Summary
#e purpose of this essay is to make a literary reading of the postcolonial diasporas in Britain, 
especially in connection with the metaphors used by diasporic writers in the UK in their 
search for their own identity and belonging. As diaspora is a metaphorical term in the sense 
we are using it now, three different metaphorical constructions of diaspora will be explored: a) 
the metaphor of the imaginary homelands created by immigrant writers; b) the metaphor of 
the Black Atlantic as a sort of space shared by those who are part of the diaspora and what this 
entails in history and literature; and c) the metaphor of the journey as an intrinsic element of 
diaspora itself.
Key words: diaspora, metaphor, imaginary homeland, Black Atlantic, journey
 Povzetek
Namen pričujočega prispevka je literarna predstavitev poskolonialnih diaspor v Veliki Britaniji, 
posebej v povezavi z metaforami, ki jih uporabljajo avtorji v Združenem kraljestvu v iskanju svoje 
identitete in pripadnosti. Glede na to da na tem mestu uporabljamo izraz diaspora v metaforičnem 
smislu, bomo raziskali tri različne metaforične zgradbe diaspore: a) metaforo izmišljene domovine, 
kakor jo ustvarjajo priseljeni pisatelji; b) metaforo Črnega Atlantika kot neke vrste prostora, ki 
si ga delijo pripadniki diaspore, ter njen pomen za zgodovino in književnost; in c) metaforo 
potovanja kot neločljive prvine same diaspore
Ključne besede: diaspora, metafora, namišljena domovina, Črni Atlantic, potovanje
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.5.1-2.113-123

1
 Diaspora and hybridity are both metaphorical terms in the usual terminology we employ 
in literary criticism today. #e first is an agricultural metaphor associated with the idea of 
dispersion, of sowing or scattering seeds (from the Greek diá ‘through’, and the verb speírein 
‘to sow’, ‘to scatter’). Moreover, its initial metaphorical ascription to the dispersion of a 
particular people, the Jews, after the Babylonian captivity, and then later, with the Jewish 
people being forced to leave Palestine, has been extended to other peoples and communities. 
#us the classical, Jewish diaspora has carried over its meaning, extending it to other similar 
dispersions: we now view the African diaspora, the Asian diaspora, the Indian diaspora, 
and others, as equivalent to (similar to or like) the Jewish diaspora. Analogously, hybridity, 
originally connected to the horticultural – if not agricultural – and zoological worlds, has also 
acquired metaphorical values related to diaspora and postcolonialism. Its original meaning of 
combination or union of different species, races or varieties has been extended in association 
with diaspora to the coming together of different peoples, cultures, religions and worldviews. 
#us we have come to talk about the hyphenated identities so characteristic of the United 
States (African-American, Cuban-American, Italian-American, etc.), and gradually becoming 
also common in the UK (Black-British, Brit-Asians, Indian-British, etc.). We could even picture 
the usual scene of a peasant or farmer sowing the land, dispersing seeds at random, these seeds 
falling in different places and producing hybrid fruits. In this way, and now referring of course 
to people and not to seeds, we may talk about current British society as a hybrid society, the 
product of diverse diasporas. 
But my concern now is exclusively with the literary readings of the postcolonial diaspora (or 
rather, diasporas) made in Britain in recent years. #e phenomenon of postcoloniality is not 
strictly a recent one because the independence of many British colonies started immediately 
after the Second World War. #at sparked off the dispersion of populations from different 
areas of the world, and many colonised subjects – mainly (but not only) those who had 
collaborated with the colonial administration – left their countries for the metropolis in a 
process which, in the British case, took place between the late 1940s and the 1970s. However, 
reflection and theorising over this issue was not widespread until the last two decades of the 
twentieth century, when the movement for “reshaping British identity” coincided with an 
ideological, political and social debate on this question. Commenting on this at the end of the 
1990s, Jürgen Schlaeger mentioned the September 1997 Labour campaign issue “Reshaping 
British National Identity – Rebranding Britain” and the project headed by Homi Bhabha and 
the British Council Cultural Studies Department called the “Re-inventing Britain Project”. 
