“An Impossible Homecoming”: Migration and its challenges to identity in selected African Short Stories

This paper explores the theme of migration, the challenges that come with it, in particular, the impossibility of return to homeland, and the subsequent ambiguity of the notions of identity and home. Migrants’ homelands represent not only a sense of belongingness to a country or nation but also their emotional attachment to that place. Such an attachment undergoes transformation the moment they settle abroad. Their already established sense of self and home is disturbed as they stretch the boundaries of their world to navigate between their nostalgia for homeland and their attempt to assimilate in a new place. Indeed, homes and identities can be formed on the move with migrants having the agency to decide their formulation of these concepts. Interestingly, a return to the homeland is impossible since it does not exist anymore as their previous notions of home are constantly negotiated by migrants when they assert their constantly changing identities. These concepts are further contextualized by looking into five short stories by African writers whose characters are migrants and who undergo transformations in their identities as they assimilate into their new cultures and form new notions of home.