DREAMSCAPES AND IDENTITY FORMATION OF MIGRANT CHARACTERS IN SELECTED AFRICAN DIASPORIC NOVELS

Abstract

Dream is a significant lens for exploring human consciousness and psychological conflict in African diasporic literature. Existing scholarship on dream in African literature has largely focused on its figurative and metaphysical interpretations as historical repositories for preserving accounts of significant past events with limited attention paid to the inner emotional landscapes of diasporic characters captured in dreams using a psychoanalytic framework. Addressing this gap, therefore, this study undertakes a psychoanalytic reading of the portrayal of migrant characters' dreamscape and identity formation in two contemporary African diasporic narratives—Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing and NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names—which are purposively selected for their in-depth representation of the intersection of dreams and identity formation. Deploying Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung's psychoanalysis, the narratives are subjected to a qualitative literary analysis. Dreams in the narratives function as symbolic sites where suppressed emotions, unresolved conflicts and fragmented identities surface through the unconscious. Gyasi foregrounds dreams as characterised by nostalgia and longing for home, while Bulawayo depict them as traumatic, nightmarish experiences that expose sufferings characters cannot consciously access. The authors deploy dreams not merely as narrative devices but as psychological portrayals of the diasporic unconscious, revealing how displacement shapes characters' lives.