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Aija Poikâne. Vientulîba un ilgas pçc mâjâm afrovâcu rakstnieèu literârajos darbos
cessity to find and build their home in the New World. Blacks created a strong community
and their own culture in the New World in order to fight the “peculiar institution”–slavery.
Creating Black Christianity and producing significant literary narratives,
African Americans “built” home where everybody could be a subject and not an object.
Similarly Afro–Germans, although of course not enslaved, produced their narratives
in order to create their home and claim their rights to home.
Thus, I want to investigate what home means to African Americans and Afro–
Germans and which literary strategies are employed to fight isolation and exclusion
from the participation in the dominant cultures. Additionally I will examine the essay
of Molefi Kete Asante “African Germans and the Problems of Cultural Location”
which is my chief scholarly source. Asante, who is the leading figure in the
Afrocentrism school explains the complexity of the situation of Afro–Germans and
deals with such issues as the myth of blood purity and Afro–German community.
However, before I turn to my comparative analysis I want to explore and understand
the theoretical meaning of home. Therefore, I will examine the issues, presented
in the works by Homi K. Bhabha The Location of Culture and Heidrun Suhr
Ausländerliteratur: Minority Literature in Federal Republic of Germany.
Heidrun Suhr writes: “There are no satisfactory English equivalents for “Heimat”
or “Fremde”. Both terms imply far more than simply “homeland” or “a foreign place”.
“Heimat” also connotes belonging and security, while “Fremde” can refer to isolation
and alienation. This is not simply a problem of translation. Precise definitions of these
terms cannot be given in German either, for their meaning depends to a large degree
on context.” 1 Suhr’s statements beg the question of what is meant by “context” here.
In her work, Suhr analyzes the development of minority literature in the Federal
Republic of Germany, by explaining the context of the history of “Gastarbeiter”
(guest workers). “Gastarbeiter” or guest workers first arrived in 1955 when treaties
for the recruitment of workers were concluded with Italy and later with other South
European and North African countries. The residence of guest workers was considered
to be a temporary phenomena and they were expected to return to their home
countries which means that despite mastering the German language and living in
Germany for about twenty years these people were considered as foreigners. Now
returning back to Suhr’s argument that the meaning of home depends to a large degree
on context, which, of course, proves that home is a social construction, it suggests
that context here is the way white Germans approach racial and ethnic differences.
Thus the notion of home is shaped according to these racial and ethnic categories
which implies that home is a place with certain boundaries. However, these
boundaries may seem unnatural to the members of the second and third generation of
Turkish people or Afro–Germans, for instance, who were born in Germany and speak
German fluently, yet they are not perceived as full members of German society. They
are expected to return home, but there is no home to return to, suggests Suhr.
In contrast with Suhr, who views home as a place to which people are bound in
a sense, Homi K. Bhabha in Location of Culture claims that: “...we find ourselves in
the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference
and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For
there is a disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the “beyond”: an exploratory,
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