THE LIVED SPACE DWELLING AND TRANSCULTURALITY IN HUCHU’S THE MAESTRO THE MAGISTRATE AND THE MATHEMATICIAN AND LEVY’S FRUIT OF THE LEMON

ABSTRACT

Using the fictional Edinburghian lifeworld of Tendai Huchu’s second novel, The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician, and the imaginary London and Jamaican social spaces of Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon, this research work undertakes a study of the social relations existing between members of different cultural groups inhabiting the cosmopolitan space. Recognising that the problem of dwelling and human existence in the cosmopolitan world is complicated not only by the intense cultural complexity that marks this world, but also by the resultant struggle for living space, this research espouses the transculturalist view that the foundation of this rivalry does not lie in the cultural complexity of the cosmopolitan space per se, but lies principally in the Herderian cultural framework on which this world is modelled. Through an exhaustive study of Huchu’s eponymous characters and Levy’s protagonist, Faith, this project goes further to explicate how the traditional notion of single culture majorly contributes to the feelings of otherness, existential not-being-at-home, and world-weariness that overwhelm the marginal members of the cosmopolitan space. The study finds, however, that the notion of transculturality serves to mitigate these problems by decentring the zero-point stance of any culture’s or nation’s episteme and ontology, thus offering the characters the capacity to live beyond cultural borders. The theoretical foundation of this study is located at the intersection of the existentialist phenomenological insights of Martin Heidegger and Otto Friedrich Bollnow, and the decolonial transculturalist viewpoints of Walter D. Mignolo and Wolfgang Welsch.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

When Søren Frank observed that “today Daedalus has once again put on his wings in order to challenge the force of gravity and soften the roots of belonging, whereas Odysseus’s homecoming (a return to and of the same order) no longer seems possible” (1), he was emphasizing the stark reality of transcontinental migration and the resultant, irreversible transculturality that defines “our contemporary world of rapid transformations” (1). Ours is an age of “unparalleled mobility, migration and border crossing,” notes Sten Pultz Moslund, “the whole world appears to be on the move” (1). This “virtual surge of people flowing across the surface of the globe” involves, as Moslund points out, “refugees, exiles, expatriates, international vagrants, guest workers, immigrants, globetrotting travellers and package tourists, wanderers of all kinds crisscrossing the planet and all its national, ethnic, cultural, social and linguistic borders” (1-2). With this wide scale movement of people, Moslund goes on, comes a transnational defeat of gravity, an immense uprooting of origin and belonging, an enormous displacement of borders, which entails the reshaping of the cultural landscapes of the world’s countries and cities (2). Seen from Frank’s perspective, as the world accelerates and contracts at one and the same time, the material and the immaterial borders are not only blurred but are also becoming permeable; the old nation-states implode for the emergence of new ones, such that what was once global now permeates the local, just as the local dissipates into the global; thus the production of human identity is informed no longer by the old but by new coordinates (2). Put otherwise, not only do we live at a time of the redrawing of maps, “of intense deterritorializations and reterritorializations,” we live most significantly at a time when “people are passing borders [and] borders are also passing people” (2).

In this age of border-crossing, the task of “dwelling” becomes, in the words of Otto Friedrich Bollnow, “a decisive role for mankind” (Human Space 120). Nonetheless, since “dwelling” does not only (microcosmically) refer to the house, but also (macrocosmically) connects to the city, since it describes not only the way in which man lives in his house, but also implies the way man associates with others in his city – for “the city is nothing other than a house on a larger scale” (139) – this research contends that “to learn to dwell” (Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” 339), which is to say, to learn how to co-exist in the real sense of “living together” within the cosmopolitan lived space, is to embrace the notion of transculturality, the absence of which precipitates the utmost feelings of homelessness, rootlessness, disgust, melancholy, nostalgia and weltschmerz that characterise the lives of the subaltern in Tendai Huchu’s novel The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician and Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon. To buttress this point though, an odyssey into the meaning of the key terms, “lived space’, “dwelling” and “transculturality’, is necessary.

