ABSTRACT
Nostalgia for home has been a common subject in African diasporic literature. In the past four decades, the African continent has witnessed an increase of movements of people leaving their home to new places around the world. These movements, whether voluntary or forced, have resulted in displaced communities in the world, diasporic communities being one type of those communities. Deploying a discontinuity hypothesis, this paper (1) examines the representation of nostalgia for home in selected poems in Fuchsia (2) interrogates the contribution of nostalgia on redefining the identity of the poet. Shiferraw’s poems capture and communicate the traumatic experience of leaving home through the use of memories coloured by nostalgia of time, place and people. On the one hand, nostalgic feelings may evolve without one yearning to go back home, though home remains a stimulus of a reflective past and, on the other hand, nostalgic feelings raise memories that significantly re/define a poet’s identity in the host homeland.