For Schlaeger, all these governmental efforts had “all the elements of a great theatrical 


spectacle – of a dramatised pageantry on a grand scale and Britain is, after all, the country 
and culture which produced the greatest dramatist of all times” (Schlaeger 1999, 57–8). But 
certainly, apart from any political motivation and/or manipulation of the issue (something 
that Schlaeger is keen on emphasizing), it is undeniable that the presence of immigrants in 
Britain has drastically changed the identity of its society and has produced a distinctly new 
style in its literature. My purpose in this paper is to delve into some of the manifestations of 
that situation, by focusing on the effects of postcolonial diaspora in the process of current 
writing in the UK. 
#e journal Wasafiri (Spring 1999, issue no. 29) echoed the British Council Project with the 
publication of Bhabha’s “Manifesto” and the transcription of a dialogue with Bhabha himself, 
Susheila Nasta and Rasheed Araeen in the BBC Radio 3 programme ‘Night Waves’. Bhabha referred 
there to the topic of hybridity by addressing the fact that today there are about 100 million people in 
the word that live as migrants in countries and cultures other than their own. As he says, these people 
are living in a sort of “in-between state, where they are not fully accepted as nationals” (Bhabha 1999, 
40). He explains that even if they are accepted in legal terms, as they are indeed in some places, what 
really happens is that they are regarded by others as “a group apart”, “not fully integrated”. What is 
most interesting, however, is what he says after that description:
these people are not always talking about their own victimage or their own declaration, 
they are also producing very positive images. #ey are actually producing creatively a 
whole range of cultural and social acts, meaningful acts. (40)
#is means that the main interest of studying the diverse diasporas in contemporary Britain 
is not restricted to their expressions of victimage, but rather to their capacity to be creative 
and productive. Susheila Nasta, also participating in that dialogue, emphasized this feature in 
particular relation to the “in-betweenness” that characterizes diaspora – the fact that immigrants 
are living in two worlds, sharing two cultures, even if they are in conflict one with another. #ese 
are some of her words:
#e position of the migrant and immigrant I would add is enabling in this way for it 
allows a doubling of perspective, a view of the inside from the outside –though in reality 
the two perspectives are always linked. But this vantage point has both the precision of 
distance and intimacy and is essentially an ambidextrous one. (42)
My purpose in this paper is to explore just three aspects of the metaphorical constructions inspired 
by the postcolonial diaspora in contemporary Britain. I will specifically discuss: a) the metaphor 
of the imaginary homelands created by the diasporic or hybrid writers; b) the metaphor of the 
Black Atlantic as a sort of space shared by those who are part of a diaspora; and c) the metaphor 
of the journey as an intrinsic element of diaspora itself. I am fully aware that other metaphorical 
constructions have developed, and need further exploration (metaphors of blood, of colour, of 
the island, etc.). But I cannot deal with all of them in this paper, and so I will concentrate on the 
three mentioned aspects. 

It was Salman Rushdie who in 1982 wrote a beautiful essay entitled “Imaginary Homelands”. 
