Displacement and Inner Conflict in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Memory of Departure and by the Sea (Published)
Abdulrazak Gurnah (1948- ), a Tanzanian-born British penman and emeritus professor, is one of the harbingers of tr1acing the fates of the refugees. He enormously depicts the conventional scenario of the refugees and the asylum-seekers in his novels Memory of Departure and By the Sea. Gurnah pens the feelings of displacement and inner conflict in the psyche of the individuals who try to cross the edge of an ajar door toward liberty. It is evident that Gurnah’s characters aspire for decolonization but cannot transgress the boundaries of colonial temperament due to the predicaments of displacement and inner conflict. The characters are traumatized in such a way that they consider themselves refugees and asylum-seekers in an independent country. Thus, this paper argues that due to the irresolute mind, Gurnah’s characters struggle to resolve the matter of acceptance or the rejection of colonial attitudes, which creates a sense of displacement and, ultimately, leads the characters towards oscillation and inner conflict.
Citation: Ahmed I. and Jahan N. (2023) Displacement and Inner Conflict in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s, Memory of Departure and by the Sea, European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, Vol.11, No.2, pp.49-60
Keywords: Colonialism, Displacement, Double Consciousness, Other, ambivalence, inner conflict
Abu Ishaque’s Surya-Dighal Bari: Religious Hegemony in the Context of the Famine of 1943 in Colonized Bengal (Published)
Surya-Dighal Bari (The Ill-Omened House), published in 1955, translated into English by Bangla Academy awardee Abdus Selim, is Abu Ishaque’s first and classic novel. Ishaque is considered one the pioneers of modern Bangladeshi novelists. The background or plot of the novel is twofold. First, the time period, this is known as the famine of ‘50. In Bangla year 1350 (1943 AD), a devastating famine stroke this land just four years before the Partition of Bengal and almost five million people died of starvation. This famine was caused by some controversial policies and indifference of the British government. A heartbreaking scenario of this famine reported in “Bengal Provincial Hindu Mahasabha Relief Committee Report of Relief Works” says, ‘The streets of the “Second City of the British Empire” thronged with living skeletons, the emaciated deadbodies frequently found on the pavements of the metropolis, men and dogs fighting for a share of the garbage collected in the dustbins of Calcutta, unattended babies in the villages being dragged away by the jackals are the sights that are never to be forgotten’ (6). Secondly, the pre and post-Partition Bengal and its impact on ordinary people. The Partition was done on the basis of Hindu-Muslim religious riot the devastating impact of which is still perforating Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. After the partition, people became more dominated by religious fundamentalism. So called Imams and other leaders started to take the opportunity of the ignorance of ordinary people to dominate them. Even in the novel, it is depicted how the ill-omened house is haunted by djinns. And to be safe from them, people have to take Tabij (amulets) or other superstitious precautions. Politicians, who used religious sentiment as their political weapon, are not the characters of this novel, yet they dominate the plot. Readers can smell gunpowder though they don’t see a single gun. The famine emerged during World War II, the country became independent in the name of religion, and politicians were benefitted in various ways. This paper tends to show how insignificant this independence is for the ordinary people. Just within five or six years of independence, Ishaque realized that nothing positive was going to happen in independent Pakistan, a religion-based state. Independence in the name of religion is of no use to the ordinary people; rather, religion becomes another weapon of domination for the ‘independent religious-political leaders’. Politicians didn’t create war for economic- social- psychological freedom of these marginalized people. They wanted to fix up their own geographical border where they would practice power freely. National and international politicians created war and took their own shares. But the inextricable strike of the rodent paw of war descends on those who don’t know the who- what- why- how of the war. They don’t even know who are fighting against whom. The people dying of starvation are innocent and their only fund is some simple- impeccable dreams. One of these dreams is to have enough food for survival. This simple dream becomes an unreality when riot begins, war haunts and famine strikes. This paper also tries to show the true condition of a newly independent East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), where the infamous famine of 1943 has already stricken. It also tries to depict the condition of so called low life marginalized people. Has the controversial Partition of Bengal really benefited either Hindus or Muslims? Has it really freed people of religious, political or economic subservience? These questions are still valid because the devastating War of Liberation of 1971 again left an almost-permanent scar in the soul of Bangladesh. The necessity of the Liberation War proves that a partition on the basis of religion can never bring good luck to a country.
