Identity Displacement in Postcolonial Writings: a Comparative Study of Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Faqir’s The Cry of the Dove.

Abstract

Identity displacement begins to play its predicament when a person moves from the comfort of his familiar surrounding to a wholly new place, which is unfamiliar and exotic. In this new environment, a person will have difficulty assimilating into the new culture or preserving the previous one. Slowly, a sense of seclusion will start to emerge, leading, to an internal conflictin which the healthy, unified self-changes into a split, fragmented, rootless and dislocated one. The concern with identity displacement, in fact, has often been one of the most common yet crucial themes in the field of postcolonial literature. Accordingly, many postcolonial authors have shed light on this issue in their works. Desai and Faqir are no exceptions. Their masterpieces: The Inheritance of Loss and The Cry of the Dove respectively capture the ambivalence of what it means to fluctuate between two antagonistic worlds, never been able to identify fully with anyone and its aftermath on one’s identity. Therefore, this dissertation intends to provide a comparative study between the two aforementioned literary works focusing on the issue of identity displacement that is undergone by all of The Judge Jemubhai, his cook’s son Biju and Salma. Furthermore, the purpose of this study is to explore the similarities and differences between the protagonists’ traumatic experiences of dislocation and non-belonging and to examine the extent to which they succeed or fail in relocating themselves and articulating their identities. To accomplish this, the researcher employs a combination of Textual analysis and Postcolonial approaches that analyse the novels in terms of how authors represent the experiences of individuals who have been displaced by cross- cultural encounters, and how they offer strategies for coping with and overcoming the effects of identity displacement. The main findings show that each character experiences different forms of identity displacement, ranging from linguistic and cultural dislocation to economic exploitation. However, all three characters demonstrate resilience and resistance in the face ofthese challenges by failing to relocate themselves and remain adhered to their origins