Introduction

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Sonja Lehmann
but also to the country left behind which turns into an “imaginary homeland” that
has little to do with the reality anymore (10). Rushdie’s migrant seems perpetually
stuck in-between these two while not belonging to either one. The migrant relies
on his imagination to achieve a sense of belonging, but this turns out to be “notoriously
unreliable and capricious” and as a consequence a “plenitudinous sense of
home” is moved out of reach because “a sense of displacement always remains”
(McLeod 211). Stuart Hall sums this up concisely by saying, “Migration is a one
way trip. There is no ‘home’ to go back to” (qutd. in Chambers 9).
Accordingly, the migrant is considered to be neither here nor there. He is
alienated from his origins but does not fit in with his new environment either. His
sense of belonging to a place is either disturbed or lost altogether and he is not
sure of his identity anymore as a result of this. Even scholars such as Paul White
who admit to the possibility that migrants can actually live in several “worlds” (3)
still come to the conclusion that their experience is nevertheless marked by “dislocation”
and “alienation” (6) and that “amongst all the literature of migration the
highest proportion deals in some way with ideas of return, whether actualised or
remaining imaginary” (14). Iain Chambers even claims that “[t]he migrant’s sense
of being rootless, of living between worlds, between a lost past and a nonintegrated
present, is perhaps the most fitting metaphor of this (post)modern
condition” (27).
More recent works on postcolonial literature and theory still adhere to that
view. For example, Elleke Boehmer describes migrants as people who “live as
minorities, in states of unbelonging” (226). 1 Echoing Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin
she declares that “[c]ultural expatriation is now widely regarded as intrinsic to
the postcolonial literary experience” (226). Of the migrant writer she says that at
present he or she is “is more likely to be a cultural traveller, or an ‘extra-territorial’,
than a national” who most often lives in a Western country and simultaneously
still keeps some “connections” to “a national, ethnic, or regional background” but
whom she clearly sees as not belonging to either country (Boehmer 227). Diasporic
writing by writers of the next generation who did not even migrate themselves
falls in the same category for her, being “a literature that is necessarily transplanted,
displaced” and even though situated in the West still not completely part
of it (Boehmer 230; emphasis in original). McLeod likewise speaks of a “perilous
intermediate position that both migrants and their children are deemed to occupy”
because of which they are “unable to indulge in sentiments of belonging to either
place” (214; emphasis in original). The repercussions of migration thus even extend
to people who did not migrate themselves and it seems that having a cultural
background, which spans several nations is enough to evoke inevitable feelings of
dislocation.
1 Boehmer’s study was admittedly first published in 1995, however the revised edition of 2005
nevertheless still emphasizes the in-betweenness of the migrant experience.