#is piece starts with the contemplation of an old photograph of the house in Bombay where 
he was born. It evokes the past as something lost. Recalling the famous opening of L.P . Hartley’s 
novel #e Go-Between, that reads “#e past is a foreign country – they do things differently 
there”, he inverts the idea when he looks at that old photograph: “it reminds me that it’s my 
present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists 
of lost time” (Rushdie 1991, 9). #at repeated word, lost, evokes Proust and his lost time, but 
our writer does not have the same experience as the French novelist. Rushdie explains how he 
wrote Midnight’s Children in an effort to reclaim and to rebuild the city where he was born, a 
city that had disappeared from his factual reality, the reality he was living in North London, 
where he was writing his book. #e experience of leaving Bombay for Pakistan (a country he 
never names but refers to simply as “the unmentionable country across the border”, 9) and 
his later trip to the former metropolis are obviously references to that diaspora or dispersion 
undergone by immigrants who feel compelled to leave their countries. #e main problem 
of that diaspora, he says, in relation to the search for that lost time, is the impossibility of 
retrieving it as it actually was. He tells us that when he wrote Midnight’s Children he could not 
grasp the actual city and the past, so that he was fighting with his memory in order to recover 
that reality, but to no avail: “what I was actually doing was a novel of memory and about 
memory, so that my India was just that: ‘my’ India, a version and no more than one version of 
all the hundreds of millions of possible versions” (10).
He sees himself, in this respect, as one who writes from outside India trying to reflect that lost 
world and in doing so he is dealing with “broken mirrors” (11), never with the complete and 
actual reality. #is image of the “broken mirrors” is very interesting not only for its suggestion 
of a substitution (a mirror only projects images, which work as a replacement for the real thing) 
but also because of its fragmentary condition. Diasporic migrants are necessarily fragmented, as 
they have been dispersed and torn away from their country and fellow citizens. So, like memory, 
which is faulty and partial and may thus lead into distortions and falsifications of history, the 
diasporic writer is faced with the challenge of remembering and rewriting the past left behind. 
Yes, rewriting the past, although it may sound a bit awkward, as if we were talking of politicians 
who pretend to make the world in their own image (such as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). 
But writers also do that, need to do that, in order to counterbalance the lies told by politicians. 
Rushdie writes: “Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world 
in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the 
official, politicians’ version of truth” (14). What the Indian writer in the diaspora to Britain does, 
then, is to “create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, 
Indias of the mind” (10). Fragmentation, which initially might be seen as a weakness, thus turns 
into strength, allowing the writer to imagine his past, giving him more freedom to create and to 
recover the lost time, the lost home. It could even be said that writers like Rushdie, experiencing 
this sort of diaspora in Britain, feel empowered by precisely the tradition of immigration and 
diasporas of the past. He puts it very clearly when he reclaims for his own art and writing the 
traditions that Britain has incorporated throughout its history:

Let me suggest that Indian writers in England have access to a second tradition, quite apart 
from their own racial history. It is the culture and political history of the phenomenon of 
migration, displacement, life in a minority group. We can quite legitimately claim as our 
ancestors the Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews; the past to which we belong is an English 
past, the history of immigrant Britain. Swift, Conrad, Marx are as much our literary 
forebears as Tagore or Ram Mohan Roy. (20)
#e reference to the Jews cannot escape our attention in this context. Rushdie is also alluding to 
the classical diaspora, and clearly claiming that the Indian, or South Asian, diaspora in Britain 
bears a strong similarity to that of the Jews. 
Other diasporic or immigrant writers have followed suit. We cannot forget, in connection 
with the subcontinent, writers like Hanif Kureishi, Vikram Seth, Amit Chaudhuri, Romesh 
Gunesekera, just to mention some of those who live or have lived in Britain and who have 
already made a name for themselves in the United Kingdom and abroad (see Nasta 2002). 
But of course the Asian diaspora goes beyond Britain, and others like Amitav Ghosh, Bharati 
Mukherjee, Shashi #aroor, and Michael Ondaatje are part of the South Asian diaspora in the 
United States and Canada. 
