Home and Belonging: A Postmodern Perspective in Nadine Gordimer’s
“The Ultimate Safari”
The preoccupation with the concept of home and belonging is a familiar aspect of literature produced by writers who were former colonizers or colonized. The writers used the genre of fiction as a means of exploring the concepts of dislocation as a result of migration. A reexamination of the relations between literature and history is a characteristic of postmodern era. History is thus considered, not only as the recording of events of the past, but as the narration of the events of the past. Postmodern situation where identity is viewed as shapeless, shifting and moving beyond fixity, the idea of belonging and home is changing simultaneously. Nadine Gordimer through her short story “The Ultimate Safari” not only narrates the story of Mozambique and a fleeing family of refugees but she also gives universal portrayal of the tragedy, homelessness and alienation wrought by civil war. This study aims to explore the aspects of home and belonging in the short story by Nadine Gordimer.
A ‘house’ is an object; a part of the environment, on the other hand home is best conceived of as a kind of relationship between people and their environment. It is an emotionally based and meaningful relationship between dwellers and their dwelling places. But today the meaning of home has changed:
The phenomenon of home … used to be an overwhelming and in exchangeable something to which we were subordinate and from which our way of life was oriented and directed…. Home nowadays is a distorted and perverted phenomenon. It is identical to a house; it can be anywhere. It is subordinate to us, easily measureable in numbers of money value. It can be exchanged like a pair of shoes. (qtd. In Dovey 1)
In his afterword to the collection, “The Home: Words, Interpretations, Meanings, Environments”, David Benjamin considered five aspects of meaning associated with home: “the word, the descriptive use of the word, the word in psychiatric research, the empirically derived cultural phenomenon and the juridical meaning of home” (Fox O’ Mahony1). Postmodern theologian Mark Taylor describes the postmodern self as a “wanderer”, a “drifter”, “attached to no home”, and “always suspicious of stopping, staying and dwelling” (Walsh 2).
Home is a highly complex system of ordered relations with place, an order that orients us in space, in time, and in society. Yet the phenomenon of home is more than the experience of being oriented within a familiar order; it also means to be identified with the place in which we dwell. As Dovey states that “we can think of home as a place to preserve connections between our past and present, but it is also the place where we must continually reconstruct these connections”. (4)
Identity implies a certain bonding or mergence of person and place such that the place takes its identity from the dweller and the dweller takes his or her identity from the place. There is integrity, a connectedness between the dweller and dwelling. Individual interpretations often argue for a deeper connection between the home and the human spirit. Jung has argued that self-expression in built form is one way in which the self-archetype becomes manifest. He has described the construction of his own house as a “concretization of the individuation process” (Dovey 6).
Various factors can be responsible for the loss of connection with home; the loss can be both physical and mental. “There is no clear dividing line between voluntary and forced migration. Conflict and violence that make daily life intolerable may be the critical factor which triggers a family’s decision to move” (Bakewell 18). And war is one of the strongest factors which compel people to migrate.
Home as order and as identity are strongly interrelated; yet whereas order is concerned with “where” we are at home, identity broaches the questions of “who” we are, as expressed in the home, and “how” we are at home. The motif of home holds a significant position in the post colonial literature:
In the postcolonial literature, homes and dwellings are the geographic sites in which larger political, historical, and national allegories are cast. . . . If colonialism created a “home away from home” and metaphorized this spatial division in psychoanalysis through the relationship of the heimlich to the unheimlich, then part of the postcolonial literature’s agenda is unveiling that behind the construction of hominess abroad lies something fundamentally unhomely. (Azam iv)
The research paper traces the motif of home in the short story “The Ultimate Safari” by Nadine Gordimer. By the psychoanalytic study of the “grandmother” through the concept of Heidegger and Freud’s “unheimlich or uncanny”, the paper deciphers the meaning of home in the postcolonial and postmodern context. In “The Uncanny,” Freud writes that the uncanny is “actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed” (Coon n.pg). This once familiar and now uncanny thing or memory returns in distorted form into consciousness, causing feelings of unease, fear, and dread. The uncanny offers us a way to think about the relation between foreign and familiar, and how repression causes the familiar to return as something foreign. In the light of the concepts of postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha, the research paper deals with the motif of home through Bhabha’s notions of ‘unhomeliness,’ ‘in-between space,’ and ‘hybrid identity’ of the unhomely individuals through a socio-racial analysis. This research paper deals with the meaning of home for the grandmother and the child (narrator) who is a refugee in Mozambique.
