SOURCE: Flockemann, Miki. “Asian Diasporas, Contending Identities and New Configurations: Stories by Agnes Sam and Olive Senior.” English in Africa 25, no. 1 (May 1998): 71-86.

In the following essay, Flockemann compares the treatment of ethnic and cultural identity in Senior's “Arrival of the Snake-Woman” and Agnes Sam's “Jesus is Indian.”

Her arrival represented a loosening of the bonds that had previously bound her, that bind all of us to our homes. Cut free from her past, she was thus free of the duties and obligations that tie us so tightly to one another, sometimes in a stranglehold.

—Olive Senior, “Arrival of the Snake-Woman” (1989, 44)

“I am cut off from India. I am cut off from South Africa. I am not rooted anywhere. … I am not part of the Asian community; I am not part of the British community and I have never really been part of the exiled community. My interests...