TO THE VOLCANO by Elleke Boehmer

This article examines Elleke Boehmer’s short story *“To the Volcano”* (2019) through a geo-literary and postcolonial lens, exploring the symbolic and cultural meanings attached to volcanic landscapes in Southern Africa. The analysis focuses on the narrative representation of a dormant volcano as a liminal and uncanny space where scientific discourse, Indigenous cosmologies, memory, and desire intersect. Particular attention is devoted to the tension between Western rationalism and local spiritual knowledge, as well as to the ways in which geological formations become sites of affective, historical, and epistemological conflict. Combining literary analysis with geocritical and ecocritical perspectives, the entry investigates the story’s stylistic features, motifs, metaphors, and representations of volcanic space, highlighting how Boehmer reimagines the volcano not merely as a geological entity, but as a powerful catalyst for displacement, transformation, and postcolonial reflection.