dislocation. Speaking specifically about what he terms “diaspora space” Avtar Brah
contends that it is “‘inhabited’ not only by diasporic subjects but equally by those who
are constructed and represented as ‘indigenous.’ As such the concept of diaspora space
foregrounds the entanglements of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’”
(cited in Walters 2005: ix). Therefore, the tensions and harmonies that arise from the
commonality of the space of diasporas and indigenous subjectivities underline and justify
why the idea of exile or diaspora does not cease to ramify the question of otherness,
which once pursued to its logical conclusion, reveals a number of other forms of
binarism, and which point to the impossibility of blurring beacons of difference, even
where the most benevolent ethics of hospitality are applicable.
Nevertheless, because of the dialectic of home and exile in a discussion of this nature,
coupled with the fact that both the liberatory respite to flourish outside homeland and the
possible simultaneous tribulations associated with the experience of exile, home hardly
goes out of perspective when exile is brought into focus. Home thus remains recurrent in
the discussion of exile because, there is exile, first and foremost, because there has been a
home or homeland. This explains why Hamid Naficy (1999:3) argues that “exile is
inexorably tied to homeland and to the possibility of return”. Yet we must be cautious in
accepting this order of the ubiquity of homeland in the discourse of exile as it is not in all
cases that the exile is read and apprehended as holding the prospects of return. This is
true, for instance, of most African Americans and African Caribbeans who acknowledge
Africa as home but hardly think of a possible physical return; though, with this category
of African exiles, metaphoric return as a kind of mental journey cannot be ruled out.
The remark above compels us further to reckon that the apprehension of homeland in the
discussion of exile is not uniformly configured. While for instance home may be “where
the heart lies” (Kenneth Parker 1993:65), pointing to a conditioning of the mind and the
primacy of individual attitude to the understanding of home homeland or abroad such
subjective generalization contrasts sharply with an assertion like the construct of home as
a perennially tantalizing space that has never been visited: “you can go home again, so
long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been” (Le Guin in