Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, vol. VII, no.

1/2010

Segun Afolabi, Transnational Identity,

and the Politics of Belonging

Till KINZEL
Technische Universität Braunschweig
Englisches Seminar
Bienroder Weg 80 38106 Braunschweig Germany
till.kinzel@gmx.de

Abstract. This paper explores the implications of mass migration and the conditions of
hybridization for early 21st century Western societies in texts dealing with migrant
experiences. The novel Goodbye Lucille (2007) by the Afro-cosmopolitan writer Segun
Afolabi will be explored with respect to the crucial problem of an ethics and politics of
belonging, related to the recent controversies surrounding multiculturalism and issues of
migration. This text deals with the “in-between world” of migrants and negotiates
questions of identity, alienation and belonging in a so-called transcultural/transnational
context. The issues raised in Segun Afolabi's fiction are addressed by employing the ways
of thinking developed in political philosophy, including recent phenomenological attempts
to theorize the notion of “home” and “belonging” (e.g., by Karen Joisten, but also Martin
Heidegger) in order to deal with the complexities of the issue. The question, “What
constitutes the good life for the individual and the political community?”, needs to be
considered by taking into account the current plurality of approaches to forging identities
in the political sphere as well. The subtlety of literary accounts of this phenomenon –
literature may indeed be one of the best diagnostic instrument for studying a society –
sheds light, I suggest, on the conditions of politically relevant identity formations. A close
reading of literary texts such as those by Afolabi offers an important contribution to a
realistic, and therefore complex and complicating, account of our overall situation in the
Western world with respect to the politics of belonging.

Keywords: postcolonial literature, Heidegger, Philosophie der Heimat (Joisten), narratives

of identity, translocation

This paper explores the implications of mass migration and the

conditions of hybridization for early 21st century Western societies in
Segun Afolabi's novel Goodbye Lucille (2007). This novel dealing migrant
experiences will be explored with respect to the crucial problem of an
ethics and politics of belonging. This problem is in part related to the
recent controversies surrounding multiculturalism and issues of migration
but also points to more philosophical aspects implicit in the migrant
experience. Afolabi’s novel deals with the “in-between world” of migrants
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and negotiates questions of identity, alienation and belonging in a so-called

transcultural/transnational context, as do his short stories published in the
volume A Life Elsewhere (2006). The issues raised in Segun Afolabi's
fictions, I want to suggest, can be addressed in part by employing the ways
of thinking developed in various forms of political philosophy, including
the most recent phenomenological attempts to theorize the notion of
“home” and “belonging.” I refer here particularly to the theory developed
by the German philosopher Karen Joisten in her books Philosophie der
Heimat - Heimat der Philosophie and Aufbruch. Ein Weg in die Philosophie that has
so far remained largely unexplored in the context of postcolonial
theoretical discussions about these concepts. The question, “What
constitutes the good life for the individual and the political community?”,
needs to be sharpened by taking into account the current plurality of
approaches to forging identities in the political sphere. The subtlety of
literary accounts of this phenomenon – for literature may indeed be the
best diagnostic instrument for studying a given society – sheds light, I
suggest, on the conditions of politically relevant identity formations. A
close reading of literary texts such as those by Afolabi offers an important
contribution to a realistic account of our overall situation in the Western
world with respect to the politics of belonging.
Issues of identity play an important role in transcultural and
transnational contexts. For identities, always problematic, become
particularly conspicuous in these contexts where different identities are
brought into sharp focus. This happens due to the way different ways of
life can no longer be maintained as the unquestioned principles of a
particular tradition. There are, of course, very many and often incompatible
views on this issue that need to be negotiated by anyone who at least wants
to try to “resolve” the competing claims on his identity. Political and
religious positions range from an unquestioning affirmation of identity as
such to what Israeli politician and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky
calls “post-identity” positions (Sharanksy 3-4, 46, 66-79, 175-188). Even
within the context of multicultural theorizing there is no agreement on
fundamentals (Bissoondath IX-XVII, 90-141, 192-198). All these widely
diverging concepts of identity presuppose that it is an issue all human
beings need to address. However, they do not necessarily have to do this
by theoretical means. And even though critics of a unified concept of
identity, valorizing everything to do with difference, seem to have
multiplied in recent years, there are also critics of these so-called
postmodern concepts of culture and identity that at least pose the question
whether there can be something like difference without its shadow, namely

