Kunapipi XXVI:1

EVELYN O’CALLAGHAN
Settling into ‘Unhomeliness’: Displacement in Selected Caribbean and Caribbean Canadian Women’s Writing

Faced with horrific daily evidence of the consequences of polarisation on the ‘grounds’ of difference (racial, ethnic, religious), I find myself increasingly emphasising culture contact and transculturation in my teaching practice. This is a reasonable enough focus in the Caribbean context, and it certainly is appropriate to my history as a product of such processes: my parents were born in two different countries, I was born in a third, brought up in a fourth and live and work in yet another; my children were born in one country, of parents born in two other countries, and they too will very likely end up living and working somewhere else. And so the cycle continues. Hence I am drawn to texts which feature migration journeys and the interculturation, painfully or positively depicted, which follows.

There is no shortage of this kind of writing: indeed Homi Bhabha has commented on ‘the deep stirring of the “unhomely”’ in current fiction (141). For him, the migration experience — that ‘estranging sense of relocation of the home’ (141) — is the paradigmatic post-colonial experience. And given its genesis in the history of migration, the (forced or voluntary) movement and contact of peoples and cultures has been a constant in the story which the Caribbean tells about itself. However, this is an open-ended story, for as Stuart Hall reminds us, the migration journey — then as now — was a two-way affair. Over the course of centuries of contact, conflict and creolisation amongst imported peoples, the Caribbean began to export a new set of cultural and racial ‘products’. So in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example Caribbean whites who travelled ‘back’ to the ancestral homeland discovered that they were no longer expatriate Europeans but something else: Barbadians or Jamaicans or Antiguans, or more generally, West Indians Creoles (Watson 30).

The exportation of peoples and cultures, then, as well as their importation, is inherent in the construction of Caribbean identity, so that in the former imperial centre (Britain) as well as in what many term the new imperial centre (North America), Caribbean peoples have established their presence, politely — or not so politely — but insistently. West Indians in London or Toronto or New York are acknowledged, recognised, even granted ‘nuff respect’. But are they ‘at home’, and if so, what constitutes this state? Again, one can look to the texts of migrant/diaspora writers for answers. How does their work configure what Bhabha calls ‘the unhomely moment’, that post-colonial condition of ‘not at homeness’ in the old world that is their new home?