1.1.1 The Concept of Lived Space

The “lived space” is a transdisciplinary concept that stretches from the fields of mathematics, architecture, archaeology and geography to sociology, anthropology, psychotherapy, phenomenology and, to say the least, post-colonial studies. Regardless of the varied perspectives, the term has come to be accepted as a referent to “the totality of the space that a person prereflectively ‘lives’ [in] and experiences, [including] its situations, conditions, movements, effects and its horizon of possibilities” (Thomas Fuchs 426). With roots that go as far back as, if not even farther than, Kurt Lewin’s topological or field psychology, the “lived space” implicates the environment and sphere of action of a bodily subject (425-6). Michel Foucault describes it as “the space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, [which]  is  also,  in  itself,  a  heterogeneous  space”  (“Of  Other  Spaces”  23).  Within  this

heterogeneous space, he explains, is “a set of relations” (23). Consequently, Henri Lefebvre refers to the lived space as a “social space” (The Production of Space 63), in which man forms series of relationships with other beings like himself.

While the word “space” has, in the distant past, had a strictly geometrical meaning which evoked the idea of an empty area, its use today spreads to areas outside the field of mathematics (Lefebvre 1). Lefebvre’s discourse on the subject of space perpetuates a spatial dyad, distinguishing between a first space, that is the “physical space” (perceived space), and a second space, which he takes to be the “mental space” (conceived space). From the dialectics of these two emerges a third space: the social space which is “simultaneously physical and mental, concrete and abstract. Mental space, formulated in the head, is projected onto physical reality, which in turn feeds the imaginary” (Miriam Kahn 7). Establishing a theoretical unity between the physical and the mental space, both of which, though apprehended separately, interact with and influence each other, Lefebvre opines that the product of this interaction, namely, the social space, “is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity – their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder. It is the outcome of a sequence and set of operations, and thus cannot be reduced to the rank of a simple object” (73). The lived space, therefore, does not refer to the house in which a person dwells, even though the house is said to help man by serving to root himself in space (Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Human Space 119).

In lieu of a definition, Bollnow describes the lived space in these words: “space as it is manifested in concrete human life” (19). But rather than use the term “lived space” – as used by Karlfried von Dürkheim, whom he acknowledged as probably the first (in the German- speaking area) to develop the question of “the spatial condition of human existence” or, simply, “the question of the concrete space experienced and lived by humans” (15) – he chooses to use

“experienced space” for its perceived grammatical correctness, even though he recognises that the former is more semantically precise than the latter which invokes the impression of an “‘experience of space’ in the sense of a merely psychological reality” (19). Bollnow, however, is totally at home with the meaning which Dürkheim and Eugene Minkowski ascribe to “lived space.” In the last chapter of his book, Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies, Minkowski is known to have not only extended the observations on temps vecu (lived time) to espace vecu (lived space) but to have also discussed lived space in contrast to the mathematical concept of space (Bollnow 20). According to Minkowski, “space cannot be reduced to geometric relations, relations which we establish as if, reduced to the simple role of curious spectators or scientists, we were ourselves outside space. We live and act in space, and our personal lives, as well as the social life of humanity, unfolds in space” (367). Dürkheim puts it more expressively: the lived space, he says, “is for the self the medium of physical realization, counter-form or extension, threatener or preserver, place of passage or resting- place, home or abroad, material[ization], place of fulfilment and possibility of development, resistance and borderline, organ and opponent of this self in its immediate reality of being and life” (389). Dürkheim’s description, Bollnow explains, shows the dual nature of lived space; that space is given to humanity in a double manner: as having the possibility of both realization and resistance, as giving room to both threat/danger and preservation, impediment and facilitation, as supportive and as obstructive, “even more profoundly, as something that belongs to humanity like a limb, and then again as something which faces us from the outside as hostile or at least as foreign” (21).

Furthermore, the lived space is said to be different for different individuals, and to also change for the individual according to his specific state of mind and mood. Every change in the human being, according to Bollnow, “entails a change to his lived space” (21). It is just as Dürkheim has emphasized, lived space “is different according to the being whose space it is,

and according to the life that takes place in it. It changes with the person who conducts himself in it, changes with the topicality of certain attitudes and orientations which – more or less immediately – dominate the whole self” (390). This change, so much evident in the literature of migration, is connected to the spatiality of human existence. Thus unlike mathematical space which is an abstract homogeneous continuum that is geometric and objectively measured, a kind of context or ether within which places, people, and things exist, the lived space involves the pre-conceptual, concrete and meaningful spatial experience of what phenomenologists – Heidegger, for instance – call “being-in-the-world” (Kimberly Dovey 2).