Nadine Gordimer, whose narratives blur the boundaries of history and fiction, has created debate on the issue of the values of the past, national culture and political situations. This writer is considered by many as an interpreter of South African reality, and many read her fiction primarily for its vivid record of life in a controversial country. Clingman affirms that “Gordimer gives us an extraordinarily unique insight into historical experience in the period in which she has been writing” (Molina 1).
The psychoanalysis of grandmother reveals her “uncanny” feelings, which reflect a strong sense of strangeness and alienation. The journalist’s question triggered off some emotions, which were lying dormant in grandmother. She had long suppressed her emotions. She had seen great tragedy and devastation. She had lost her children to the war. Mozambique holds nothing for her. She had to create her own world where her family was. She thought only of her grandchildren that they should be educated and achieve all their goals because the narrator tells that “there was no school, no church anymore in our village” (Gordimer 2). She had no dreams, no hopes. She certainly did not want to go back to Mozambique. It was once her home, but now it was only a graveyard of her loved ones. The brick structure cannot be home for everyone: “home as order has a strong cognitive element, home as identity is primarily affective and emotional, and reflecting the adage home is where the heart is” (Dovey 5)
This “unheimlich” is bound up with homelessness because at its core, it is triggered by the revelation that at the heart of what we call home is not comfortable domesticity, but an estranging, foreign place. Heidegger’s formulation of the unheimlich contributes much to the historical nature of the uncanny and its postcolonial employment. Heidegger contends that: “That kind of Being-in-the-world which is tranquillized and familiar is a mode of Dasein’s uncanniness, not the reverse. . . . The ‘not-at-home’ must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon” (Azam 16). David Farrell Krell remarks: “marked by the uncanny discovery, we are not at home in the world” (qtd in Azam 16). Heidegger not only provides us with a mode in which to examine how elements of everyday life are marked by the unheimlich, but also allows us collectively to view the unheimlich as “a metaphor for a fundamentally unlivable modern condition” (Azam 16).
Anthony Vidler explains that our uncanny Being in the world may also be attributed to more material elements: “Estrangement and unhomeliness have emerged as the intellectual watchwords of [the twentieth] century . . . generated sometimes by war, sometimes by the unequal distribution of wealth” ( qtd. In Azam 17). Vidler understands modernity as commensurate with the unheimlich as both literal homelessness and displacement and the more metaphysical state of being ill at ease with the world.
“The Ultimate safari” does not present the stereotypical colonized woman in the character of the grandmother. On the other hand her character represents new identity of women that defy traditional essentialist ones. The grandmother is a lady of great strength – both physical and mental. The migration raises a question that where is their real home? Seemingly, neither culture feels like home. This feeling of homelessness, of being caught between two clashing cultures, Bhabha calls “unhomeliness”, and a concept referred to as double consciousness by some postcolonial theorists. This feeling or perception of abandonment by both cultures causes the colonial subject (the colonized) to become a psychological refugee. One of Bhabha’s major contributions to postcolonial studies is his belief that “there is always ambivalence at the site of colonial dominance” (Jamili and Rad 310). This ambivalence is very much obvious in the narrator. At the beginning of the story the narrator says: “we wanted to go away from where our mother wasn’t and where we were hungry. We wanted to go where there were no bandits and there was food” (Gordimer 2), while towards the end of the story she says: “I will go back … after the war, if there are no bandits any more” (10). In the case of grandmother this ambivalence is much more psychological. But various factors made her bound to say: “there is nothing. No home” (20). This dynamic, interactive, and tension-packed process Bhabha names “hybridity”. Bhabha himself says that: “hybridization is a discursive, enunciatory, cultural, subjective process having to do with the struggle around authority, authorization, deauthorization, and the revision of authority. It’s a social process. It’s not about persons of diverse cultural tastes and fashions” (Jamili and Rad 310). As a result, according to Bhabha, a feeling of unhomeliness develops in the colonized: “Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects” (Bhabha 154).
