Storm Stories: Climate Trauma and Collective Memory After Cyclone Freddy in Malawi

This study investigates how storytelling practices in Malawi mediate psychological and cultural responses to climate-related disaster, positioning narrative as central to understanding environmental trauma and collective memory. Using Cyclone Freddy as a central case study, the book analyses how oral testimonies, literary texts, community storytelling, and digital narratives document experiences of flooding, displacement, bereavement, and infrastructural collapse, while simultaneously functioning as cultural frameworks through which individuals and communities process grief, construe meaning, and sustain resilience after ecological catastrophe. Through interdisciplinary engagement with environmental humanities, trauma studies, narrative theory, and African literary and cultural traditions, Storm Stories argues that local narrative forms do more than document disaster: they actively shape communal interpretation, emotional recuperation, and enduring memory. By foregrounding Malawian storytelling epistemologies and specific examples and drawing on public health narratives about the cyclone’s impacts on mental wellbeing, this project contributes new theoretical and methodological insight into climate trauma that decentrally situates African voices in global environmental discourse.