Melancholic travellers and the idea of (un)belonging in Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara and Soul Tourists

Abstract

This article explores the articulations of (un)belonging in Bernardine Evaristo’s novel-in-verse Lara (1997) and novel-with-verse Soul Tourists (2005). It closely examines the precarious nature of belonging for the “second” generations of black British and their (un)belonging to the national, “originary” racial and generational lines of belonging, and to wider unresolved histories of loss that can be broadly defined as postcolonial and post-imperial. The article presents a case against reading Evaristo’s work, and black British literature more generally, as Bildungsromane. Locating Evaristo’s novels within recent interpretations of melancholia by Anne Anlin Cheng, by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, and by Paul Gilroy, it calls into question the idea of the journey, in both Lara and Soul Tourists, as a process of self-formation and resolution of social conflicts. Revealing instead the moments of tension and non-resolution, it addresses the way in which Evaristo’s narratives challenge and haunt the very foundations on which the hegemonic discourses of belonging and history still rest.

Keywords:

• Bernardine Evaristo
• belonging
• melancholia
• loss
• Bildungsroman

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Journal of Postcolonial Writing for their helpful suggestions and comments. She is especially grateful to Bernardine Evaristo for permission to reproduce a section of the interview she conducted with her in 2009.

Notes

1. D’Aguiar was born in London of Guyanese parents, but he had lived in Guyana until he was 12 before returning to London in the 1970s.

2. I discuss the first edition of Lara. The new edition was expanded by a third and published in 2009.

3. There is no space here to further consider the inadequacy of the terms such as “second” or “third” generation. In absence of a better term, I use the term “generation” here to provisionally differentiate between the parental migrant and the British-born generation, as represented in Evaristo’s novels.

4. For a historical development of the term melancholia, see, for example, Radden.

5. It would be possible to read a range of other black British texts through melancholia, from Riley’s The Unbelonging to Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, for example.

6. In the new edition of Lara, Evaristo expands and reconstructs Lara’s Irish and German maternal family history.