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
Kamila Shamsie’s Novel “Burnt Shadows”: A Discourse of Traumatic Displacement (Published)
Kamila Shamsie, a Pakistani English fiction writer in her epic novel, Burnt Shadows (2009), covers more than half a century, from fatal day of atomic bombing on 9th August 1945 at Nagasaki in World War II to the 9/11/ 2001 attack on World Trade Centre and the post-9/11 world. This study explores the traumatic displacement of innocent humans because of the major historical events caused by the world power politics. A Series of traumatic displacement is presented through the stories of two families which consist of individuals of various nationalities and a number of cross-cultural relationships. Norman Fairclough’s (1995) interpretative framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been used to uncover the traumatic impacts of the misuse of power which according to Van Dijk(1990) is the most prominent theme of CDA. Postcolonial context of the writer and the text and inherent ideology and power relations embedded in the text have been explored. The outcome of this academic discussion provides a tapestry of emotional, psychological and social challenges caused by traumatic displacement and the enormity of damage it causes in the life of the poor victims.
Keywords: Displacement, Postcolonialism, Power Politics, Trauma