Precarious Family Spaces in Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory

Abstract

Human beings are social creatures, and the family space is their principal institution for socialisation and reproduction. The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah (London: Faber & Faber, 2015) reveals that family spaces (both heteronormative and non-normative) can become precarious. In exploring how the entanglements of family, cultural prejudices, and personal choices dialectically give rise to and result from precarious family spaces, this article examines parental roles in relation to precarity and emerging family structures as forms of precarity. I argue that by focalising albinism, queer sexualities, and race, Gappah exposes normative practices as responsible for creating precarious family spaces. With an awareness of its ontological and philosophical shortcomings, this article deploys the theory of precarity as a descriptive category.

Keywords:

• precarious family spaces
• precarity
• albinism
• alternative sexualities
• parental roles
• race