Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Using Caroline McKenzie’s 2020 novel One Year of Ugly, which attempts to depict the real issues Venezuelan immigrants face in Trinidad, this paper discusses the subversion of migration narratives to reflect movements within the global South, a shift from migration narratives which explore movements across vast distances toward the global North and centers Western metropoles as the only viable destinations. I examine how such a marked change is necessary for attempts to center the ‘peripheral’ cities of the global South. MacKenzie complicates such narratives in her willingness to position South-South migration as a modern foil to the aging ideology of South to North migration as the only worthwhile movement for literary exploration and civic investigation. Port-of-Spain, the capital city of Trinidad, and only seven and a half miles from the protagonist’s homeland of Venezuela, becomes a center in its own right, offering possibilities of a better life even as it creates core problems for McKenzie’s characters. Consequently, by abnegating the idea of the city to which migrants flee as wholly a city of hope, MacKenzie’s novel proves that these cities of perceived havens are spaces of duality (hope and horror; destination and danger; relative opulence and oppression) wherein the characters find themselves becoming simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible. This paper ultimately examines the implications of migration narratives where destinations for migration/asylum are a stone throw away from one’s home and questions the magnitude of positioning postcolonial cities of the global south as centers and valuable sites for migration.