Mostly, I do not like doing reviews: they demand
a challenging approach to a piece of literary/artistic
work. For me reviews are intimidating, and they become
even more than intimidating when you attempt to review
a piece of work by one of your former teachers.
Of late, Sierra Leoneans overseas (or diasporic Sierra
Leoneneans) have been producing works of fiction/poetry
that directly address the meaning and substance of life
abroad. Worthy of note is Osman Sankoh's Hybrid
Eyes: An African in Europe and Sheikh Umarr Kamarah's
Singing in Exile and the
Child of War. The short story by Pede Hollist,
" BackHomeAbroad,"
contributes to this on-going discourse on the complex issues
of the experiences of diasporic Sierra Leoneans, experiences
that focus on displacement, dislocation and the search for
the meaning of home. Specifically focusing on Sierra Leoneneans
in the USA, the story probes into the psychological, psychical
and emotional tensions (and latent and even patent violence) and
the cultural, economic, and social factors that
define the migrant, diasporic Sierra Leonenean. Significantly,
the story explores the intersection of these psycho-emotive
forces and their tensions with the socio-economic ones.
The story presents a hodge podge of issues about transnational
and migrant identities and the ever shifting possibilities
of such identities. The multiple "homes" the
story engages account for its intense dramatic investigation
into the lives of Sierra Leoneans as they engage (and reflect
on) "back home" in their "home abroad." The
multiple notion of home puts the story squarely within the
broader themes and concerns that define all migrant/diasporic
literatures and communities.
The concept (and reality) of home, signified
by the very title itself, occupies a central place in
the short story. I will come to the meaning of
the title in the story later in this review. However suffice
it to say at this point that the story portrays two intersecting
concepts of home: "back home" and "home abroad."
The first category of home, "back home" presents
the notion of home as a country. In this sense, the story
represents "back home" as their [Foday and
Claudine, the two major protagonists in the story] own
country was a wasteland" (10). In fact, the
idea of "back Home" as a "wasteland"
provides the terrain to understand the social and emotional
worlds that the story represents. As a "wasteland,"
"back home" is represented as a war zone, a semblance
of a home that is being destroyed and ravaged by the forces
of the civil war--a war that shatters and destabilizes the
very notion of home. ! ; To emphasizes this devastation
of "back home" by the war, Santigie (who is
"back home") tells Miss Claudine that "Alpha
jets [are] bombing all over the city," suggesting
that all the homes (including that where Santigie and the
displaced family of Foday live) are subject to destruction.
"Back home" not only becomes a "wasteland"
but also, more apocalyptic ally, one in "all
smoke and explosions" (2). Because of the war,
"back home" lacks the necessities, the comfort,
and the conveniences that make home home: Santigie tells Miss
Claudine: "We don't have food, electricity, or water
to drink, not even to wash with" (2). Thus the
idea of "back home" as a "wasteland"
is given further clarification when Foday refers to the
"disorder and cut and join way of lives back home"
(4). The notion of "disorder" must be highlighted
here because it provides possibilities for us to see what
"back home" (in the throes of a war) repres! ents--a
place not only of physical dislocation and violence, but one
of emotional and psychological (the very "cut and join
way of lives" or what Claudine refers to as ["the
catalog of woes"]) trauma and disruption. Paradoxically,
while the war destroys the notion of home, it also extends
the idea of home as comfort and protection where "Cousin
Baby and her children" (8) could live in a home
with other members of the family.
The second notion of home the story explores is that of
"home abroad." Like "back home," "home
abroad" also has its disorder and semblances of
a "wasteland." For example, "home abroad"
has its "unsightly heap of unwashed dishes, open
drawers and cupboards, yesterday's newspaper, last week's
magazines, used candy wrappers, Foday's shirt and slippers
laying in majestic abandon" (5). In fact more importantly,
Miss Claudine states that she had "neither the time nor
the energy to bring order to chaos threatening to take over
their townhouse" (5). Thus, the disorder that
marks "back home" is replicated in the the
lack of "order" and the presence of "chaos"
that defines "home abroad." In a way,
"home abroad" reflects a picture of a domestic "wasteland"
characterized by marital fighting, wrangling, bickerings and
the related lack of domestic peace they engender. If "back
home" is disorder, "home abroad" is dysfunctional.
T! his dysfunctional mode is even demonstrated in the fact
that in the world of the story, Foday the father never interacts
with his children. This dysfunctional wasteland of "home
abroad" is further captured by the "inside
of the townhouse [which] was untidy" (13) and the "domestic
spat" was "sending the home into slow disrepair"
(13). This "disrepair" that characterizes "home
abroad" (represented by the town house) is vividly
represented in the following manner: "The toilet
remained unfixed, like the warped tiles on the floor, the
doorknobs of the children's bedroom doors and the choked garbage
disposal" (13). What a wasteland of a home indeed!