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identity (Larise 16). For if, that is, difference and identity necessarily go
together and affirming the one does not eliminate the other, identity
negotiations turn out to be standard operating procedure for anyone.
Negotiations of identity are therefore always situated in a field where
difference is limited by identity, so that the non-identity of identity and
non-identity is necessarily confirmed. Whereas political controversies about
multiculturalism necessarily have to focus on more abstract considerations
and principled arguments about which structures and which policies should
be established or maintained, the literary realm is a much more ambiguous
“space” whose status is somewhat precarious. For this literary “space” as
such might well be an in-between space, which, however, is not true for
political spaces such as nation states with clearly demarcated borders and
one constitutional law for their whole territories. Rejecting older ideas
about the aesthetic autonomy of works of art, postcolonial theories of
literature, in accordance with many other theoretical movements of recent
decades, tend to emphasize a whole range of non-literary contexts in their
interpretations of literary works. Especially the widespread use of the
hyphen to categorize so-called postcolonial writers can be seen as a form
of contextualization that at least some of these writers regard with a
considerable amount of scepticism, to say the least.

SEGUN AFOLABI’S FICTIONS OF DISPLACEMENT

The writer I want to focus on in this paper, Segun Afolabi, does not
make theoretical statements but rather points to possible literary models as
a source of intertextual relationships: Afolabi is reported to cherish
especially writers like Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison (Battista). In
another interview he also mentions writers such as Omar Rivabella,
Graham Greene, JM Coetzee, Lorrie Moore and Albert Camus (The
Farafinist). No clear ideological or aesthetic position emerges from this
assemblage of writers but the intimation that Afolabi understands himself
as a writer's writer who does not want to be circumscribed by one tradition,
one way of writing, one point of reference in terms of identity.
Segun Afolabi's work so far consists of a volume of short stories, A Life
Elsewhere, and a novel, Goodbye Lucille, mostly set in Berlin in 1985
(Patterson). Not all of these texts lend themselves to a treatment within the
theoretical frame I here employ. But already the very beginning of his
novel Goodbye Lucille highlights the issue that I want to call the politics of
belonging. The first sentence of the novel reads: “I left London to get away
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from myself” (1). Displacement thus sets the tone for the novel as a whole,
a displacement, however, that is not enforced by some other power but
self-induced. One might well describe Vincent's move to Berlin as a form
of freely chosen exile. As one of the few reviews of Afolabi's works so far
has it, “exile is a fundamental trope in Afolabi's stories, which tell of
displacement, dispossession and loneliness.” Among the things that people
strive for in their attempts to get along in the world are “casual sex,”
“alcohol,” “a place to call home.” In the case of the photographer Vincent,
the novel's autodiegetic narrator, it is all these three things, but especially, it
seems, “a place to call home.” This striving after “a place to call home”
points to the crucial issue of “homelessness” in late modernity and in the
early 21st century when translocations have become almost something like
standard operating procedure for ever-increasing numbers of people. In
Vincent's mind, life presents itself in spatial terms as he envisions it as a
never-ending road, in fact as “a shapeless, ragged road with turnings,
random as a game of chance” (219). This notion of a “shapeless, ragged
road” with its implications of randomness points to the underlying
structural parallels of Vincent's movements through the world to
picaresque modes of episodic narration centered around an often
somewhat marginalized narrator. It is precisely the picaresque notion of the
necessary inconclusiveness of the social integration of the individual
(Ehland 13) that links Vincent's picaresque position to his attempts to
construct a viable identity for himself. Vincent's marginality is of particular
relevance in connection with a politics of belonging that is based on
recognition as the pre-condition of participation. The fact that Vincent
switches off “at the mention of politics” indicates that he does not think
highly or at all about the political possibilities of creating a sense of
belonging (4).