It is interesting, however, to note that Rushdie’s allusion to his literary forebears in the Indian and 
British traditions alike is echoed by another contemporary writer belonging to a different diaspora, 
the Caribbean one. It is Caryl Phillips, born on the island of St Kitts, who in 1997 published 
an anthology entitled Extravagant Strangers. A Literature of Belonging. #is is a collection of texts 
and fragments ranging from 18
th
-century African writers like Olaudah Equiano to contemporary 
poets and novelists from diverse parts of the world like Linton Kwesi Johnson, Romesh 
Gunesekera, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Dabydeen or Ben Okri, but also including such well-known 
white authors as William #ackeray, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Wyndham Lewis, or 
George Orwell, all of them born outside Britain and all of whom contributed their imagination, 
their “imaginary homelands”, to English or British literature. Phillips’s idea in compiling this 
anthology was simply to prove that Britain has always been a country of immigrants, where 
different diasporas have coalesced in shaping its peculiar identity, an identity that cannot be 
considered homogeneous at all. Reading these texts we certainly become aware of the diversity 
implicated in the definition of British. In Phillips’s words,
readers will come to accept that as soon as one defines oneself as “British” one is participating 
in a centuries-old tradition or cultural exchange, of ethnic and linguistic plurality, as one 
might expect from a proud nation that could once boast she ruled most of the known 
world. #e evidence collected here confirms that one of the fortuitous by-products of this 
heterogeneous history has been a vigorous and dynamic literature. (Phillips 1997, xii)
So, this is the power that writers belonging to the diaspora wield. #eir creations of “imaginary 
homelands” are multiple: Rushdie’s singular Midnight’s Children (1981) comes immediately to 
mind, but so too do Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef  (1994) in connection with Sri Lanka, Abdulrazak 

Gurnah’s Memory of Departure (1987), Paradise (1994), Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea 
(2001) or  Desertion (2005) about Zanzibar, as well as recreations of their parents’ homelands by 
younger novelists such as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Zadie Smith’s White T eeth (2000) or 
Hari Kunzru’s #e Impressionist (2002), or other constructions of “lost time”, like the recreation of 
the “Windrush Generation” of Caribbean immigrants in the late 1940s and 1950s, as presented 
in Andrea Levy’s popular novel Small Island (2004).
 #e second metaphorical issue I wish to explore is that of the Atlantic as “black”. #e great ocean 
that separates, and connects, three continents: Africa, Europe and America, was thus regarded by 
critic Paul Gilroy in his 1993 book #e Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Gilroy’s 
aim is perhaps best understood through the subtitle with its key terms “double consciousness”, 
another name for what Bhabha and others have termed “in-betweenness”. #e first sentence of 
the book is very clear in this respect: “Striving to be both European and black requires some 
specific forms of double consciousness”, and a bit later he declares with further precision:
#e contemporary black English, like the Anglo-Africans of earlier generations and 
perhaps, like all blacks in the West, stand between (at least) two great cultural assemblages, 
both of which have mutated through the course of the modern world that formed them 
and assumed new configurations. (Gilroy 1993, 1)
#e physical Atlantic Ocean is seen then as a metaphorical channel or space where the 
process of exchanges or mutations between Africa and the West take place. #e slave trade 
is indeed the origin of this concept of Black Atlantic, but the concept itself is not merely 
equivalent or synonymous to the slave population and the slave trade in their passage from 
Africa to Europe and America. Gilroy talks about these movements of black people through 
the Atlantic, which, he says, cannot be seen exclusively as commodities, but also as “engaged 
in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship”, which is a way to re-
examine “the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory” (16). #is 
is not a minor subject, but perhaps more relevant to my point here is the emphasis put on 
the interaction between the black population and the white culture in the metropolis. In this 
sense Black Atlantic is a conceptual tool that permits us to study, as Ania Loomba has written, 
“the extent to which African-American, British and Caribbean diasporic cultures mould each 
other as well as the metropolitan cultures with which they interacted” (Loomba 1998, 175). #is 
is precisely the centre of our interest: the effect that the slave trade and its subsequent diaspora 
had on the metropolitan culture, on British identity. Stuart Hall has taken this notion of the 
Black Atlantic as an instrument of analysis a step further and talked about “cultural diaspora-
ization” (Hall 1996, 446–7; quoted by Loomba 1998, 176). As can be seen, diaspora is now 
presented as a cultural process affecting not only the direct subjects of diaspora (Africans in 
this particular reference to the slave trade), but also the metropolitan subjects that interact 
with them. Its dispersing quality makes diaspora a sort of metaphorical “infectious disease”, 
which extends across the wide social texture of the UK. 

