ABSTRACT
This chapter critically explores the concept of “home” (or “homeland”) based on the experiences of African women living in Alberta, one of the most economically viable of Canada’s ten provinces. Using first-hand information provided by these women, it exposes their various attempts to build as well as conceptualize home in their present status as transnationals. The analysis highlights, in particular, the shift from a fundamental and often taken for granted understanding of home as a geophysical space to a diversity of historical and prospective experiential dispositions that reflect the specificities of individual women’s immigration journey. It begins with a brief review of literature that places the women’s experiences within a broader scholarly discourse, and moves on to introduce the African Women’s Project from which this contribution, among others, has emerged. These experiences are subsequently examined in terms of linkages with places of origin in Africa, community building in Canada, and the interrogation of home as both geophysical spaces and experiential zones. As a much-needed contribution to a small but growing body of “Afro-literature,” this chapter assesses the challenges this “homing process” presents, its gender implications, and the prospects of what has turned into a struggle to establish self.
