Kunapipi XXV:2

CYNTHIA SUGARS

'There's No Place Like Home': The Unhomely Paradox of André Alexis's Childhood

[H]ow to belong not only in the legal and civic sense of carrying a Canadian passport, but also in another sense of feeling at 'home' and at ease. It is only in belonging that we will eventually become Canadian. (Philip 16)

[I]f you are Canadian, home is a place that is not home to you it is even less your home than the imperial centre you used to dream about. Try to speak the words of your home and you will discover that you do not know them. (Lee 46­47)

Salman Rushdie's little guidebook to The Wizard of Oz contains some compelling observations about diasporic experience. Dorothy's wistful longing for 'somewhere over the rainbow' testifies to 'the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots' (23). The Wizard of Oz, Rushdie attests, exemplifies 'a great tension between these two dreams', but ultimately it 'is unarguably a film about the joys of going away'. What the film and the song really attest to, however, is that, despite the power of the ruby slippers, there is, ultimately, 'no place like home' (57). In other words, the place we call home, in the final analysis, cannot offer the sought-for psychic comfort of familiarity and 'homeliness'.

The engagement with questions of home and homeland has formed a central theme in postcolonial writings, especially those written from within a context of diaspora or exile, which in a sense is why Rushdie playfully attests that Over the Rainbow ought to be 'the anthem of all the world's migrants' (23). This is certainly true of what is being termed the new 'international' literatures in English, which Bruce King identifies as 'a literature of cosmopolitans rather than of ethnic immigrants with separatist cultures that are in conflict with their new homes' (19).¹ Certainly writers such as Rushdie, Ishiguro, Ondaatje, and others have been overtly identified in this way.