Frantz Fanon was insisting that issues of colonial exploitation, and resistance to it, were historically real and carried material consequences. These realities should not be concealed by trendy phallic metaphors of psychoanalysis. Fanon was prophetic in his cautions, given how fashionable the so-called linguistic turn, the focus on texts and tropes, has become. Harsh historical truths have been buried under infinite mediations, stories and representations. By contrast, this study has been an exploration of how material realities are evoked by writers, who are struggling to anchor themselves in their daily lives in new places and to make sense of their pasts. We saw how they often depicted these material realities in a concrete, a metonymic language, which potentially toys with, problematises and reconstructs, the figurative. This we saw it do as much by the music and texture of words as by returning the figurative, when it is potentially ‘toxic’, to its literal, material function. Many of the writers discussed in this book have been returning the phallus to the gun in their own ways and to suit their own fictional purposes. In the introduction I referred to the narrative politics of de-fetishising and restoring symbols their material ordinariness, as a way of confronting their power. This is a project that Ioan Davies refers to as ‘decolonizing the fetish’ (1998: 139), which he understands as a strategy to confront the old dominating metaphors (142).