HOME AND BELONGING IN NIGERIAN DIASPORA LITERATURE: A STUDY OF BUCHI EMECHETA’S THE NEW TRIBE

Abstract

Buchi Emecheta’s novel, The New Tribe, is an interesting text that tries to generate discourse on questions of Home and Belonging in Diasporic situations. Few texts have captured the issues of identity, socialization and belonging as Buchi Emecheta’s The New Tribe. The objective of the paper was to demonstrate that “home†was not necessarily homeland and that to belong to a host culture was a matter of one’s ability to negotiate belonging and the host culture’s ability to accept otherness, which aligns with Paul Gilroy’s concept of conviviality and melancholia. Gilroy always argues that any British citizen holding strongly to the privileges of race and takes pride in England’s imperial past suffers melancholia; but to accept the reality of the nature of the world as a village would lead to cheerful acceptance of other cultures in diasporic situations, that is, a convivial situation or conviviality. The study, therefore, adopts the convivial and melancholia theory by Gilroy to understand the diasporic conditions of some of the characters in the text, who are either Nigerians or are trapped in a hybrid situation of feeling British but are viewed as Nigerians, a situation the protagonist, Chester, finds himself. The study was largely qualitative.