The deep stirring of the unhomely: African diaspora on Biyi Bandele's The Street.

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 22-JUN-08

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ABSTRACT

Informed by the pervasive dispersal of peoples, capital, commodities and ideas across the globe the concepts of home and diaspora have produced some of the liveliest debates in recent times. Previously conceived in essentialist terms as considerably stable models, these concepts have today become intensely contested. This paper examines the manner in which Biyi Bandele engages with these contested notions in The Street. It examines the dialectics of home in diaspora and observes that "unhomeliness," the postcolonial condition of displacement, invasion, and estrangement of "home," typifies the experience of displaced subjects as they engage with the project of identification against the drifting (dis)locations of home in two spaces: the natal homeland and the host nation. The street functions not only as the site where subject positions are perennially formed and performed, negotiated and (re)consfituted, but also as a metaphor for the dynamic and medial nature of diasporic identity.

In the House of Fiction you can hear today, the deep stirring of the ' unhomely."

--How BHABHA ("THE WORLD AND THE HOME" 141)

As travel, changing locations, and leaving home become central experiences for more and more people in modernity, the difference between the ways we travel, the reasons for our movements, and the terms of our participation in this dynamic must be historically and politically accounted for.

--CAREN KAPLAN (QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL 102)

The present age of global capitalism and commodity culture witnesses an unprecedented dispersal of peoples, commodities, and cultures across the globe, and creates a new ethic of diaspora discourse that continuously pushes the parameters of the terms original Greek and Zionist formulation. Pushing beyond its literal, fixed, and hegemonic Jewish configuration, diaspora has come to share "meanings with a larger semantic domain" (Tololian 5) and many displaced peoples have come to be represented, and to represent themselves, as diasporic subjects (Walsh 3). Confederate with this fluid sense of diaspora is a radical engagement with the essentializing and purist notions of "home" and "identity" as spatially bounded and culturally fixed formations, refiguring them instead as heterogeneous, unstable, and vacillating; always-already constructed out of difference (see Hall, "Cultural Identity"). Anindyo Roy observes that "[f]or writers of the Diaspora, many of them hailing from former colonies and empires of Europe, home is a problematic site, since the reality of home as well as its imaginative projection are vulnerably linked to an entire network of personal, national, social, and cultural identification" (104). Homi Bhabha warns, "To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the 'unhomey' be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres." Rather, the unhomely is that condition when "[t]he recesses of the domestic space become sites for history's most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused; and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting" ("Introduction" 13). The unhomely therefore characterizes the diasporic condition not implicated simply in the invasion of the homeland but the opening up of "homing" conditions in the world--the worlding of the home, if you like, which makes us not homeless indeed, but makes the home strange. This is not simply through the invention of homes beyond the borders of the private sphere, or being squeezed out of the protective encasement of home or privacy into the public world, but indeed making home that disquieting and nonspatializable nomadic condition. Home or lack of it, real or imagined, therefore figures decisively in the construction of identity for those displaced postcolonial peoples who reside in the metropolis of the West, those who must find homes away from home. Home belongs out there, public; no longer here, private. Diaspora inverts the equation by making here the world and there the homeland.

As a subject of diaspora and its colonial entourage, Biyi Bandele privileges the problematics of home and its fragmented implications in the construction of the colonized/marginalized subject in his novel The Street. Setting the work in Eng land, in the heartland of imperial colonizing power/knowledge, Bandele engages with the dynamics of identity and the discontinuous imagining of "home" in a transcultural black British community. This essay attempts to probe this problematic by examining the manner in which Bandele's characters seem to navigate the vicissitudes-the pitfalls, contradictions, and strengths-attending the figurations of home and identity in diaspora. I deploy a more metaphorical sense of diaspora and tend also to mobilize uncritically what James Clifford describes as the "unruly crowd of descriptive/interpretive terms" (303) employed in the discourse of transnational subjects, such as exile, home, hybridity, identity, displacement, and travel. While these terms are not commensurate with, and reducible to, diaspora, I seem to deploy them at those moments when they "meet" with diasporic consciousness.

Like diaspora itself, these terms are conflicted and positional. Sensitive to the plural significations and positionalities of the term, I imagine diaspora as the overarching condition within which displaced subjects engage with the project of self-writing, involving disparate inflections of identity against the shifting (dis) locations of "home" in two spaces: the homeland and the host nation.

Described as "a discourse that is traveling or hybridizing in new global conditions" (Clifford 306), diaspora has emerged as one of the most visited issues in today's cultural, social, and political thinking. Slipping out of its exclusivist claims in the Jewish sense, it has acquired a much broader relevance, referring to practically every mass displacement of peoples from their homelands and their subsequent emplacement in other lands. This slippage of the Zionist narrative is often celebrated in counterhegemonic terms as making possible the participation of narratives from displaced and marginalized peoples within, or beside, the metanarratives of imperial economy. To avoid the danger of re-placing the discourse within a bounded and policed framework, many experts recommend, rather than a theoretical benchmark, a fluid sense wherein certain shared nonessentialist historical, social, and psychological experiences crystallize into what Clifford describes as family resemblances (306). Of greater interest, especially to cultural, political, and literary theorists of the "postcolony," is the invention of an intertextural counterculture against, beside, and within the geographical and cultural spaces of western power/knowledge. This culture has come to be generally described as creolizing and "hybridizing," and is practically celebrated because it has opened up much of what is described as the fictional purity of imperial culture and the nation/state: the lie in the notion that there is, or ever was,...

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