It is very interesting to reflect on what a Caribbean-born British writer like Caryl Phillips has 
written on this respect. In his book of essays A New World Order (2001) he comments on his 
experience of alienation when visiting Africa. As a black, wishing to get back to his origins, he 
visits the Dark continent and encounters a reality that is not his own:
Africa faces a unique set of problems as it tries to orientate itself through the postcolonial 
nightmare of corrupt leaders, and beyond the resounding clash of the new world entering 
as its people are still trying to pick over the remnants of the old world which was destroyed 
by European incursion. [...] What Africa needs is critical self-analysis, and intellectually 
rigorous minds and impassioned voices to dissect the past and suggest a future. And 
it possesses such minds and voices. What Africa does not need is a continual flow of 
disaffected African-Americans, wounded by race, acting out their fantasies of belonging 
and alienation with a presumed authenticity which is understood by the figment of the 
pigment. (Phillips 2001, 93)
A similar experience is had when he visits the Caribbean and particularly the island where he was 
born before his parents immigrated to Britain in the 1950s. He does not feel part of it at all. What 
is happening, as I have written elsewhere (Galván 2004), is that a cultural transformation is now 
taking place in Britain, and thus an emerging hybrid culture is occupying the space of what used 
to be different categories of people, each in their own neat pigeon-hole: white Europeans, black 
Africans, Indians, Caribbeans, etc. #is new culture is the result of that dispersion of diverse 
diasporas, or diaspora-ization, as Stuart Hall has called it, in another development of the original 
agricultural metaphor. In Phillips’s words,
After thirteen years of compulsive itinerancy, I know my Atlantic ‘home’ to be triangular 
in shape with Britain at one apex, the west coast of Africa at another, and the new world of 
North America (including the Caribbean) forming the third point of the triangle. (Phillips 
2001, 305)  
Of course that “Atlantic ‘home’” he mentions is not a real place; it is not precisely located here or 
there; it is the “Black Atlantic”, another imaginary homeland constituted by many other things 
apart from a lot of salty water (“I have chosen to create for myself an imaginary ‘home’ to live 
alongside the one that I am incapable of fully trusting. My increasingly precious, imaginary, 
Atlantic world”, says Phillips 2001, 308). He has been writing for many years about this 
condition of feeling diasporic, and parallel to the experience of the Jewish diaspora, he has dealt 
extensively with one of the most traumatic aspects of it: the Holocaust. From documentary 
books like #e European Tribe (1987; 2
nd
 edition 1992) or #e Atlantic Sound (2000) to novels 
such as Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993) or #e Nature of 
Blood (1997), Phillips has been retelling over and over again the “other” Holocaust suffered by 
the black diaspora and fictionalising the common identity shared by Jews and Black Africans in 
their respective diasporas: Othello is thus one of the best epitomes of that experience, as Phillips 
has narrated it in #e European Tribe and #e Nature of Blood. #is feeling is conveyed in strong 
terms in the pages of that first travel book:

I was brought up in a Europe that still shudders with guilt at mention of the Holocaust. 
