«Our Home Can Travel». Return Fantasies and Impossible Returns in Uba Cristina Ali Farah's Narrative

Abstract

This article investigates Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (2007), Il comandante del fiume (2014), and Le stazioni della luna (2021), focusing on the way the main characters long for the motherland, or fantasise about it. These novels tell the story of the reconstruction of a self which is fragmented by migration, and they revisit or go beyond the concept of return. This article takes a close look at the aforementioned dynamics by concentrating on: 1) cultural contamination of spaces; 2) continuous trespassing of the linguistic border; 3) rethinking of kinships; 4) a wider, not geographically-defined idea of motherland; 5) identification of the act of writing with the space of return.