewriting of our history could ever change how we felt. We didn’t want a sorry. We wanted it to stop.” There is no way to narrate their trauma that will undo the harm done. But is there any way to narrate trauma that will even reflect the harm done? This is the question to which the novel repeatedly returns; in doing so, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder courts heavy-handedness in its emphasis on criticizing existing motifs for narrating trauma and instead charts an alternative, a form centered not on finding closure but on figuring out how to live when there can be no closure.
McConigley’s novel self-consciously enters a contemporary moment saturated with trauma narratives. Think of Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, Jamie Hood’s The Trauma Plot, Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Kristin Hannah’s The Women and so on. Indeed, you only have to scroll through TikTok to find numerous people rehearsing their trauma—at least, as they understand it—perhaps to spread awareness, or to make others feel less alone or cope (see #traumatok, or popular true crime accounts like @crimewithkourt). This kind of content emphasizes what happened in great and grisly detail, and other users’ comments seek greater and grislier details (sometimes paired with “if you’re comfortable, of course,” or “no pressure!”). And when trauma content also comes to overlap with the genre of true crime, the story becomes a sort of whodunnit. Content consumers quickly become sleuths, tracing even the most circumstantial dots into straight lines pointing to the guilty party, no matter what they might miss or who they might harm along the way. McConigley is not content to participate in this trend and reiterate these tropes; instead, she probes the shapes we often give to trauma narratives, skirting their edges rather than fitting neatly inside them. By resisting readers’ desire for certainty, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder hopes to transform readers from detectives, ceaselessly searching for the clue that will explain it all, into explorers, who must become comfortable navigating uncertain terrain.
The novel resists resolution at every turn, repeatedly identifying a satisfying story arc and then refusing to take the exit. In chapters entitled “You,” addressed to (and at times antagonistic toward) the imagined reader, our narrator explicitly wrestles with audience expectations: “I know you want [this story] to go a certain way…Here is what you want. Here it is as a list, so organized, so efficient” and then proceeds to discuss, in bullet-points, a number of stereotypical associations with Indian culture, including mangos, saris, spices, poverty, and cows, so the reader will “feel like you’re reading a proper brown-person story.” Georgie thus lays out and then lambasts one structure for narrating trauma, one which hinges on fulfilling ethnic tropes. This pressure to “perform culture” manifests in the stories she feels able to tell. Throughout the novel, Georgie experiments with ways to convey the harm done to her, a harm that emerges in the short-term from her uncle’s abuse and in the long-term from the systems of colonialism that have intensified her vulnerability. Her narrative experimentation reflects the way that trauma as an experience can exceed the tempting narrative direction that moves from a concrete cause toward an equally clear sense of closure. After all, trauma can estrange one’s relationship to time; events might not directly correlate with their aftereffects and survivors might dissociate from the present or be triggered to slide backwards into traumatic memories. This timing operates outside the typical linear sequence of a story, particularly that of the whodunnit genre, where we get clues that ultimately point to one distinct villain. It might strike readers as unsettling, uncomfortable. But trauma is neither settled nor comfortable.
The novel unsettles that notion of cause-and-effect right away, showcasing the difficulty of pinpointing a moment in time when everything went wrong. Maybe the trouble started when their extended family arrived, but the two sisters realize that any effort to assign blame could become far more expansive: “then we blamed it on Reagan…I blamed the Cold War, and Gorbachev…We blamed AIDS…We blamed the Olympics….” and finally decided “Everything went back to the British.” These accusations might strike a reader as comedic, and they are, but the novel asserts throughout that the causes of violence are indeed widely dispersed. Their uncle’s abuse can be explained by the Reagan-era pro-oil policies that absented their oil worker father for long stretches, or the broader ecosystem of mutually-assured destruction that defined life at the time, or the misinformation surrounding AIDs that targeted marginalized bodies, or the nationalistic spirit that requires the performance of a perfect nation-state, or the colonial infrastructure that split their ancestral home and family into two, sending them to the US in the first place. Georgie destabilizes the idea that trauma begins with a distinct inaugural event, understanding that her abuse has arisen from many intertwined dynamics that position her to be victimized and voiceless. From the first page, then, McConigley charges readers to re-evaluate the formulas for narrating trauma. “How do we tell the story of this place?” Georgie wonders. The novel does not answer her question, instead forcing readers to dwell among the same uncertainty that Georgie faces.