Thus, "home abroad," just like "back home," has
its own emotional and psychological disruptions and disasters,
ones that reflect the state of war.
Importantly the war that characterizes "back home"
also in a way defines "home abroad," although in
a different sense. The home of Claudine and Foday is a home
at war. In this sense, the idea of war that characterizes
"home abroad" suggests, after all, that "home
abroad" is just like (minus the physical brutalities,
the rape, and displacements of the civil war) "back
home." The military jets, the smoke and explosions, the
fires that describe the war back home have their other manifestation in
the different kind of war in "home abroad." One
thing is certain about "home abroad"--there
is no peace in this home, a situation that mirrors the lack
of peace on a larger scale as represented in "back home."
The domestic relationship and encounters between Foday and
Claudine are mostly defined by metaphors of war: Foday "was
armed with an assorted array of examples from history,
tradition and common sense" to confront Claudine
with issues affecting their home. Claudine for her part confronted
Foday with "questions [that] exploded in quick succession
behind Foday's head like concussion grenades" (9,
emphasis added). In fact continuing with the military metaphor
that defines "home abroad" as a war zone, the
questions which Claudine "had fired .
. off" were a sort of a "surprise attack"
to Foday, an attack that completely took Foday off his strategy.
In fact, "She stopped her advance into the kitchen and,
turret-like, wheeled herself around her trained eyes on Foday
who, beginning to recover from his surprise, jumped up as
if ready to do battle" (10, emphasis added).
Their verbal battle is referred to as a "fight"
(10).
The battle in "home abroad" centers around authority,
responsibility, obligation and leadership attributes, which
mostly "back home" must be exercised by the man.
In "home abroad" the idea of power and control,
authority and responsibility, on the domestic front
is more diffuse, the reason perhaps for the constant friction
between Foday and Claudine. So part of the battle
in "home abroad" is a gender warfare: who is the
master (please forgive my gendered term here). Thus, this
war relates directly to the questioning of Foday's
masculinity. Is Foday a man--meaning that is he in
control of his house? Or has he been emasculated and feminized
by Claudine who presumably controls "home abroad"?
Here lies the war, the bigger war that connects both "back
home" and "home abroad." Sissy
baby states, "Do you now wear a lappa (skirt) in America?
Must we be afraid to call on you whom we fed?
The reference to the "skirt"! suggests the question
over Foday's masculinity by his family "back home."
Foday replies to Sissy Baby's question, stating, "I
am the man in this house, even in America" (8,
author's emphasis). Foday's emphatic reclamation of his
supposed derailed masculinity "even in America"
proves that, at least to his family "back home", he
has not been domesticated. In short, his manhood is intact. But
the battle in "home abroad" is not that simplistic
as Foday's emphatic answer may want to suggest. Power
here is shared and Claudine has her own balance of control,
a control she guides ferociously refusing to be the
housewife that mostly "back home" would define
her place. That "Claudine refused to
cook" for Foday ruptures the "normal"
gendered role the housewife would be expected to perform "back
home." We subtly learn where power lies in "home
abroad" when the narrative provides this clue: "Claudine
was the reality of his life, evident in the arrangement
of the furniture, reflected in the bold colors of their
home's interior wall paint, and certainly prominently placed
because of her portrait with the watchful look hung midway
on the staircase wall and seemed to follow Foday as he climbed
up to their bedroom" (14). Claudine's "watchful
look", her gaze, symbolizes more than a gaze. It codes
the power dynamics in this home.
What makes the story very rich in its treatment of home
is the way it ties, very obviously, the categories of home
and family. A story about family--because the notion
of home inevitably always involves notions of the family.
In a way, the domestic war between Foday and Claudine in
"home abroad" concerns the debate over the extended
and the nuclear family as they relate to the concept of home.
For Foday, the extended family, which includes large
number of family members comprising several generations,
constitutes the family and home. For Claudine, the nuclear
family, consisting of few members (usually two parents,
and a limited number of children) constitutes home.
And here lies the tension that the story explores. For Foday,
"home" which he refers to as "household"
is larger: "Family for me doesn't just mean you and the
kids. I grew up in a very large household where we learned
to share what we had; we cared for e! ach other; one man's
blessings were everybody's blessings" (11). The overall
idea the short story raises are about "obligations"
(3, 4) and "responsib[ility]" (4) about home.
And for Foday, "back home" demands sacrifice. He
talks about support for "back home to his family";
wants to "make sure that his family back home was not
starving" (10). For Claudine, family must be about her,
her kids, and Foday. These two fundamental approaches to the
notion of home and family accentuate the battle in "home
abroad."