The lived space then is coloured by the heterogeneous “lived experience” of the network of relationships that constitute the lifeworld. This network of relationships, according to Heidegger, makes up Da-sein’s “world” (Being and Time 61-2). Since being-in-the-world is an existential determination of Da-sein, worldliness (which bespeaks the structure of a constitutive factor of “being-in-the-world”) is itself said to be an existential feature (60). But what happens when Da-sein – be it willingly or by sheer force – is uprooted (either physically) from its world, actually from its space, (or psychologically) from its perception of itself and its world, and then translocated or subjected to a totally (or even if to a nearly) different world, as we see in Huchu’s enormously existentialist text The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician and in Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon? Concealed in the oftentimes spurious countenance of such uprooting is the dreadful disorientating quality of decentring/dislocation (lostness in space), whereby – having lost, as Bollnow puts it, “the direction of its sunrise” (62) – Da-sein, unhomelinee (see Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home” 141), is tasked with making a centre, say a dwelling, from which, as a Kantian metaphorization goes, to peer at the sun in the sky and “know where to find South, West, North and East” (Immanuel Kant 134).

1.1.2 The Concept of Dwelling

While “dislocation” foregrounds the fact that man had a place of origin which he had left behind (or, as in some cases, was ejected from), the term “dwelling” implies that he has need of creating for himself an “in which,” a world, wherein he is rooted in space, a centre to which all his relationships in space refer (Bollnow 119). For mythological man, the centre of the world was the place of residence of one’s own people, symbolized even further by some sacred focal points (Bollnow 119), a good example of which is the village square/arena, that is the “Otobo” in Nsukka Igbo (John Kelechi Ugwuanyi and John Schofield 1), which does not only serve as “a symbol of an independent village [or people]” but also functions as the “space for keeping or locating shared cultural materials and monuments,” as the “venue for meetings, where laws/policies of the land are made and reviewed,” as the “civic space for inculcating values, ethics and traditions of the land’, as the religious centre/tabernacle of the village,” as a “native court for the people, where cases are tried and judgments delivered,” as the “space for carrying out performances, festivals, ceremonies, initiations and all kinds of communal feasting” and also as the “space for leisure, games and sporting activities” (6). But for cosmopolitans – who are chiefly existentialist (Bollnow 121) – upon whom the advantage of a more expansive experience of the world has fallen, this centre more strongly relates to the individual: it is the house in which he lives (119). However, this house is said to be no longer anchored to a particular place, for man today is reputedly “homeless on earth,” an “eternal fugitive with no special ties to any place in particular” (120), except the place in which he has, by the conscious effort of migration that defies the initial situation of “thrownness” (Heidegger, BT 164), learnt to take up dwelling.

Thrown into the world, the existentialist man first “finds himself in some basically arbitrary location, which he did not choose. . .. He knows the world only as the pressure of [a] restrictive situation” (Bollnow 121). In this world that impinges menacingly upon him, he must

find and make for himself a space in which he is at home. This is the sense conveyed by Heidegger’s term dwelling: “to be at home in a particular place, to be rooted in it and belong to it (Bollnow 121). While the cosmopolite’s “not-at-homeness’, which leads to dislocation from his place of origin, exposes him to the danger of being a “dispersed being” (Gaston Bachelard 5), to the “restlessly roaming life of a fugitive” (Bollnow 127), if he must root himself to the ground and have a sense of stability upon arrival at a new lived space, he must find for himself a “house’, an enclosure whose walls cut a special private space out of the large common space, and thus an “inner space” from an “outer space” (125). But just as Bollnow points out, the mere outward possession (whether by one’s own building effort, mere renting of an apartment in a block, or even by squatting) of one’s dwelling-place is not enough. Rather it is one’s inner relationship with it that enables it to fulfil its task of providing security (120-

1), as well as enabling the qualities of peace and comfort which are characters of homeliness.

