Home, Place and Displacement in Fatou Diome’s The Belly of the Atlantic (2006)

This article examines the crucial question of displacement in Fatou Diome's The Belly of the Atlantic (2006). It highlights the motivations of Senegalese youths' migration to the West and the subsequent problems they face both in their host and origin countries. It also uncovers the unrewarding reality and myth of the West, viewed as the ‘Eldorado' and ‘the promise land' by many candidates as it analyzes the interconnectedness between home, space/place, and displacement. Resting on postcolonialism, Homi Bhabha's conception of homeliness and unhomeliness, relational space paradigm, and Diome's sociological approach and rhetorical strategies, the paper brings to light the problematics raised by hereness and thereness, space liminality, and identity in the mind of the migrants as they strive to find balance between happiness and suffering, success and failure, and self, other, and self-other.