Stranded in a Border Zone: Traumatic Liminality in Black British Short Stories

Abstract

As is widely known, “liminality” is a term derived from the Latin word limen, “threshold”; it designates an interspace to be crossed, a border between two locations to be traversed. In this chapter, I will be dealing with varying degrees of failure to go across the threshold or borderline between spaces, moments or situations in three short stories by contemporary black British writers: Koye Oyedeji’s “Home: The Place Where You Belong (Memoirs of a Modern-Day Slave)” (2000), Pete Kalu’s “Getting Home: A Black Urban Myth (The Proofreader’s Sigh)” (2015) and Valda Jackson’s “An Age of Reason (Coming Here)” (2015). The difficulties to cross, or, even more importantly, to cross back and forth, to negotiate an interspace are experienced by the stories’ central characters as traumatising obstacles on the way to find a desirable safe anchorage for the self, to reach a point of existential balance, a sense of belonging or feeling at “home”.