A Childhood Idyll

Novels are house bound phenomena. They express a species of exile where our lives are either in the process of becoming, or have wholly become, urbanised; a kind of mourning. A grief, like one of those elongated faces you see on painted African masks; for a loss that cannot be rectified: whatever the ostensible subject matter the racial memory that is its spring is the vanished pastoral.  The ancient, ancestral powerhouse is our homelessness.

Tags: Homelessness, The Novel