Chaotic Homecomings in Prodigal Daughters edited by Lauretta Ngcobo, Always Another Country by Sisonke Msimang, and What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article discusses three contemporary works about and by first- and second-generation South African exiles. In Lauretta Ngcobo's collection of memoirs, Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012), 17 South African women present their personal accounts of political exile. In Sisonke Msimang's Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2017), she writes about her exile childhood in Zambia, Kenya, Canada, and the United States, and her return to South Africa in the 1990s. Finally, Zinzi Clemmons's experimentalist debut novel, in the form of a grief memoir, What We Lose (New York: Viking, 2017), features a protagonist who, like the author, is a young American woman, the daughter of a South African mother and an African American father. All three works engage with the South African exile's experience of unhoming and conflicted homecoming, and, importantly, with what home has come to signify for second-generation exiles. Focusing on the central exilic motifs of home and homecoming, the article shows how any essentialist or foundational notion of “home” is complicated by the experience of exile, especially for children of exile. Through an analysis of memoir and fictional memoir, the article argues that chaos complexity theory, with its principle of generative disorder and trajectories that are nonlinear, multidirectional, irreversible, unforeseen, unpredictable, and unstoppable, might also provide a useful paradigm for understanding the experiences and approaching the writings of those whose lives have been shaped in the wake of their parents’ exile.