ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to one of the book’s central concerns, namely, the limitations of celebratory readings of migration that cast displacement as an inherently progressive and creative force. The case of involuntary migration, in particular, complicates such a reading due to the material homelessness that such journeys entail and the political and legal structures of contemporary asylum regimes that maintain people in an unsettled state of temporariness. As a result of such state-imposed precarity, refugees and asylum seekers are not able to participate in disrupting exclusionary narratives of the nation in the same way as migrants and diasporic communities more generally. Rather, their narratives must conform to the state’s idea of a bona fide “asylum story” in order to be perceived as having a legitimate claim to its protection. Given their spatial precarity, practices of domesticity and homemaking should be seen as resistant to the political and legal structures that maintain refugees and asylum seekers in a state of temporariness. Such practices have the further potential of creating much-needed material stability and also serve a narrative purpose that creates continuity between past and present. This connection between homemaking and narrative is particularly relevant to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea, which centers on the experiences of a Zanzibari asylum seeker, Saleh Omar. Through the novel’s narrative investment in houses and domestic objects, it draws attention to the importance of material homes as spaces where the depersonalizing work of forced displacement and the asylum system can be resisted by the restorative work of storytelling.