For the grandmother home had a different meaning. With all joys and poverty Mozambique used to be her true home. But the same country could not warranty her safety. The government could not save her home and children. Having settled down in a different country she got back her freedom and a new life with a dream to live for her grandchildren. These two homes taught her that home is a non reality and that no one owns a home permanently. The unhomely individual disrupts the clear-cut relationship between the dominant power and the subject. Therefore, according to Carole Boyce Davis, “the rewriting of home becomes a critical link in the articulation of a new identity and a resistance to the domination of imperial power” (Jamili and Rad 309).
The text of the short story reveals that their native house in the village was not in a very good condition, the bandits “burned the thatch and roof of the house fell in” (Gordimer 1). Without roof the house “looked as if there was no one in it” (1). The grand parents had not left a big fortune or a house; this was also a reason due to which grandmother did not want to go back.
The concept of social determinism provides a support to grandmother’s decision as it states that: “your actions can be explained by what you have undergone at the hands of others. You are not free because you are the product of what others have done to you” (McDonald n.pg). Since Behavior is explained by social factors, not by decisions, social determinism takes away this choice and eliminates the meaning of right and wrong.
Grandmother was also compelled by the social and environmental factors to leave the village as the grandmother had no food for children, “no food for grandfather and herself’ and even when the planting time came: “grandfather had no seeds to plant” (Gordimer 2). On the other hand they had food in Mozambique: “some people dug up the bare ground around the tent and planted beans and mealies and cabbage” (9). Grandmother carried bricks and fetched baskets of stones on her head in this way she had “money to buy sugar and tea and milk and soap” (9).
The trauma of migration produces a disagreement between the grandmother and the child (narrator). A possible reason for the difference in opinion about Mozambique might have to do with the generational gap between both. The narrator features fewer roots, less connection, and less experience to Mozambique. Though she had spent much time in the tent as refugees, but still she wanted to go back. She was hopeful to go back. She had developed “place attachment” with the village, the feelings that develop towards places which are very strong in head n heart. A place where his grandfather would have “found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park” (Gordimer 20). Place attachment for the child (narrator) was: “potpourri of memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas, and related feelings about specific physical settings, as well as types of settings” (Hague 4). That’s why she says “I will go back” (Gordimer 10).
The grandmother’s pragmatic notion of “home”, as opposed to the narrator’s wishful fantasy is based on realistic appraisal of where her family’s best chances of survival lie. Whereas the narrator still yearns for her Mozambican home, the grandmother says that she wants to remain in South Africa where her grand children have some opportunity to learn so that they could get some job and money. Given the irresistible forces of poverty and civil war, the claims of “home” are rendered meaningless and crossing the border into south Africa an imperative that supersedes all other considerations. The entire story of an unnamed girl in some remote Mozambique village somewhere along the border between it and South Africa represents so many individual’s struggle. In giving a story to a girl who has no name, Gordimer’s purpose seemed clear: Give her, and the millions like her, a voice and a reason to be heard, a narrative to be told.
By drawing attention to the horrors of Mozambican civil war, the history of American communities divided by colonial powers, and the instability of what we call “home”, Gordimer confronts the readers with many questions. Gordimer’s contradictory response highlights an unresolved tension between, on the one hand, ‘the new racism’ of post apartheid South Africa, and on the other hand, the more sympathetic sentiments that underlie ‘The Ultimate Safari’.
Works Cited
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