PHILOSOPHICAL INTIMATIONS
OF A THEORY OF BELONGING

This period in time could be said to be the age when human beings face
the task to identify with a certain place without being completely bound to
it and determined by it. The German philosopher Karen Joisten has
offered the most intriguing reflections on the philosophy of home
(Heimat) that I know of, taking her cue from the phenomenological
analyses of human life offered by Husserl and Heidegger. It was the latter,
incidentally, who offered reflections on the connection between who we

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are and where we live, since, as Nichols comments, “how we define

ourselves stems from what we identify as our Heimat, where we dwell--not
so much physically, as affectively, as the place for which we experience
Heimweh or nostalgia, when circumstances move us elsewhere.” (Nichols
54) Heidegger has emphasised the connection between three aspects of
human life, building, dwelling, and thinking (Bauen Wohnen Denken) which
directly bears on the issue of how people relate to, and think about, places
that are not always already a “home.” For Heidegger, the relationship of
human beings to places and through places to spaces resides in dwelling
(Heidegger 32). However, Heidegger’s language – and that implies his
thought – shows that his approach to the issue of belonging is still too
abstract, for it is tied to essentialist concepts. These essentialist concepts
appear in Heidegger’s search for an “essence” of dwelling and belonging
(Heidegger 36), an essence that is precisely subverted by narratives that
dramatize an individual’s, e.g. Vincent’s, search for a “place to call home.”
“Home” in the sense developed by Joisten, at least in a preliminary
fashion, implies that it refers to a space (Heimat) that includes a place
(Heim) in which one can live, where one can feel sheltered (Joisten,
Philosophie 19). According to this concept of home, a home is the condition
for the possibility to feel at home; this means that human beings can only
develop a relation to a home by leading a kind of sheltered life (Geborgenheit
is the untranslatable German term used in this context). In Joisten's
understanding, this does not in any way exclude some form of movement.
On the contrary--and this is an important point, because it enables one to
think beyond the opposition of rootedness and mobility. However, Joisten
acknowledges the dilemma of the philosopher who wants to reflect on the
issue of home and belonging in the face of an intellectual state of mind that
prioritizes homelessness, displacement and in-between-ness. This,
however, would seem to be problematic in so far as human beings need
“home” as a condition of his life within certain limits to which they are
always already bound. That human beings want to be at home somewhere,
that human beings are by nature beings that need to bind themselves to
some home from which they can also explore the world (Joisten, Philosophie
24). Home, on this understanding, is a primary phenomenon that can be
identified as the familiar, that which is not strange but which exists in a
necessary tension with what is not familiar, for home can also be that
which one longs for, so that it can be described as a strange place that
implies the possible and the doable (Joisten, Philosophie 27). Home, on this
interpretation, turns out to be a multi-dimensional concept. It is located in

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an in-between space where tensions between security and insecurity,

Geborgenheit and Ungeborgenheit, intimacy and distance, trust and distrust play
themselves out. Security is always questioned by new disruptions and can
only be regained by inegrating the contradictions that are inherent to the
complex phenomena of “home.” (Joisten, Philosophie 27) For Joisten,
human beings are defined by their potential to move between the poles of
security and insecurity, satisfaction and longing, of binding oneself and of
saying goodbye, of one's own and of the (alien) other (Joisten, Philosophie
28). Joisten emphasises important tensions underlying human life. The
concepts she explores in her reflections can be usefully employed as
categories for a better understanding of texts such as Afolabi’s that deal
with these tensions in a sophisticated way.

DIMENSIONS OF SPACE IN AFOLABI’S GOODBYE LUCILLE

The obese photographer Vincent, in Afolabi's Goodbye Lucille does not

appear to be a very thorough thinker, but he occasionally reflects on his
position in the world. He does not, however, want to be drawn to talk
about his African past. E.g., when asked about his origins by his girlfriend’s
mother, Frau Schlegel, he first has to explain the basic facts of geography
but then refuses to go into details. When his girlfriend Claudia remarks, “It
must be interesting, Nigeria, so close to the equator. The climate. All that
variety,” he merely responds with a shrugging acknowledgment, “It's okay”
(151). And it is only when he travels to Africa/Nigeria, in order to visit his
uncle, who is very ill, that he notes that it is the streets of Berlin, his
present place of living, which are more familiar to him than anything in
Nigeria: “The streets of Berlin were more familiar to me now that anything
here, and it discomfited me” (269). The unfamiliarity of the African
surroundings prods him to think of his destiny, even though what he had
tried to get away from was not so much the place as the people connected
to this place, particularly his uncle Raymond: “I had tried to get away, but
where was I going? Was there any sense in any of it?” (272f.). These
thoughts get into his mind quite literally “in the middle of nowhere” (273),
in a place which his uncle and aunt had been unsuccessfully trying to re-
find again for many years. This place in-between rocks somewhere out in
the country, next to a lake, acquires an almost mythical aura, when Vincent
walks back up from the water's edge and sees the members of his family as
shapes. Vincent repeats a cycle of remembrance in his mind when he
realizes that he might not return to this place, as already his mother did not

