The representation of home in the novel Geographies of home, by the Dominican-American writer Loida Maritza Pérez

Abstract

Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home portrays a Dominican family who has emigrated to the United States in an attempt to escape from poverty and the lack of opportunities in the Dominican Republic, an aftermath of Rafael Trujillo's thirty-one years of dictatorship in that country. The family lives in extreme poverty while in the Dominican Republic. Emigration becomes, then, a possibility of hope, of a better life condition. However, even after years of settlement in the United States, an idea recurrently haunts the members of this family: home. Whether in the form of a longing, a fear, and/or a memory, home seems to be presented and re-presented in numerous ways by the characters, especially the women, which are the objects of this analysis. I have chosen to investigate how the concept of home is represented in the novel in order to find out whether there would be a single notion of home shared by all characters, as the title suggests (since 'home' is used in the singular), or rather if the novel uncovers distinct notions of home for each of them. My hypothesis is that not only there are various homes, opposed to a single one, in the novel, but also that there are different homes even for each character. The narrative shifts perspectives, each chapter focusing on the perspective of one of the four women characters: Aurelia, Iliana, Rebecca or Marina. This way it is possible to look at the same episode from different angles, crisscrossing information. It is my assumption that whereas a traditional view on home stabilizes and fixes its notion, these characters in Geographies of Home offer a counterview, conveying the idea that home is a fluid concept, being a process rather than a product in their lives.