Hundreds of books have been published, many films made, television programmes 
produced, thousands of articles written. #e Nazi persecution of the Jews is taught at 
school, debated in colleges, and is a part of a European education. As a child, in what 
seemed to me a hostile country, the Jews were the only minority group discussed with 
reference to exploitation and racialism, and for that reason, I naturally identified with 
them. At that time, I was staunchly indignant about everything from the Holocaust to 
the Soviet persecution of Jewry. #e bloody excesses of colonialism, the pillage and rape 
of modern Africa, the transportation of 11 million black people to the Americas, and 
their subsequent bondage were not on the curriculum, and certainly not on the television 
screen. As a result I vicariously channelled a part of my hurt and frustration through the 
Jewish experience. (Phillips 1992, 53–4)
So diaspora also means, in literary terms, and thus metaphorically, the reshuffling and reshaping 
of metropolitan language and literary and cultural myths: Othello, a black man, is like a Jew, and 
as such he is treated in #e Nature of Blood, next to the Nazi concentration camps and the worst 
and cruellest manifestations of human beings. Curiously enough perhaps, the association between 
Jewish and black characters seems to be relatively common in postcolonial literature (which is 
possibly another effect or consequence of the colonial experience and the teaching of the Bible to 
natives). I will simply recall now the name of “Moses” in two very different novels: Doris Lessing’s 
#e Grass Is Singing, back in 1950, where the African servant who kills Mary T urner has this name; 
and Sam Selvon’s sequence about Moses Aloetta, starting with #e Lonely Londoners (1956).
I have been quoting from Caryl Phillips, but there are others who, living and writing in Britain, 
are now, at the turn of the twenty-first century, principally concerned with the diasporic experience 
of the Black Atlantic particularly in relation to metropolitan hybridisation or “diaspora-ization”. 
One of the most fruitful, inspiring and recent studies on this is John McLeod’s book Postcolonial 
London. Rewriting the Metropolis (2004), which focuses on the literary and imaginary constructions 
of London by writers belonging to different diasporas from the 1950s to our days. Contemporary 
authors such as Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen, Fred 
D’Aguiar and Bernardine Evaristo feature prominently in this volume, but other recent publications 
also bear witness to the fertility of these British constructions of postcolonial diaspora, such as books 
published by Sukhdev Sandhu (2004) or James Procter (2003), whose span extends beyond London 
and addresses the issue of the construction of space (physical, mental, metaphorical) by members 
of diasporas. Procter focuses not only on those immigrants that arrived in Britain and tried to find 
their place there, but also on the new generation, those “born-and-bred” Black Britons who prefer to 
tackle their everyday reality rather than the past or lost worlds left behind by their parents. All this, in 
short, is evidence of the influential role played by this metaphorical view of diaspora.
 Finally, let me address the third metaphorical issue connected with diaspora: the journey. #is is 
of course an issue closely related to physical diaspora itself, but I wish to tackle it from the point of 

view of writing and writers. In short, what is the role of travelling for diasporic writers? Firstly the 
connection with the African diasporic writers is self-evident: Caryl Phillips has drawn our attention 
to writers who have had to travel to other places in order to make sense of their own lives. #ese 
are individuals who are associated with foreign places, where they could settle and escape from the 
oppressive atmosphere of their original lands, people such as Langston Hughes in Moscow, W .E.B. 
Du Bois in Berlin, Ida B. Wells or Phillis Wheatley in London, Claude McKay in Marseilles, or 
James Baldwin in Paris. According to Phillips, “the ability to leave and see oneself through another 
prism – hopefully one that is less racially clouded – has long been a part of the legacy of being a writer 
of African origin in the West” (Phillips 2006, 4). #is is also linked to Paul Gilroy’s description of his 
metaphorical Black Atlantic, as he sets out to discuss “the stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural 
forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of 
feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering” (Gilroy 1993, 3).
Naturally, journey is not an exclusive property of the African diaspora; many contemporary 
Caribbean writers in Britain have also produced travel books or novels imbued with journeys. 
Apart from those written by Caryl Phillips which I have already mentioned, let us recall some 
of the classics: C.L.R. James, Jean Rhys, George Lamming, V .S. Naipaul, or Samuel Selvon. 
Members of the British literary tradition itself, on the other hand, have not been alien to these 
“necessary journeys”, as Phillips calls them, in order to “affirm their sense of their own place in the 
global scheme of things” (Phillips 2006, 3). Writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson or George 
Orwell, among many others, have felt that need to change countries and try to find themselves. 
