Books
Author
Hasti Abbasi
Publication date
2018/8/25
Publisher
Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Description
This study aims to foreground key literary works in Persian and Australian culture that deal with the representation of exile and dislocation. Through cultural and literary analysis, Dislocation, Writing, and Identity in Australian and Persian Literature investigates the influence of dislocation on self-perception and the remaking of connections both through the act of writing and the attempt to transcend social conventions. Examining writing and identity in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978), Iranian Diaspora Literature, and Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men (1989/Eng. 1998), Hasti Abbasi provides a literary analysis of dislocation, with its social and psychological manifestations. Abbasi reveals how the exploration of exile/dislocation, as a narrative that needs to be investigated through imagination and meditation, provides a mechanism for creative writing practice.
Chapter 1: Introduction: Dislocation and Writing
Dislocation, whether enforced or self-inflicted, can in many ways be a disaster for a writer who immigrates to a new country but does not experience a sense of belonging. However, a greater creative capacity can also be cultivated, and immigration can even become a source of creative expression, once the individual in question experiences transnational existence and the feeling of belonging. Writing is a cognitive process that is replete with the personal insights of authors as they put their world under the microscope. It can reflect the experience of settling in a place away from home, or even of being at home, when characters re-evaluate their perceptions of their expected life journeys after experiencing the un-likelihood of surpassing the ties of location.
Chapter 2: Writing in Exile
Self-expression becomes more complex after one’s arrival in a country where a foreign language is spoken, and daily encounters with incomprehension lead to questions of belonging and a quest for identity. During the process of looking for the self in writing in a new culture and language, the exiled writer needs to alternate his/her feelings and identities while switching languages. However, writing in exile is one of the most practical ways in which a writer can keep up his/her imaginative practice and independence.
Chapter 3: Malouf’s An Imaginary Life
Malouf’s romantic perspective of Australians’ sense of marginality involves the reconsideration of Australia as a place where individuals can become reconciled with their surroundings through the experience of exclusion and exile. To Malouf, the suffering of exile can be healed when past and present homes co-exist happily without exiles attempting to ascribe complete truth and superiority to themselves in relation to social and political power, and deceit and inferiority to outsiders. He pays careful attention to the creative connection between language and nature by representing the means in which landscape reflects the various phases of self-understanding.
In writing in an oppressive situation where authors are denied freedom of speech and literary expression, Parsipur chooses an intellectual existence in exile while attempting to traverse ideological boundaries. Parsipur’s characters can be interpreted in terms of nomadic experience as they attempt to go beyond the emotional and cultural sense of dislocation.
The 1979 revolution in Iran resulted in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, which was replaced by the Islamic Republic. To reclaim the missed years of their lives in their homeland, therefore, some writers including Goli Taraghi, Azadeh Moaveni, and Marjane Satrapi developed shared narratives, centered on their diaspora community, and social and cultural relations, unsettled by a sense of un-belonging to their new home.