Conclusion: Breaking Boundaries, Leaking Truths, Pressing Issues: Ghost Wall (Moss, 2018)

Contemporary women’s ghost stories focus on both loss and recovery, moving on. This chapter looks at the relationship between mankind and nature in the Anthropocene, trauma, genocide, ghosts and women victim survivors. Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall is set on Hadrian’s Wall, where the physical wall and the wall of time align the historical abuse of a sacrificed bog woman, and domestic abuse meted out to the twenty-first-century girl and her mother. It deals with the ghosting of place and body in the Anthropocene, the destructive period dominated by humankind’s worst damage, which would make ghosts of everyone and every living thing, as do other briefly introduced novels. Aboriginal Australian Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) focuses in the future on an abused Aboriginal girl, people using power to invest in a reinterpretation of a damaged haunted past and a more positive future. Indigenous treatment of the ghosts of the Anthropocene aligns with Afrofuturism in the work of Nalo Hopkinson in The New Moon’s Arms (2007), where haunting and ghosts to begin to offer alternative rewriting of the traumatic genocidal past of transatlantic slavey and magical powerful alternatives to toxic threats to the future.