“Home had a way of shifting”: Cosmopolitan belonging in Diana Evans’s 26a

Abstract

Diana Evans’s debut novel, 26a (first published in 2005) follows the fortunes of Hunter twins Bess and Georgia, the daughters of a white English father and Nigerian mother, and examines their relationship in the context of their parents’ troubled marriage and Georgia’s struggle with mental illness. In doing so, the book explores the cosmopolitan movements of second-generation black British subjects, as the twins and their sisters move across and between the temporal spaces of England, Nigeria and the Caribbean. This article discusses 26a’s exploration of multi-locational cosmopolitan subjectivity through the various journeys each sister undertakes, and argues that this charting of the sisters’ differing engagements with diaspora casts aside paradigmatic 20th-century racial identities, leading to a rendering of a cosmopolitanism that is both mobile and yet circumscribed, and imaginatively reshapes black British histories.

Keywords:

• Diana Evans
• 26a
• cosmopolitanism
• belonging
• black British writing

Notes

1. 26a was first published in 2005 by Chatto & Windus. References are to the 2006 Vintage edition.

2. In the novel, the twins’ Nigerian grandfather recounts the myth of Onia and Ode: “He told them of a woman who once had two twin girl twins who were best friends from the very beginning, even before they were inside their mother’s womb, when they were spirits. Their names were Onia and Ode. Onia was first. Ode was second – they set her on fire. When Ode was burnt [ … ] Onia got sick and wouldn’t eat at all until Ode’s ghost entered her body. The ghost came in, and Onia began to eat again from her cursed mother’s breast. But Ode could only stay for one year, because that was how long it took for the soul to be ready to leave the earth. After that, there would be no choice” (Evans 2006, 63).