Prophetic knowledge, trauma and gendered violence in Faith Ben-Daniels’ A Quarter Past Midnight (2013)
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Abstract
Prophetic knowledge, trauma, and gendered violence converge as central concerns in Faith Ben-Daniels’ A Quarter Past Midnight (2013), a contemporary Ghanaian novel that engages deeply with spiritual causation and the burden of long-held secrets within a family and community setting. The novel sits within a longstanding tradition in African fiction and cosmology of treating the supernatural not as fantasy but as a coherent and operative worldview shaping how characters understand fate, obligation, and consequence. This article takes a look at how the novel deploys prophetic knowledge and supernatural causation as narrative mechanisms for surfacing trauma and enacting gendered violence Adopting Supernaturalism as its theoretical framework, and drawing on its treatment in, comparative literary criticism, and African literary studies , the article undertakes a close textual reading of key moments in the novel, treating its spiritual causation deity pacts, prophetic countdowns, and spiritual reckoning as an internal cosmological logic instead superstition requiring secular explanation. The analysis demonstrates that this supernatural authority governs the novel’s treatment of inherited suffering and its consequences, tracing how trauma is transmitted across generations before erupting into gendered violence that repeats not only resolves. The article finds that prophecy in the text functions not as foreshadowing but as binding spiritual contract, structuring the plot’s climax around foretold obligation rather than open-ended threat. The article recommends wider critical adoption of Supernaturalism and related frameworks for reading African texts on their own cultural terms. The article contributes a critical reading of A Quarter Past Midnight (2013), positioning Supernaturalism as a necessary and longstanding lens for understanding how prophecy, trauma, and gendered violence are bound together in the novel’s narrative structure.
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