In spite of the way I have analyzed these two homes the
story explores, these boundaries are rather tenuous in the
text. The mere presence of "back home" and "home
abroad" suggests that there is no such thing as
a stable home (and family). There is, the story seems directly
to be suggesting, that there is anything but stable about
home, even when explained through the opposition of "back"
and "abroad." In way, the story further directly
suggests that that the notions of "back home"
and "home abroad" are not mutually exclusive,
but that they are closely related and dependent on each
other. They intersect. Thus, the presence of "back
home" interfering into "home abroad" symbolized
by "Foday's countless sisters, brothers, nieces, aunts
and uncles [home]" who intrude into the "home abroad
of Claudine. Even Foday thinks that "back home"
must be in "home abroad" by the fact that he craves
his home food: "there was no rice and no soup of an!
y kind, not even a plastic container containing a frozen,
week-old cassava leaves that he could throw into the microwave"
(9). To him, this is "utterly absurd" (9).
Home is more than a physical location; it is a psychological,
emotional, and psychic space that no category of "back
and "abroad" can separate; it is a state
(and space) of mind, even (to Foday) a culinary
one. Perhaps it is Claudine who tells us most vividly
about the very porous borders between "back home"
and "home abroad." She comes to this realization
in hindsight, one in which she had believed that she could
separate the notions of "back" and "abroad"
from home. The narrator tells us of Claudine's thoughts: "Living
abroad then meant something: physical distance, breathing
space between her and the family back home. But not anymore.
Communications technology has made family back home permanent
hutch-hikers in their lives abroad. They could be reached
and touched at anytime" (4, emphasis added). Thus,
Claudine realizes that home is no longer a concept defined
by separate spaces of "back" and "abroad,"
but rather one that transgresses and crosses borders. In short,
home becomes an intersection.
Hollist in an email response to the foregrounding of
the theme of stereotypes, a foregrounding that he thinks minimizes
the other salient issues the story engages, states, "I'm
most interested in explaining how individuals deal with the
many ways in which back home and abroad daily intersect"
(Pede Response To Marda, Leonenet, Monday June 30, 2003).
The idea of intersection plays a very central role in the
way the story configures home. This configuration is
very apparent in the very title of the story. In a way, the
title reads like a single word BackHomeAbroad, with no separation
in the three categories, suggesting the intersection among
them, or as Claudine would say the categories would
"be reached and touched at anytime." The title,
therefore, illustrates very strikingly how the concept of
home becomes a frontier, with boundary lines that intersect
and touch "back" and "abroad." Thus, home
becomes a place of transitions, transactions, migration, and
movement with no fixed and no precise boundaries:
"BackHomeAbroad" as a title suggests that boundaries
about home are not permanent, but they shift. The title also
suggests that home (for Foday and Claudine and diasporic
Sierra Leoneneans) is no singular, but plural. Home does
not exclude but it includes; home consists of dividing and connecting lines,
ones that significantly capture the migrant existence and
identities of diasporic Sierra Leoneneans who constantly
negotiate between back and abroad as they try to make
meaning out of their lives abroad. Home, therefore, becomes
a place of transitions and contacts ("back"
will always touch "abroad." What diasporic Sierra
Leoneneans will have to live and deal with is this constant
tension and the experiences it facilitates. Thus in way the
story focuses on the struggle to reconcile,
cooper! ate, incorporate (and not separate) theses opposite
and mutual demands.
In BackHomeAbroad" home becomes (to refer to a word
I have used recently in a posting in Leonenet) nomadic,
in a way, with no fixed and permanent location, abode, or
settlement; home becomes a migratory concept--between physical,
emotional, psychological states of mind and spaces; it shifts,
it is moblie and itinerant. Home becomes a dynamic place that
is mediated through movement, through the journey back-and-forth;
home becomes paradoxically a center with no center; if it
is a center at all, it is center that shifts. By
centering the concept of home in the title Hollist encourages
us to rethink and reconsider what exactly home means; he throws
doubt about the common assumptions of home as fixed and located.
In his hands, home becomes diasporic with possibilities of
displacement and return, change and adaptation; home
is not unidirectional involving movement from one point
to another but a multi directional and plural phenomenon
involving migration and in-betweenness, which in a way all
migrants are.
The story is very astutely written. The narrative voice
is deep and expansive, allowing for multiple revelations and
insights. It engages many cultural issues that are not
given convincing explorations--but perhaps the genre in which
the story is written, the short story, could not allow for
such. The characters are fresh, they move and breathe and
appeal to our own sense of in-betweenness as we constantly
move back and forth to the notion of home as back and abroad.
A nice addition to the literature of the experiences of Sierra
Leoneneans in the diaspora.
The nomad,
PB
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