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return, but that he would certainly remember it. Returning to the place one
left is always an option, it seems, even though the return need not take
place in spatial terms. In fact, as Vincent's aunt says, leaving a place does
not mean leaving your memories behind: “You know, when you leave a
place, if you move away in favour of another, you can never completely
forget the first.” The translocation his aunt is speaking of does not do away
with the place one leaves behind. Translocation does not mean a complete
rupture with the earlier spatial dimensions of one's life. She goes on to say
that the former place “is like a stone tied around your heart. It keeps you
from floating away from yourself, from losing something essential that
once belonged to you.” (249) This statement of Vincent's aunt points to
the ambiguous valorization of translocations in so far as they could seem to
be liberating to the person who leaves one place in favour of another. But
this liberating aspect of translocations may also be very limited since it is
only a liberation in terms of space not in terms of mind – translocated
bodies are not freefloating entities but tied by mental and/or emotional
strings to one's essential being. Place here is encoded as something both
spatial and mental – place maintains its notional hold even on those whose
life consists of a series of translocations.
The transitoriness of his life in terms of place is something that is taken
for granted by Vincent's uncle who asks him: “What will you do when you
finish in Germany?” Vincent, however, rejects the implications of his
uncle's question (which point not so much to new places to go to but to a
return to his homeland where he still believes to have some influence that
might procure a job for Vincent). He does not understand his uncle's use
of the term “finish,” for he seems to regard Berlin as his new home: “It's
where I live. I've made no plans to live anywhere else.” (257) Vincent is
obviously not very enthusiastic about Berlin – it just happens to be the
place where he lives. He recognizes the fact that his uncle Raymond “was
always on the move, forever changing his place in the world,” thus
representing a perfect example for an existence defined or determined by
translocations galore. Vincent is not sure about the motivation behind his
uncle's restlessness; he offers two conjectures: 1) love of adventure, 2)
inability to settle (164). In contrast to his aunt's emphasis on the fact that
one cannot ever forget the place that one leaves or left behind, Vincent
attributes to his uncle the desire to start all over again. Translocating is here
connected to the possibility or the promise of “Living life from a clean
slate” (164). It is this tension between remembering and renewal which
seems to be a key feature of human life in the context of (not only

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postcolonial) translocations. Translocations are never simply changes of

place, but changes of memory, re-creations of memories in which the
constructed meanings of identity narratives become encoded.
Even though it may be appealing to consider the urban space of a city
like Berlin, in the words of the postmodern world traveller Pico Iyer, as a
“space between,” “the space between the home [the refugee or immigrant
has] left and the new life he’s hoping to create,” it is still a place with a
particular history, a particular, not indistinguishably globalized cityscape
(Iyer 49). This history does not dominate life in the city but still remains an
ominous presence – in the case of Afolabi’s Berlin this history is present
through the rumours of neo-Nazi motives behind the assassination of
Social Democratic politician Henkelmann who is found murdered in the
Berlin village of Lübars, of all places. (It's just a rumour as the crime later
turns out to be connected to Henkelmann's habit of soliciting certain kinds
of sexual services). To negotiate the nature of this place, however, is first
and foremost the task of those who tell stories, and in Afolabi’s stories in
the novel it becomes quite difficult to learn anything about what lies
behind the surfaces of everyday life, to decode the meaning of all the many
signs that make up the world of immigrant life but that do not seem to
cohere. Berlin, as it were, is in semiotic turmoil.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S CONSCIOUSNESS

Vincent the photographer sees many things but does not make any
attempts to make these impressions cohere and analyse them within the
context of a theoretical framework. So what we learn about the goings-on
in Berlin is not systematically linked to political or social issues. Politics
appears more like an accident. This is illustrated by the way the murder of
the Social Democrat politician Heinrich Henkelmann is treated. It also
shows in the way Vincent gets involved with asylum seekers from all kinds
of countries. For some unexplained reason he wants to take their
photographs but when asked by one of them, Arî, a Kurdish refugee, for
his reason to do so, he cannot offer a plausible answer at first: “It's my job.
And I want to.” (32) When the Kurdish Asylbewerber (asylum seeker) insists
that Vincent should let him know when he realizes why he took the
photographs, Vincent is finally compelled to reveal some of his concerns:
“I think I want to find out why people leave places. Their impulses. What
makes them get up and go . . . What that can do to a person. I'm still not
clear about . . . Do you see what I mean?” (33) In Vincent's way of looking

