Transformations of the Liminal Self: Configurations of Home and Identity for Muslim Characters in British Postcolonial Fiction

By Alaa Alghamdi

The concept of home has been changing for more than a century. This change began with colonialism and the movement of people across the globe, often within a set power dynamic. Since people now move with greater frequency, the question of where home is and what home means is more relevant than ever before.

Meticulously researched, Transformations of the Liminal Self addresses the formation of home and identity and the ways in which the latter depends on the former. Using the postcolonial Muslim characters in the literary works of British authors Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, and Fadia Faqir, author Alaa Alghamdi shows how home and identity are profoundly impacted by the power dynamics of the colonial relationship, the individual immigrants experience, and the subjects multicultural setting.

Drawing upon the theoretical work of Homi Bhabha, Rosemary Marangoly George, Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, and Edward Said, the conception of home and the formation of hybrid identities is examined and connected to larger cultural manifestations of MuslimWestern relationships. More specifically, Alghamdi explores how these characters define their home.

Bold and challenging, Alghamdis work offers a rigorous and well-articulated contribution to the ongoing academic conversation about identity and postcolonial literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462044894

Alaa Alghamdi

Dr. Alaa Alghamdi is an assistant professor of English literature at Taibah University, Medinah, Saudi Arabia. Educated in Saudi and England, Alghamdi published his first book, “Transformations of the Liminal Self: Configurations of Home and Identity for Muslim Characters in British Postcolonial Fiction” in 2011. Since then, he has been a prolific writer publishing academic papers and articles in magazines and journals worldwide on the subjects of postcolonialism and feminism. This is his first novel.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgement

Chapter One: Introduction

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight: Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgement

This book could not have been written without the help and support of the following individuals.

I would like to express my indebtedness to my parents: to my father for his unconditional support, and for being a perfect example for me, and to my mother, who sacrificed so much for the sake of her children, and for he constant prayers for me and for my success. I likewise owe a debt of deepest gratitude to my uncle, Asem Hamdan, who has been the prime source of inspiration in all venues of my life. I am thankful for everything I have learned from him.

I am grateful to my sisters Mona and Rawan, who have always been there for me, supported me, and encouraged me throughout my research.

I am profoundly grateful for my sweet wife and best friend, Hadeel Alsharif, for her unfailing encouragement, patience and support.

Finally, I wish to thank my friend and editor Malina Kordic, for her tremendous help in making this publishing endeavor possible.

Chapter One

Introduction: Home and Identity

in Postcolonial Perspectives

Chapter One: Introduction

Home and Identity in Postcolonial Perspectives

Of the multiple dilemmas that affect the postcolonial subject, the interaction between home and personal identity is one of the most pervasive and probably the most profound. Throughout much of human history, one’s home was a fixed concept—stable, pure, and intact. It is possible to see remnants of that placid and uneventful conception of home and its affect on identity among members of an intact culture, one in which there is little or no discernible contrast between the individual and the larger society. Identity may be attached to a certain geographical locale, and will certainly be embedded within a culture. However, the disruption caused by the colonial contact between cultures has had a long and complex legacy, and the examination of home and its effect on identity is central to the issues that emanate from this legacy.

Colonialism mixed cultures and set up an uneven power dynamic between them. The concept of the Other, an individual living within a society but always seen as belonging to it in a lesser or different way, was created. Cultures have been permanently altered, leading to a situation in which individuals, because of their race or cultural history, are able to identify with some aspects of the society but not with others. For all of these reasons, there has been a pressing need to re-define the concept of home as it applies to members of Postcolonial and multicultural societies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Home has become a contested concept, no longer predictably applicable to a discreet geographic set of cultural practices, given the formation of novel, hybrid and liminal positions. We must always question, therefore, what a Postcolonial subject actually means when he or she speaks of ‘home’. In The Politics of Home, Rosemary Marangoly George (1999) discusses, at the outset, the imaginary properties of home for the Postcolonial subject, noting that home is a desire for a stable, rooted identity, and that realistic works of fiction reflect this by situating themselves . . . in the gap between the realities and the idealizations that have made ‘home’ such an auratic term (George 1999: 2). George implies, therefore, that the personal and social meanings of home have been significantly altered, and that this change in turn can be extrapolated and characterized—even if not precisely defined—from the works of novelists who examine and represent the permutations of home experienced by these subjects.

George notes that many scholars of the twentieth century (including, for example, Gaston Bachelard, Clara Cooper, David Sopher, Yi-Fu Tuan, Douglas Porteous, Adrian Forty and Witold Rybczynski) have drawn a close correlation between home and self-identity (1999: 20). Both concepts are, however, malleable. When people occupy a place over a long period of time, the experiences and practices that emerge within it influence the self-identity of those who live there. However, for subjects who have left or been parted from their original setting self-identity may become fragmentary, divided between identification with the older and newer setting. Home may become ‘imaginary’ or ‘desired’, if the focus is on a union with a setting and range of practices no longer accessible to the subject. At the same time, of course, self-identity through the bonding with a sense of home may be stymied by exclusion or marginalization within one’s new social context and culture.

