READING THE NEW DIASPORA IN YEWANDE OMOTOSO’S FICTION
Born in Barbados but brought up in Nigeria and South Africa, Yewande Omotoso’s fiction presents a profound and multi-directional logic of the experience of diasporic identity. Her fiction paints the imagination of not only multiple but also “intersecting” and “overlapping” diasporas. While the concept of diaspora is generally read along the predominantly Black Atlantic shorelines of North America and Europe, what happens when we think about it from the vantage position of the Cape? Yewande Omotoso’s fiction locates these identities from this perspective. This essay will argue for the ways in which Omotoso’s fiction not only makes visible “South Atlantic connections,” but also imagines Atlantic connections from the specific location of the Cape - at the tip of the two oceans - in ways that will allow us to think beyond certain “hemispheric limits.” In this way the paper argues for Omotoso’s fiction as creating conditions for re-imagining the directional flows of diaspora studies away from a North-South and East-West paradigm to a more lateral, south-south sideways that stretches from the Caribbean, across the Cape, sub-Antarctic to south Asia.
