Home and Belonging

Throughout the novel, the author uses Sammar's feelings of dislocation to explore the ways in which the individual's sense of home contributes to her understanding of self. For the majority of the narrative, Sammar is living and working in Aberdeen, Scotland. Having been born in Scotland, Sammar originally saw the country as an ideal refuge. In Chapter 8, the narrator says that if Sammar had not had a British passport, she would not have been able to get "on the plane after quarreling with her aunt, sold her gold bracelets for the one-way ticket" (72). She chose to return to Aberdeen from Khartoum "for the tie with Tarig" (73). While married to Tarig, Aberdeen was home. After his death, Sammar stripped her small apartment of all evidence of her late husband, "never imagining she would come back," never imagining the fight with her aunt (16). Mahasen's hostility, however...