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at the issue of migration, agency is attributed to the migrants, he wants to

find out what makes them leave a place, without, however, reflecting on
how this could possibly be portrayed in a photograph.
Vincent does not possess any kind of political awareness so that
political issues effectively become relegated to the margins of the narrative.
Still, on various occasions these political issues cannot be ignored even by
Vincent, as in the case of the politician's murder, the suicide by “jumping
to conclusion” of a Kurdish asylum seeker, and finally in the case of the
coup d'état in the African country of his birth, leading to a forced
interruption of any communication between him and his uncle and aunt.
This interruption due to political upheavals the precise nature of which is
never revealed happens precisely when Vincent's refusal to communicate
with his uncle and aunt has finally given way to some kind of
understanding between them. Thus, the narrative underlines the
tenuousness of interpersonal communication both on the level of family
relationships and in terms of the larger political picture.
One might say that Vincent's political consciousness sticks to the
photographic surface of things, a random sequence of impressions and
pictures that may or may not make sense. Vincent does not link the
random sequence of impressions to any ideological concerns; he also does
not interpret his own situation in any way politically. When he is in fact
confronted with issues of race – in the Strandbad Wannsee, mostly – this is
merely mentioned in passing by him. In contrast, the issue of his obesity
and the self-consciousness that goes with it seems to be much more
important to his sense of identity. There is thus never a hint on Vincent's
part to any desire for political recognition, for political participation in the
society in which he lives. It is not, in fact, clear whether Vincent's identity
can be described in terms of hybridity – at least he does not regard himself
as a hybrid person. For him, this issue simply does not exist. What seems
to be clear, though, is that Vincent’s life can be said to be a clear example
of a “transnational biography” that is characteristic for the new world
literature in the age of globalization (Sturm-Trigonakis 199).

IDENTITY, SPACE, TOPOGRAPHY AND INTERTEXTUALITY

The “fascination with borders and belonging” that Christina Patterson

rightly discovers in Afolabi's writing, is equally apparent in his story stories
(Patterson, Afolabi, A Life). Afolabi shows a keen awareness of the
perplexities of diasporic life and this constitutes a major asset of his

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writings. He does not belabour any ideologial points but rather seems to
employ the ductus obliquus in more hinting than highlighting tensions and
feelings of unpleasantness. Telling stories of identity always already implies
the negotiation of difference in time and place so that, in the course of this
on-going negotiation, we turn out not to be “but creatures of our origins” –
as e.g. the narrator in the novel No New Land by the Canadian writer M. G.
Vassanji says (Vassanji 9) – but creatures whose temporal and spatial
origins cannot be made to go away completely. This problematic is sure to
remain a permanent feature of the transnational world as it seems to be of
continual concern to writers like Afolabi who neither complain about
homelessness, nor offer nostalgia as a way to cope with the feelings of loss.
Homelessness is a necessary condition of life in a transnational world, but
it is not a condition that determines people's life completely. Vincent for
one thus seems to feel neither particularly rooted nor uprooted--looking
for a sense of home, achieving Geborgenheit, is surely important but cannot
ever succeed once and for all. We can, however, say that by retelling the
episodic events of his life, by presenting his assorted observations and
memories and weaving them into a narrative that is framed by the
“goodbye” of the novel's title, Vincent achieves some measure of
autonomy, appropriating the spaces he inhabits by narrative means, even
occasionally (perhaps accidentally) changing actual topographical features
of his fictional Berlin so that the U-Bahn station Krumme Lanke has two
exits instead of just one (189). By changing the actual topographical
features of Berlin the German city he subtly undercuts his fiction's
appearance of referentiality, highlighting the constructed nature of the
cityscape he inhabits or moves through (Piatti 26-31). Despite the refracted
nature of Afolabi’s narrative, he pinpoints key features of middle European
life in the 1980s. The way in which he does this is to offer his fictions as a
foil for closer observation of the faultlines of European culture, in much
the same way that issues of representation are embedded in the fictional
presentation of so-called third-world countries and provide “narrative forms
of knowledge.” (Nünning 66).
Vincent clearly looks for a way to position himself through narrative,
thereby constructing his identity not as something fixed once and for all
but as an identity in becoming. His position as a “migrant observer,” of the
migrant as observer, on the margins of German society helps him to
register events that people belonging to the majority population normally
would not note. In line with his job as a photographer, Vincent observes
Berlin through a camera eye. But although he can look at things without