Keywords: Colonialism, Famine, Hegemony, Partition, Religion.
Righting/Rewriting Arab History in Arab American Narrative (Published)
Arab nation is one of the most ancient nations in the world. Their history goes back to The Bronze Age (3200–1300 BC). However, such a history is totally distorted as it was written according to the whims of the colonizers. Arab history has been massively transformed; their culture deprecated and entirely disparaged; their wealth plundered. However, some Arab and Arab-American writers have started a mission to rewrite the deformed history of Arabs. One of these writers is Samia Serageldin, whose novel The Naqib’s Daughter is a rewriting of the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. The present article argues that Egyptian history has been defaced by the colonial powers and that Serageldin has succeeded in bringing to light the false claims of the colonists. The article maintains that the novel is a counter-discursive postcolonial novel, in which Serageldin attempts to right and rewrite the history of Egypt from the point of view of Egyptians themselves. The article aims also at analyzing The Naqib’s Daughter in terms of the contemporary political developments in the Arab world and the role played by world superpowers in shaping and reshaping the contemporary history.
Keywords: Colonialism, Egypt, French invasion, history, rewriting
Arevenge Endeavor (And) Unconscious Desire: Psychoanalytic Study on Mustafa Saeed in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (Published)
Season of Migration to the North is first written in Arabic language by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih and later translated into more than fourteen languages. As postcolonial novel it reflected the conflict between the West and East. Despite Sudan is an Africa country, East stands for the Arab culture that dominates the Sudanese Muslim Majority nation. Many studies endeavored to explain the ambiguity that usually dominates this novel especially the main character Mustafa Saeed. This study aims at analyzing the main character by adopting psychoanalytic theory by Sigmund Freud and later theorist like Carl Jung to explore Mustafa Saeed’s interracial sexual relations with western women. It is also attempted to find out why did Mustafa behaved differently in Sudan and London? To test whether his childhood wormless upbringing impacted his sexual relations as defense mechanism as claimed by Freud that childhood experiences crucially contribute to adulthood personality or he deliberately seduced Western women sexually as a revenge for the Western exploitation for Africa. Through the critical analysis it’s apparent that Mustafa exploited English women sexually as a means of revengeful reaction to Western exploitation of Africa; but it’s also his loss of maternal care and love in state of sexual fixation towards all women especially his feeling of a vague sexual yearning when Mrs. Robinson embraced him for the first time despite he was only being a boy of twelve years old.
Keywords: Colonialism, Psychoanalytic criticism, interracial sexuality, oedipal complex
Imagery as a Character Delineation Technique for the Analysis of Loss of Identity in Desai’s “Clear Light Of Day” (Published)
Desai is famous for creating an intense atmosphere in her novels. Being an Indian Feminist writer, her novels deeply reflect the social and cultural background of Indian society. She, being a literary writer, has mastered in delineating various techniques in her novels that distinguish her from her contemporary female writers in literary world. As an eminent figure in the world of Literature, she has employed similes and metaphors in order to find out loss of identity issues in postcolonial era. This paper aims to draw attention of the readers to the hidden underpinnings in her novels.
Keywords: Colonialism, Identity Crisis, Imagination, postcolonial
Neo-Colonialism is a Stage Designed by Colonial Powers to give the Colonized an Illusion of Freedom: A Neo Colonial Analysis of Things Fall Apart (Published)
This research paper aims at exploring how neo-colonialism is an indirect survival of colonial system. The assumptions of Nkrumah and Young along with the supporting views of Sarte and Bhaba regarding neo-colonialism have been used as a major theoretical framework for this paper. The novel Things Fall Apart (1958) has been chosen to show that neo-colonialism is in fact killing of two birds with one stone. It shows that how white men indirectly started working on colonizing the minds of people. The new globe order does not allow the direct rule therefore specific local bourgeoisie class plays the role of middle man in transferring the nation’s wealth and resources to the ex-colonizers.
Keywords: Colonialism, Indirect rule, Neo-colonialism, Young