Unhomely Home, Unhomely Women: The Precariousness of Being, Belonging, and Becoming in the Sri Lankan Diasporic Fiction of Nayomi Munaweera

Abstract

This paper recognizes an existential anxiety and an estranging sense of unbecoming that postcolonial homes incur, being enunciated as “differential sites of social formation” for the disruptive discourse of global precariousness. Reading Nayomi Munaweera’s fiction, I examine how home has emerged as a conspicuous motif in which identities intersect with a quest to unlearn the political geographies of belonging in South Asian Literature. In Island of A Thousand Mirrors (2012), home emerges a space in which exile and belonging overlap for individuals who negotiate their distorted histories and realities amidst a civil war in Sri Lanka. In the other novel, What Lies Between Us (2016), there is both resistance and virulent anger against the irreconcilable extremities of belonging concurrently to two homes/nations. Home emerges as an unhomely space, situated within the dilemma of becoming and unbecoming. Despite the idealized longing involved, conjuring the “archeologies of desire” accentuates an inescapable failure of reconciliation between an imagined belonging and the shifting paradigms of unsettled identities. Within these irate resistances of unbecoming selves in the literary space of South Asia, home is a precarious locus of discontent which reveals a systemic psychological lacuna in the critical sensibilities of postcolonial belonging.