Domestication of Foreigner’s Home in Toni Morrison’s Home
Domestication of Foreigner’s Home in Toni Morrison’s Home

Summary/Abstract: In a number of interviews, Toni Morrison refers to America as Foreigners’ Home. This conceptualization is linked to the historical processes related to the formation of the New World by immigrants who sought to make America their new homeland. Upon their expropriation of land from native inhabitants, there arose a need for a labor force to work the acquired land that engendered forced chattel African immigration to America out of which grew a particular African-American experience. Enslavement as well as Jim Crow segregation induced within the New World black American community feelings of foreignness, “a long way from home”. One of their survival strategies and forms of resistance against oppression was the development of another sense of home over against the oppressive conditions that engulfed them. In her novel Home, Toni Morrison reconstructs the journey of a black Korean War veteran, Frank Money, who reaches a sense of homeliness in the racially segregated South despite failing to realize the citizen-soldier ideal and being victim and witness to continued widespread racist oppression. He attains a sense of belonging and security upon returning to the black community of Lotus, Georgia, where black people are regarded as foreign because of their settlement there as forced exiles. The community, by its unity, manages to domesticate this foreigners’ home, which enables Frank Money, the traumatized black veteran, to perceive Lotus as an empowering space contrary to the alienation he felt before his engagement in combat abroad.

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