Nomadic consciousness and border crossing in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that two novels of European and African origins, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Emezi’s Freshwater (2018) share a common discursive formative. Nomadism, it is argued, constitutes the consciousness behind the textual formation of the two stories, and this consciousness informs the trajectory of border crossing observable in the two novels in terms of narration, characterization and incidents. The subjects in the stories mostly refuse fixed and normative identity, and are physically and mentally in motion. They traverse limits and lack sense of proportion. The narration apparently lacks cohesive elements as the stories, from varying narrative views, move from one point to another without transitional cues. Grounded in Postmodernism, particularly the concepts of deterritorialization and nomadism, this study shows that the two novels, though variant in many ways, are similar in terms of their figuring the nonrecognition and crossing of narrative, sexual, physical, mental and symbolic borders. This reestablishes and consolidates the novels’ relation to the post/modernist sensibility.