Diasporic Subjectivity and Homing Desire in Fruit of the Lemon

Abstract

Mass migrations and increasing movements of people, particularly after the World Wars from the former colonies to the colonial centres, have formed multicultural societies and complex diasporas. Since diaspora experience includes physical, emotional, and psychological border crossings, all essentializing distinctions between the colonizer and the colonized, centre and periphery, the self and the other, belonging and unbelonging based on the assumption about spaces being a fixed source for a coherent identity are deconstructed in liminal diasporic spaces. Thus, diasporic subjectivity is to be found in a web of relations and signifiers. Diasporic self combines diverse cultures, histories, and languages within itself, but it belongs to none of them totally. Hence, subjectivity, belonging and home turn into challenging terms, meanings of which change constantly according to the context they are used in. This diasporic liminality leads to homing desire, a kind of struggle to claim a homeland, a desire to belong. The aim of this paper is to discuss the idea of diasporic subjectivity and homing desire in relation to the novel Fruit of the Lemon by British Caribbean writer Andrea Levy. This paper is an attempt to trace the process of subjectification in a diasporic context, paying particular attention to the mapping of new subject positions in multicultural spaces. The drawbacks faced by the Caribbean diasporians living in their Mother Country, Britain, their complex sense of belonging and the homing desire shaping their lives are discussed through the protagonist of the novel, Faith Jackson.