In “Necessary Journeys”, Phillips develops his own justification for travelling, which he links to 
his diasporic condition. He explains that the only way for him to become a true writer was to 
escape from Britain and travel first across Europe, and then throughout the world. Otherwise he 
feels he would have become a prisoner of the image that Britain had of him, that is, a cliché of 
what it meant to be a black writer in the UK. Phillips does not want to be considered “a black 
writer” as a category or type; he does not want to be called by the media to give his opinion about 
racial issues, “a predicament that can quickly reduce a writer to the position of being little more 
than a social commentator” (Phillips 2006, 4). If he had not gone abroad, if he had not escaped 
that social and media pressure, he would not have developed his own self, as this was reduced in 
Britain to images (again the recourse to mirrors that project only “images”, fragmented pieces, of 
reality) which, he adds, “were laughably restrictive, generally insulting, and palpably false” (5).
#e “necessary journeys” are also grounded on his own interior journey of development. Let me 
quote a descriptive paragraph about himself, because what he says here is generally applicable to 
many other writers of his generation and origin, in their fighting for an adequate definition of 
their identity:
I was born in the Caribbean and journeyed to Britain in the late fifties as an infant. #is 
migration has had an incalculable effect upon who I am. #at I grew up in Yorkshire, 
in the north of England as a working-class boy, has also had a deep-seated effect upon 
me. #at I went first to grammar school, then to a comprehensive school, and from 
there to a prestigious older university, this has all fed who I am. #e evidence of these 

migrations over water and across land, through nations, class and geography had, twenty 
years ago, already bequeathed to me an exceedingly multifarious sense of self. Add to this 
the ingredient of race, in an institutionally racist society, and it becomes clear that I was 
dealing with a personal identity that resisted easy classification. (5)
As can easily be appreciated, the writer is not talking merely about the physical journey of 
moving with his parents from the island of St Kitts to Leeds, where he was brought up, but he 
includes as part of his journeys his metaphorical migration from working-class Yorkshire through 
grammar and comprehensive schools to the prestige of Oxford  University. #ese are migrations 
in space of course, as they entail different geographies in the UK, but they are also, and perhaps 
more importantly, journeys across class and nation. In this sense, and in coincidence with 
Phillips, other diasporic writers have explored the metaphor of the journey (physical and interior 
journeys) in their novels. Not surprisingly, of course, some of these writers (Abdulrazak Gurnah, 
Zadie Smith, Hari Kunzru, Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen, etc.) I have already mentioned in 
connection with the metaphor of the imaginary homelands and the Black Atlantic, and I say not 
surprisingly because the metaphor of journey is closely linked to the imaginary homelands and 
the lost spaces and times, as well as to the middle passage and the “in-betweenness”, hybridity or 
double consciousness implied by Gilroy’s Black Atlantic.
 As a way to draw this argument to a close, I will quote a few words from a paper published by 
Abdulrazak Gurnah in 2004 that reveal this utter identification with other postcolonial writers 
of the diaspora. He explains that he came to writing as a necessity to recover his past, his “lost 
life” in Zanzibar, as he is living in Britain and feels estranged in a foreign country, with “the sense 
of a life left behind, of people casually and thoughtlessly abandoned”. It is that separation which 
makes him write and empowers his imagination. #e words he uses are particularly interesting as 
they combine the metaphor of the journey with that of recollection and imagination:
T ravelling away from home provides distance and perspective, and a degree of amplitude 
and liberation. It intensifies recollection, which is the writer’s hinterland. Distance allows 
the writer uncluttered communion with this inner self, and the result is a freer play of the 
imagination. (Gurnah 2004, 59)
Gurnah’s experience is not far from Rushdie’s or from Phillips’s in this respect. All these writers 
are living and enacting the metaphors of the diaspora and, by so doing, they certainly extend and 
empower the cultural and aesthetic values of immigration, hybridity and diaspora-ization.  

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