Migration involves departure from one’s native home, and also returning back. The returning migrants bring back unique stories to share with their people, and these stories of dislocation unveil ambivalent experiences due to multiple identities, rootlessness, cultural dilemmas, in-between condition, and loss of native mooring. Migrants leave their homes for upward mobility, personal venture, or due to some unbearable situations at home which forces them to move out. Despite getting assimilated into a comfortable life in the new nations and attaining new identities, there is a sentimental yearning in them, and they cannot be in their original selves. In diaspora there is a constant debate about homelessness, and the agony of being located and then dislocated. Migrant writers are keen to trace their roots and write about the social as well as political happenings of their native homelands. The two stalwarts of Sri Lankan diaspora writing, Michael Ondaatje and Romesh Gunesekera, seek to portray displaced immigrants living in the countries of the author’s adopted homes, Canada, and England. This is clearly illustrated in their respective novels Running in the Family and The Sandglass. Their books project displaced characters who straddle between two homes, two cultures and two identities, creating an expatriate identity that lacks fixity of roots due to living in two worlds.

Migration implies departure from native home, and also returning back. Russell King, John Connell, and Paul White in the preface to their edited collection Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration, remark that “[f]or some groups, migration is not a mere interval between fixed points of departure and arrival, but a mode of being in the world – “migrancy””1. The returning migrants bring back unique stories to share with their people, and these stories of displacement reveal ambivalent experiences due to multiple identities, rootlessness, cultural dilemmas, in-between condition, and loss of native mooring.

Migrants leave their homes for upward mobility, personal venture, or due to some unbearable situations at home which forces them to move out. The initial migration started with the arrival of the colonial empires, that is, the whites who crossed the oceans and invaded countries, bringing about an amalgamation or mutation in the colonies. But this migration reversed when colonized people started to move to colonial centers, the movement gaining momentum with the end of World War II, as people from the middle and upper classes started seeking higher education, and a new life. Even political exiles and war refugees added to those numbers.

Despite getting cushioned into a comfortable life in the new nations and carving new identities, there is a sentimental yearning in them, and they cannot be their original selves. Their sense of nostalgia teaches them to reflect reality with broken mirrors building meaning from scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, media, etc., and to build a partial view of the home which has been distanced by time and space.

The concept of ‘Home’ performs an important function in one’s life, and act as a valuable means of giving one direction, a sense of place in the world. It stands for shelter, stability, security, and comfort. Author Dorinne Kondo in her article “The Narrative Production of ‘Home,’ Community, and Political Identity in Asian American Theatre” remarks that home denotes a safe place where a person does not have to give any explanations to the outside world, and it denotes community. To be ‘at home’ is to inhabit a location where one is welcome, and can be with people very much like oneself, thus connoting one’s networks of family, kin, friends, colleagues and social space.

Commonwealth Literature Journal, Aravind Adiga, Cultural Production, Commercial Mediations, Indian Fictional Writing, South-Asian Cultural Commodities, Contemporary Corruption, Social Responsibility, Postcolonial Literatures, Foreign Cultures, Commercial Implications, Postcolonial Production.