Beyond Sedentarism and Nomadology: Yaa Gyasi’s HOMEGOING and the Ambivalent Desire for Home

Heinz, Sarah

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16172

Beyond Sedentarism and Nomadology: Yaa Gyasi’s HOMEGOING and the Ambivalent Desire for Home

Authors :

Abstract

Home is an auratic term that is often connected to positive feelings and experiences like comfort, warmth, or safety. In such associations, home is set up as a pre-existing space, an organic community, and an inborn feeling, i.e. an allegedly natural experience that can become threatened by hostile outside forces. Such a sedentarist metaphysics sees mobility as a pathology or threat and rejects both homelessness and alternative notions of home. However, ideas of home have been ‘mobilised’ in nomadological approaches to home and mobility. Here, home is reassessed as a dangerous fantasy, and a radical homelessness and nomadic subjectivity turns into a progressive source of resistance to essentialist sedentarism and state control. This binary opposition has led to certain impasses in the discussion of home that the article traces, to then propose a third way of conceptualising home in a close reading of Yaa Gyasi’s novel HOMEGOING (2016) along the lines of Brah’s notion of a ‘homing desire’ (1996). Using the initial two protagonists, the two sisters Effia and Esi, and their respective chapters as representative examples for the novel as a whole, the close readings show that Effia’s story critically comments on organic, sedentarist notions of home, while Esi’s story underlines that celebrations of nomadism and homelessness are equally problematic. For both characters and their descendants, home is elusive, fluid, and far from unproblematic, but at the same time, home is something longed for and desired.