“A Bird in the House”
This collection of interconnected short stories puts the dominating symbol right there in the title. That always makes interpretation and analysis easier. Well, when the meaning of the symbolism is understood, that is. The symbolism of a bird in the house is derived from an ancient superstition which situated the circumstance of an outside bird getting into one’s house as being a foreboding omen of a death in the family.
Africa
Africa, the continent in which the stories in the collection The Tomorrow-Tamer are set, is a significant symbol within the body of short fiction work produced by Laurence. The stories set there often present white protagonists as a way of using the colonial conflict between two vastly different cultures as a means of exploring her persistent themes of self-identity, alienation and cultural stratification.
Violet and Ruth
The two figures at the center of the story “The Rain Child” are, taken together, arguably the strongest symbols for the complexity of those themes with which the writer is obsessed. This story takes the fundamental premise at stake in the other African stories and twists them into brilliance: it is the older white English teacher who has been working at a school in Africa so long and the African-born, but British-raised new girl in class through whom the issue of identity—and specifically the “right” to claim an identity—is explored. The racial and culture switch forces the reader to reconsider preconceived ideas about the topic.
Missionaries
The opening tale in the African collection, “The Drummer of All the World” is the son of white missionaries who was born and grew up on the continent foreign to his parents’ historical mindset. He leaves to go to school in England later on and when he makes the return to “his” homeland, he is barely able to recognize it as the Africa he left. This disconnect becomes symbolic of the colonialist privilege that colors the idea of the territorial possessions as something which never actually was in reality as he comes to understand that his nostalgic recollection of the Africa he knew as a child was little more than an illusion afforded by his privilege.
Godman Pira
The only character in the African stories who seems to be presented specifically as symbolic idea rather than a genuinely believable person is one of the two title figures in “Godman’s Master.” Godman is, after all, a midget (whose name suggest he is both god and man) who has been exploited by being held hostage inside a box to fulfill his “role” as a prophet offering forecasts of destiny. Another young man who has just returned from school in England thereupon sets out to liberate Godman by rescuing him from his burden only to become utterly useless for a man who for the first time must face the reality that freedom means lack of comforting dependence.