Against the categorization that pervades her life—down to the early histories of humanity that draw a line between hunters and gatherers as “the two ways of being,” through the more recent British imperialist project that “divided and divided the world” and into her own time navigating the gender gap that was cast upon her at birth—Georgie plays with narrative forms. The novel offers numerous templates: direct appeals to “you” and lists, as well as instructions you might find in guidebooks and quizzes in Cosmopolitan. Whether it’s the “How Do You Know if a Boy Likes You?” or instructions on how to fish, or how to marry well, these moments of enumerating and sorting represent Georgie’s efforts to organize her traumatic experience into some structure that will make it make sense. But the novel isn’t certain that any organization will cohere the incoherent. Even the lists have a metaphorical valence that extends beyond their numbered announcements; for example, in the “many steps to extraction” that it takes Georgie’s father to find oil, you might hear an echo of how it feels as a reader to extract the full story from our reluctant narrator. Bringing oil to the surface requires identifying promising sources, drilling through many layers and isolating and extricating the right pieces, as well as the mentality that the land is “seemingly just there for the taking” to make money—similar to how Georgie perceives her potential audience as hunting for a good story that follows certain procedures, a hunt she will not satisfy. Realizing that her uncle will never acknowledge his harm or atone for it, Georgie feels pressured to rewrite their story, “to say what he did to us was wrong” based on the premise that “You have to acknowledge wrongdoing, or it will never heal.” At the same time, Georgie feels that her place as a young girl and a colonized subject gives her few tools to actually achieve an effective, empowering rewriting.
Ultimately, the novel determines that the only way to do such work is to chart a path that resists generic expectations, prompting the reader to explore possibilities rather than wait for answers. “You love crime,” Georgie assumes of the reader, although she quickly revises that claim to reflect that many so-called true crime junkies focus on white victims. “You’ve been patient,” Georgie admits when we are two-thirds through the novel and still unclear what happened to their uncle, because her imagined readers want an answer now: who committed the crime, and when, and how, and where. Indeed, Georgie also admits that she has been trained that all stories need such details, but she finds them hard to pin down. She asserts outright that if these story formations are “all ways of creating order,” then “the center would not hold” because “in life there isn’t always a resolution.” So Georgie, and McConigley, will not give one. If the novel sometimes lacks subtlety, it does not lack significance in its endeavor to challenge readers’ desires for salacious stories with satisfyingly neat endings.
But how can a novel end without resolution? McConigley’s conclusion centers not closure but uncertainty as a dominant feature of life after trauma. Here, uncertainty does not represent a failure, a lack of clarity; here, uncertainty does not need to result from or in fear; here, uncertainty stems from multiplicity, from many potential paths. Instead of giving readerly detectives an answer, there are three endings, represented as choice A, choice B, and choice C. In A, the two girls continue to grow apart. In B, the sisters realize their aunt may have been the one to kill their uncle. In C, Georgie leaves it indeterminate, but eventually the sisters reunite to spread their mother’s ashes. Georgie recognizes readers want to know what happened but never confirms who killed their uncle, or if she and AK begin speaking again, or if they find a way to make peace with their pasts. McConigley thus draws attention to the perverse curiosity that propels interest in violence only to deny it. Readers can only speculate which road Georgie took, if, indeed, any. We must balance different interpretations with no answer key. Georgie herself recognizes that such an interpretive adventure is both a burden and a power—earlier on, when she plays Sacajawea in a summer camp play, she identifies with her as another woman of color who must translate within the confines of a white audience’s expectations. Now Georgie cedes that wayfinding work to the reader. The novel theorizes life after trauma as a life “in spite of”—and perhaps also out of spite for—all sorts of violence, from racism to capitalism to abuse. How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder suggests one more addition to the list: trauma narratives told in and out of spite for established narrative forms, ways of telling stories that spiral beyond the well-worn routes of who, what, when, where, why. At one point, McConigley’s narrator expresses her exhaustion with the spiraling, sinking and splitting she has endured, noting that out in the U.S. West, “The road was supposed to be straight and clear.” We might want straight and clear stories, with straight and clear answers; we might seek them out, we might speak them ourselves—but sometimes the only avenue to make sense of the past is a winding one.
Maggie Boyd earned her PhD in English Literature at Boston University in 2024 and now works as Assistant Director for Writing Support at BU. Her research focuses on contemporary representations of healing. She has perfected her Dunkin order and – though she is otherwise not much of a cook – the baked potato.