To invoke Avtar Brah’s highly engaging questions though, “When does a place of residence become home?” (Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting identities 1), and “What is the difference between ‘feeling at home’ and staking claim to a place as one’s own?” (190). Brah observes that such questions, which are “almost always enmeshed with politics, in the widest sense of the term’, inevitably – at some stage in their lives – confront “those for whom travel constitutes a form of migrancy” (1). While there is definitely no shortage of ideas in relation to the concepts of home, homeliness and homelessness, Peter Somerville does well to point out that scholars are hardly in agreement as to how the term “home” is to be defined and analysed, how research is to proceed, and how the findings of research are to be interpreted (529). For Craig Gurney, “home” is an “ideological construct” created from people’s emotionally charged experiences of where they happen to live (26-9). Improving on Gurney’s view that “home” is a matter of feelings and lived experience, Somerville adds that it also involves “cognition and intellectual construction” (530).  However, Brah – referencing Phil

Cohen, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Barbara Tizzard and Ann Phoenix – has observed that it is quite possible to feel at home in a place and, yet, be inhibited from publicly proclaiming the place as home due to the experience of social exclusions (190). With this in mind, and reinforced even more by her own sense of social exclusion as a migrant of Indian descent raised in postcolonial Uganda where her looks often marked her out as an outsider (1-4), she conceptualizes home within two frames: that of “the nation” and that of everyday lived experience.

In the first instance, “home” is seen “in the form of a simultaneously floating and rooted signifier’, wherein there is an “invocation of narratives of ‘the nation.’” In this racialized or nationalist point of view, she says, “home” involves “considerable psychic investment in the idea of belonging to ‘a people’” (4), which then reinforces claims that settling in a place does not mean that one (or even a diasporic group) is necessarily of it—Idi Amin, for instance, “asserted that people of Asian descent could not be of Uganda, irrespective of how long they had lived there” (3). On the other hand, “home” is also a signifier of the site of everyday lived experience (4), the lived experience of a locality: “its sounds and smells, its heat and dust, balmy summer evenings, or the excitement of the first snowfall, shivering winter evenings, sombre grey skies in the middle of the day . . . all this, as mediated by the historically specific everyday . . . social relations” (188-9). Brah further clarifies that while on the one hand “home” indicates “a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination” – mythic because even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of “origin,” that space has become “a place of no return” (188) – on the other hand, it involves a discourse of locality:

It is . . . the place where feelings of rootedness ensue from the mundane and the unexpected of daily practice. Home here connotes our networks of family, kin, friends, colleagues and various . . . “significant others.” It signifies the social and psychic geography of space that is experienced in terms of a neighbourhood or a home town. That is, a community “imagined” in most part through daily encounter.

This “home” is a place with which we remain intimate even in moments of intense alienation from it. It is a sense of feeling at home. (4)

We can isolate at least three significant – though insufficient – properties of “home” from Brah’s deconstruction of her own features-of-home-provoking questions. These three properties, identified and discussed by Kimberly Dovey, are: “order,” “identity,” and “connectedness” (2-8).

By order, Dovey simply means “‘patterning’ in environmental experience and behaviour;” thus being-at-home, she says, “is a mode of being whereby we are oriented within a spatial, temporal, and sociocultural order that we understand” (2). As a signifier of identity, home is seen to be a highly complex system of ordered relation with place, an order that orients us in space, in time, and in society; furthermore, the phenomenon of home, Dovey observes, is more than the experience of being oriented within a familiar order; it also means to be identified with the place in which one dwells (5). This echoes Bollnow’s characterisation of the dwelling- place as an “expression of the individual who dwells in it, a piece of this individual which has become a space” (145). Dovey further puts in that while home as order and as identity are strongly interrelated, there is a major difference: the former is concerned with “where” we are at home, whereas the latter broaches the questions of “who” we are, as expressed by the nature of the home, and “how” one is at home (6). As for the third property, connectedness, Dovey maintains that it bespeaks the schema of relationships that brings order, integrity, and meaning to one’s being in a place—a series of connections between person and world: connectedness both with people in the inner space and with those in the outer space, connectedness with the place, connectedness with the past, and connectedness with the future (8). Some of the factors that facilitate connectedness include: the creation of openings such as windows and doors which give one free access to the space outside and prevent him from becoming a prisoner within his own inner space (Bollnow 147), the interior furnishing which gives comfort and

warmth (144), the presence of everything in the house that has a “history,” a reflection of a long past, a reminder of something, images and keepsakes that keep a piece of the past alive (145); and the plurality of the dwellers in the house—we dwell plurally, notes Bollnow, we dwell communally with our family, with “our own,” but separate from the “others,” the “strangers” (126, 239).

