In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 “The House I Live in . . . a Language which Barks and Scorns at Me behind Every Corner” From the beginning, I was looking for a sovereignty—an authority—that I believed was available to me only in fiction writing. . . . There, in the process of writing, was the willed illusion , the control, the pleasure of nestling up ever closer to meaning. There alone the delight of redemption, the seduction of origination. But I have known for a good portion of the past twenty-nine years that those delights, those seductions, are deliberate inventions necessary to both do the work and legislate its mystery. It became increasingly clear how language both liberated and imprisoned me. Whatever the forays of my imagination, the keeper, whose keys tinkled always within earshot, was race. Toni Morrison, “Home” In “The World and the Home,” Homi Bhabha “wrestle[s] with the wisdom of Iris Murdoch’s laudable pronouncement, ‘A novel must be a house for free people to live in’” (142). Considering the difficulty of fitting the “political, cultural, or chronological experience of [V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas] into the traditions of Anglo-American liberal novel criticism,” Bhabha argues that while “the image of the house has always been used to talk about the expansive, mimetic nature of the novel . . . in Biswas you have a form of realism that is unable to contain the anguish of cultural displacement and diasporic movement” (142). If the novel is a house, then the novels of migrant writers will raise questions of politics of home and home ownership in their very form. Zanzibar-born Abdulrazak Gurnah certainly does so—in each of his seven novels to date, complex metafictional devices mirror his main characters’ hankering after “good, solid earth beneath [their] feet” (Memory of Departure 159). A more selfconsciously literary writer than Emecheta, Gurnah combines a materialist , social interrogation of home ownership with further-reaching philosophical investigations of the way that language determines one’s place in and ability to move around the world—especially as a person of color. 50 / Part I. Postcolonial Geographies Even in Dottie, for instance, the only one of Gurnah’s seven novels with an English-born protagonist, the final tableau presents Dottie and her friend Michael Mann “dron[ing] on in a conversation that it would take many attempts to resolve” as night falls across London. Published just four years earlier than Kehinde (1994), Dottie (1990) gives us one of Gurnah’s most successful central characters: the daughter of an unknown father and an immigrant prostitute variously named Bilkisu and Sharon, Dottie is a young woman, almost an exact fictional contemporary of Kehinde , whose gradual upward mobility seems rewarded finally by an inner sense of self-possession materially signified by home ownership in Brixton. Typically hesitant, however, Gurnah leaves Dottie less confident of her place and less assured of her role in public space than Emecheta’s Kehinde. The novel has earlier alluded directly to Heart of Darkness, and its final tableau ironically recalls the liminal opening moments of Conrad ’s novella: “The light outside was beginning to die, and the shadows in the Common were beginning to thicken and solidify under the trees and against the walls of distant houses. Lines of cars dashed busily by in the Avenue and along the main road. Beyond the Common the immense city spread away into the dusk, lit by strings of small lights and the phosphorescence of the nearby river” (332). Conrad’s Marlow, as we all know, discomfitshislistenersbyinsistingthatthelightandenlightenmentofthe citythatheandhiswell-to-dopeerstakeforgrantedashomeisbothmore compromised and more tenuous than they assume; Gurnah’s narrative at theendofDottiesuggeststhatthosehistoricallyexcludedfromthatcity,in part through the very language of lightness—the racial ideology embedded in the English language, and the ethnocentrism of English literature and historiography—still feel only tentatively at home there. The tentativeness of this sense of belonging is all the more melancholy in the case of Dottie and her friend Michael because both were actually born in England, so have no other nation to think of as “home.” In this regard they are unusual characters for Gurnah, whose six other novels all feature protagonists born in the author’s own birthplace, Zanzibar. For these characters the politics of home are from the outset more vexed even than in the case of Kehinde, since the European colonizer/African colonized discourse that so dominates Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, and Kehinde is explicitly complicated in Zanzibar by a set of further circumstances that do not fit the Black...

Share