How Can Home Be Reconstructed after Trauma?Family Failure and the Reconstruction of Belonging in Toni Morrison’s Home and Tijan Sila’s The Day My Mother Went Mad

Abstract

Although Toni Morrison’s Home and Tijan Sila’s The Day My Mother Went Mad emerge from different linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts, both address a central question: how does historical trauma enter the subject through the family and subsequently reshape the experience of belonging? Rather than treating “home” as a static spatial image, this article understands it as a mediating site where structural violence, intimate relationships, and subject formation intersect. Through a comparative reading of the two works, the article examines how historical trauma enters the family, why the family’s protective function breaks down, and how belonging may remain possible after trauma. The analysis shows that both works challenge the conventional idea of home as a place of inherent safety, yet they differ significantly in their ethics of repair. Morrison places greater emphasis on reconstructing belonging through relational support, the naming of history, and communal care, whereas Sila focuses more strongly on maintaining a minimal form of psychological presence when external structures of support have become unavailable. In trauma narratives, therefore, home is no longer a natural endpoint but a complex site where historical violence penetrates private life and belonging is reshaped through processes of rupture and reconstruction.