The house, thus designed to offer dwelling, becomes for man the world’s centre, from which he orients himself and finds his direction in space. Drawing from the term “Orient” which refers to the land of the rising sun, Bollnow points out that although we are rarely conscious of the origin of the word when we speak in a figurative sense of intellectual orientation, the phrase “to orient oneself” literally means “to determine the direction of sunrise” (62). Hence Kant could say that “to orient oneself, in the proper sense of the word, means to use a given direction . . . in order to find others, [for] when I see the sun in the sky and I know it is noon, then I know where to find South, West, North and East” (134). Kant’s metaphorization of the sun paints the image of a sojourner who is lost in a vast empty space, and thus has to rely on the universal, homogeneous positioning of the solar system for orientation/direction. But as we find even in Huchu’s and Levy’s novels though, the problem with finding South, West, North and East (which is to say, the problem of orientation) within the lived space is that contrary to the homogeneous character of mathematical space and solar bodies, the lived space is heterogeneous in nature. Implicit in this quality of heterogeneity, among other things, is what Wolfgang Welsch describes as the “inner differentiation and complexity of modern societies” (“Transculturality – The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today”

4). Otherwise stated, different people from different backgrounds have different thinking on what, and how it, ought to be done. Put simply, people differ and so also do their cultures. Therefore, rejecting the traditional notion of single culture for its perceived inadequacy in this heterogeneous world, Welsch proposes the idea of transculturality to be the most descriptively

adequate and normatively accountable concept of culture today (1), and its practice the only way by which human societies can peacefully coexist in the complex lived space of this age of globalisation.

1.1.3 The Concept of Transculturality

The concept of transculturality describes the process of mutual exchange and modification that takes place when different cultural forms collide and intersect (Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan 22). It was first formulated in the 1940s by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz who, “with regard to the dynamic context of colonial and postcolonial Cuba,” is known to have coined the term “transculturation,” “a concept designed to undermine the homogenizing impact of the acculturation model” (Mark Stein 255). According to Stein, Ortiz emphasized give and take (“toma y daca”) in place of the unilateral process of acculturation, thereby pointing to the bilateral and even multilateral dimension of his concept (255). However, rather than Ortiz, it was Welsch who is reputed to have given more audible enunciation of the idea of transculturality. Welsch propagates “transculturality” against the backdrop of the complexity of human societies, a situation partly brought about by the daily relocation of people, who are the embodiments of different ways of life, from one part of the globe to another. He states that transculturality, which is – in the first place – a consequence of the complexity of modern societies, allows for a “number of ways of life and cultures, which also interpenetrate or emerge from one another” (“Transculturality – The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today” 4). In developing this view, Welsch points out that it stands in contrasts to Johann Gottfried Herder’s traditional concept of single cultures and other theories (such as interculturality and multiculturalism) which were founded on, and which presuppose, “the old homogenizing and separatist idea of cultures” (4). To say the least, he finds these notions of culture deficient and unable to offer a more habitable lived space for people of different backgrounds and origins. Transculturality, in contrast, purports to allow such diverse people, in the words attributed to

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to conclude a pact – and this pact involves a certain possession of the world by their body, a certain gearing of their body to the world – which then gives each one “the enjoyment of space” (292), that is, the inclusive feeling of “comfort and security” (David C. Lim xii), in Bachelard’s words, the “joy of dwelling” (91), the relaxing feeling of being at home.

In the primary texts under study, however, we are confronted with a set of characters who are not-at-home in their lived space. These characters are alienated and devoid of the joy of dwelling because even though they live in a cosmopolitan age, the age of intense networking, a time in which material and immaterial borders are blurred and made permeable, these individuals, for example the characters in Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician, are either, in the words of T. S. Eliot’s persona, still “clutching their gods” (“Journey of the Magi,” Stanza 3, line 42), trying to live by the dwindling traditional, separatist mode of individual cultures (Welsch, “Network Design of Cultures”); or they are, in the case of Levy’s characters in Fruit of the Lemon, living among a people who – despite putting up the façade of tolerance for other cultures – are essentially cultural separatists, abhorring and resisting any level of difference. As such, the task of dwelling in the two novels is nuanced. In The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician, dwelling is complicated by the characters’ lack of transcultural perspectives, while in Fruit of the Lemon it is the British society itself that integrally rejects transculturality, making the minority group suffer the pain of unbelonging.

