This chapter addresses the figuration of the visceral and the neuralgic as a common loci of narration in García Márquez's No One Writes to the Colonel (1961) and Labou Tansi's Anti-people (1983). These texts are written in unnatural corporeal voices, lucidly depicting the emaciation of the self and body in situations of postcolonial injustice and subject alienation. What is rendered readable and perceptible are traces of a self that is struggling against being dehumanised by dismal social and political conditions. In Labou Tansi's text, this decentred self leads to the crisis of self-recognition that accords the narrative voice a deeply existential tonality. In the case of García Márquez, the dire economic situation of the protagonist pre-disposes the narrator to an expressive economy that is significantly at variance with the verbal luxuriance characteristic of his other works. But in both cases, the visceral and neuralgic dimensions of the body becomes propitious entry points into the enunciation of socio-political pain.