President Barack Obama's Speech

[Name of the Institute]President Barack Obama's Speech

Neither can the subject of institutionalised racism, given the political furore over the recent shooting of a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. Frank's emotional fall-out - and the reader's immersion in his semi-hallucinatory inner monologue at the start of the book - could be that of a soldier returning from the Helmand front today (www.zeleza.com).

But Home is not about war as much as its aftermath. Morrison has said that Barack Obama's election was the first time she felt "powerfully patriotic". This tenth novel by the Nobel Prize-winning writer can be read as an examination of patriotism - the idea of belonging to, and fighting for, one's country, and what this means for an ordinary African American man.

For Frank it means freedom of sorts, because it offers him escape from his mean existence in Lotus, Georgia, the type of town where "there was no future, only long stretches of killing time". We meet Frank half-dressed and fleeing from a hospital ward to make his Greyhound bus migration to the South. He has lain handcuffed in his hospital bed, we are told, and his arrival from Korea is a symbolic return to bondage from which he must break free.

A sympathetic minister who harbours him after his hospital escape expresses the racial outrage that Frank never articulates: "An integrated army is integrated misery. You all fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better."

It is interesting that Morrison chose the Korean War as her backdrop. A closer parallel to Iraq, if she had wanted it, might have been Vietnam with all its moral murkiness and internal opposition. Korea is perhaps understood as a more just war, and its homecoming for troops an ostensible return to the land of the ...