A major thesis of this research then is that dwelling is not simply marked by the mere presence of a space of abode and the presence of caregivers or family. These are important, but equally important is the ability to assimilate the views and standpoints of others and the capacity to see things from relational perspectives.  If dwelling, by which we now mean “the homeliness of the house” and, by extension, “the homeliness of the city,” were merely marked

by the presence and the (relative/full) ownership of a house (or an enclosed space which one identifies with), why then does the Magistrate not feel at home in his own rented apartment in Edinburgh? Why does the Maestro become ever reclusive, keeping to himself and feeling a sense of strangeness to others? Even so, why, among the Zimbabwean emigres in the text, are Farai the Mathematician and Brian the most at-home in the heterogeneous city they have all made their zero-point? Similarly, why does Faith, Levy’s protagonist – a British citizen, born in London, whose parents (first generation Windrush immigrants) have come from Jamaica to London in search of dwelling – find herself unable to integrate into Britain’s heterogeneous space? Why has she earlier on chosen to hastily move out of her family house, in order to take up dwelling in a shared apartment with her friends? Moreover, why, later on, does she find herself drowning in the sea of unhomelinee within the apartment she shares with her white friends, so that she has to move back in with her parents? Why, in order to resolve her acute sense of rootlessness, does she have to journey to Jamaica? In other words, how is Jamaica expected to help her build up a deeper sense of self? More importantly, how do Huchu’s and Levy’s texts critique today’s movement of globalization? And in what ways do the two texts propagate the “decolonial attitude” (Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity 8) by “advancing [or failing to advance] radically distinct perspectives and positionalities that displace Western [or even African] rationality as the only framework and possibility of existence . . . and thought?” (Catherine E. Walsh 17). The phenomenological framework, hinged on the decolonial attitude of transculturality, will guide our exploration of these important issues within the primary texts.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

As the second chapter of this project shows, The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician and Fruit of the Lemon have both been read from different perspectives. However,  among  the   various  prior  readings   of  the  two  texts,  there  has  been  no

phenomenological exploration of the role of transculturality in mitigating the problem of dwelling in the heterogeneous lived space of the age of globalisation.

It is only Tanaka Chidora that comes very close to tackling this research problem in his reading of The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician. However, his study and this ongoing research have distinct theoretical approaches and objectives. Compared with Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician, Fruit of the Lemon has received far more critical attention, being the object of innumerable, in fact, an avalanche of critical studies. While the decolonial attitude of this study and its interest on “home” might echo some of these established readings of the text, the interest being pursued in this current study of the novel is unique: to assay how Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon, just like Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician, portrays the place of transculturality in creating a homelier dwelling for minority groups within the complex lived space of our globalising age.

4.1 Aim and Objectives of the Study

Extrapolating from the above, this research aims at studying the flagrant and subtle ways in which the texts perpetuate the decolonial attitude of transculturality as a remedy to the problem of dwelling. Hence in seeking to explore Huchu’s and Levy’s novels, this project intends:

a.   to investigate the representation of the role of decolonial transculturality in softening the émigrés’ task of being in The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician;

b.   to explore, in Huchu’s novel, the role of transculturality in fashioning the new form of diversity in which each one’s sense of self is retained;

c.   to study the representation of the place of decolonial transculturality in mitigating the problem of dwelling posed by the separatist notion of single culture in Fruit of the Lemon; and

d.   to examine transculturality as the product of the longing for distance, and wandering in

Fruit of the Lemon.

4.2 Significance of the Study

Scholars of literature will undoubtedly deem this research noteworthy for its inventive study of Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician and Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon. The insights it offers will be helpful to subsequent phenomenological readings of literary texts in the area of postcolonial and world literature. Moreover, its engagement in the archaeology of social spaces will surely be useful to archaeologists and sociologists whose research interest is in the study of social spaces as lived and experienced by migrants.

4.3 Scope of the Study

This study primarily revolves around the problem of dwelling and its mitigation in Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician, and Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon. As such, it touches on the existing body of works within the existential-phenomenological school of thought, wherein it borrows from the works of such thinkers as Heidegger, Bollnow, Dürkheim, Minkowski, and Dovey; and also from the ideas of scholars in the area of cultural studies like Bhabha, Welsch, Brah, Walsh and Walter Mignolo. The project is restricted to the study of the following characters:  the Magistrate, Chenai, Mai Chenai, the Maestro, and Farai, who are drawn from Huchu’s novel, and Faith, Mildred, Wade, Constance and a few minor characters in Levy’s work.

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