Returns ‘Home’: Constructing Belonging 185 in Black British Literature – Evans, Evaristo & Oyeyemi

Summary

The idea of ‘return’ implies both a ‘to’ and a ‘from’; it does not infer settling as the term ‘home’ does, but rather movement between places that are home and those that are not. This article seeks to explore how the idea of returning to ‘home’ is developed in the context of travels between Africa and England in three novels by black British writers. These novels are: Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl; Diana Evans’ 26a; and Bernadine Evaristo's extended version of Lara. Each of these books features a mixed-race protagonist with one black Nigerian and one white English parent; they are all born and grow up for most of the narrative in England. In each novel, the protagonist travels from England to Nigeria at some point in the narrative and then from Nigeria to England. However, the intention of my discussion is not to explore how Nigeria might be constituted as home for Nigerian-British, mixed-race individuals, nor only to analyse how they are alienated in each place (although this will be considered); rather, the discussion explores how ‘home’ is constituted for these characters in ways other than their connections to place, but also how such non-geographical locations are recognized because of the protagonists’ returns to Nigeria.

The idea of home is a complex one, explored across disciplines in different ways ranging from examinations of the physical house to more subjectively experienced or imaginatively constituted places. As a metaphorical term, as David Seamon notes, home is ‘an abstract signifier of a wide set of associations and meanings’ (cited in Manzo ‘Beyond House and Haven’: 48), where those meanings are associated with being comfortable, with belonging and familiarity. This is not to deny connections with the physical locations which are the settings for the books being discussed here but these are not the ‘images of felicitous space’ (The Poetics of Space: 19), as described by Gaston Bachelard, which are the spaces constituted by the human imagination as ‘the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse forces, the space we love’ (19). In the novels, those spaces are aligned with places in the real, material world which tend to be the hostile spaces that Bachelard refuses to discuss.