• Fatima Zohra Dib

  Author

The purpose of this paper is to examine the notions of home and identity in Caryl
Philips’s A State of Independence. Specifically, I argue that the novel interrogates and
challenges the fixed and the stable notions of the original homeland and identity. The
protagonist’s return is driven by ill-conceived notion of originary homeland and essentialist
identity to finally discover the painful reality of changing homeland. The paper demonstrates
that through the trope of return to the country of origin, the novelist engage in the task of
demythologizing the homeland as the disaporic subject comes to discover and to confirm the
elusiveness of home and thus negating the idealized vision he buries deep in his mind and
imagination. It also attempts to show that the supposedly notion of physical return as a metaphor
for return to origins, has left the protagonist suspended between two different countries and
cultures.

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