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blinders, the sheer semiotic overkill is too much for him to make more
than a fleeting sense out of the many pictures he takes. The refracted way
in which German society is depicted through the photo camera eye of
Vincent is reminiscent of another book that is conjured up by the
“Goodbye” in the title of Afolabi’s book – Christopher Isherwood’s
Goodbye to Berlin. Afolabi, however, does not adopt the narrative technique
of the camera eye but rather nods towards it by incarnating the principle of
the camera eye in Vincent as the focalizer who often perceives without
properly understanding the goings-on around him.
When Isherwood’s book – a novel made up of semi-independent short
stories – begins with the sentence, “I am a camera with its shutter open,
quite passive, recording, not thinking,” he offers a model for the way
Vincent comes to look at another Berlin, several decades later (Isherwood
7). This time, it is a Berlin divided by the wall due to the Cold War, a city
both in the center of the world and a meeting place of many culture but at
the same time somewhat parochial.
Ultimately, it is the stories that count and that, in their interminable
attempts to make sense of the goings-on “in-between,” create a sense of
identity that also includes a sense of home. The sense of home that
Vincent develops is tenuous, to be sure, but it is also a real possibility. This
fact is underlined in its tenuousness and its humanizing potential by the
epigraph to Afolabi's novel. This epigraph is a line from the last page of
Kazuo Ishiguro's novel of paradigmatic and almost unbearable
Englishness, The Remains of the Day: “It is curious how people can build
such warmth among themselves so swiftly.” What the narrator of
Ishiguro's novel refers to in this passage are things like banter and talk that
create a certain kind of community among complete strangers. In this
particular scene of the novel, Stevens the butler sits on a bench and listens
to conversational exchanges that reveal what he took to be a “group of
friends out together for the evening” as “strangers who had just happened
upon one another here on this spot” behind him (Ishiguro 245). When he
notes that they were laughing merrily, the narrator immediately adds the
sentence Afolabi quotes as his epigraph and that I quoted above. This
intertextual reference could then be read as a reminder of, or pointer to,
the possibility of a community to which one can in fact belong. This may
be merely a faint intimation of a utopia of belonging, a tenuous possibility
but also a real one. As Joisten points out, the condition of being on one's
way is constitutive for human beings, since they constantly move back and
forth between one's place of settlement and the openness towards the

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world (Joisten, Aufbruch, 75-6). This constant movement back and forth as
an essential feature of the human condition provides the general
framework or foil for understanding Vincent in his own very particular and
seemingly haphazard movements that shape the narrative of his identity.
By narrating his own search for a “home,” Vincent provides the readers of
Goodbye Lucille with food for thought in Heidegger’s sense: belonging to a
certain place in the way of dwelling there is something that has to be
learned. And when human beings start to think about their place in the
world they engage in the politics of belonging, or, to appropriate another
of Heidegger’s statements, they overcome their homelessness by beginning
to think about it (Heidegger 36).
But what is also present in the quote from Ishiguro is the inescapibility
of getting things wrong, of misreading them. Stevens's supposed
recognition of swiftly built-up warmth is based on a double misreading of
things as they are--warmth among strangers is not built up swiftly; the
warmth that may come into being among strangers is a most transitory
thing which can easily revert to cold indifference. Thus Stevens comes
across as the paradigmatic unreliable observer who has observed things
and goings-on around him all through the novel while hardly ever decoding
the signs properly. His semiotic incompetence increases the obligation on
the part of the reader to fill in the gaps by re-reading Ishiguro’s novel
(Vianu 239). There is something bleak to this vision of Stevens misreading
again and again the people around him, something that is barely recognized
by Stevens himself, it would seem. This uncertainty of what to make of
other human beings in one’s search for a place of one’s own is something
which also infuses the narrative stance of Afolabi's novel of goodbyes and
arrivals.

Acknowledgements. The study was funded by the CNCSIS project IDEI

932 / 2008

References

Afolabi, Segun. Goodbye Lucille. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Print.

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