Identification with one’s home or homeland becomes complex and problematic in the case of the exile or immigrant subject because the homeland has been altered, left behind, or otherwise inaccessible. Within this context, the examination of individual identity formation relative to the notion of home becomes relevant to virtually everyone in society. The intersection between the two can no longer be taken for granted. An examination of all aspects of home and identity, for all subjects, becomes widely applicable to literature and life. Our current and continuing movement towards globalization merely increases the complexity of the interaction between home and identity and renders it universally applicable.

A pure or stable notion of home may refer to one’s place and culture of origin, but if the subject has left his or her homeland (either voluntarily or through necessity) and has no direct access to it, this construction of ‘home’ becomes less reliable. Its power may increase even as its tangible qualities diminish. As one critic describes it, the notion of home has extended beyond its primary connotation… of the ‘private space’ from which the individual travels into the larger arenas of life and to which he or she returns at the end of the day… home is also the imagined location that can be more readily fixed in a mental landscape than in actual geography (George, 1999: 11).

The idea of home can acquire more power in the absence of access to the place itself, and this imagined construct has the power to strongly influence issues surrounding the intersection of home and identity. Constantly referencing an imagined homeland is problematic for the Postcolonial subject if it creates nostalgia for something inaccessible or if it serves to accentuate the alienation of a subject from his or her immediate surroundings and culture. In some cases, the family unit may be disrupted or fragmented due to a member’s loyalty to an abstract notion of home or homeland. The subject’s loyalty may be split due to a dichotomy between his or her homeland and actual, physical home. The subject may also experience discrimination or simply a lack of understanding in his present environment, causing him to identify more closely with the original homeland. In short, a great variety of possibilities exist with regard to this complex interaction. Unlike a physical home, the imagined home or homeland as an abstract concept transcends time and space. The idea is powerful and pervasive, though its definition and manifestation is highly variable. The power of the imagined home or homeland may be central to an understanding of the Postcolonial subject with regard to his or her identity formation. Specifically, in the immigrant or exiled subject, the ephemeral, indefinite or imaginary construction of home and self-identification with this imaginary notion of home ultimately impacts the subject’s ability to form a hybrid identity. Postcolonial theory, understood within the broader context of postmodern inquiry into identity and other key concepts, provides a useful framework through which to examine the immigrant or exiled subject’s formation of identity. Accordingly, this research and analysis applies Postcolonial theory to the examination of the home-identity interaction in the Postcolonial subject of Muslim origin. Assuming for the moment that hybrid identity formation is the objective for a Muslim character living in and adjusting to a multicultural context, the identification or over-identification with an ‘imagined home’ or homeland may hold the individual back and prevent the evolution of identity. It is equally important to acknowledge that, conversely, the identification with the imagined or remembered home as a relatively stable entity may also provide a unique foundation for the evolution of new Postcolonial identities.

These questions are addressed through a juxtaposition of the depictions of the search for home and selfhood in the works of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, and Fadia Faqir. Whether literal or symbolic, the notions of home and identity warrant a re-examination within a Postcolonial theoretical context, with the ultimate objective of explicating the nature and result of the interaction between the subject and his or her new and old, stable and shifting, lived and imaginary notions of home. The identity that springs from the identification with these various ‘homes’ may be a liminal one, allowing the subject to straddle various cultures and identities and create an innovative but fully functional identity. In fact, it is the strength and variety of such identities that reveals the resilience and promise of the Postcolonial subject. Postcolonial inquiry, which once focused on the loss of identity and the marginalization of minority subjects, may now potentially transcend these concerns and examine the strong, novel and unique identity formation which does occur among liminal subjects. Liminality and hybridity may come to characterize home and identify formation the majority of individuals in the twenty-first century.

The modern or Postmodern novel is the ideal forum in which to explore questions of identity and home in the Postcolonial. Hanif Kureishi considers the novel to be the most capacious, the most sensual form [of literature], capable of capturing and conveying human experience in a multifaceted manner (Hanif Kureishi Interview, n.d.). The French novelist Louis Aragon called the novel the key to forbidden rooms in our house (cited by Faqir, 1998: 86), acknowledging that novels have a unique capacity to let the reader into the subject’s home, space and work, and thus effectively interrogate it. Moreover, novels have the unique ability to allow for an examination of the subject in situ, embedded within and influenced by a full complement of human, cultural and geographical contexts. After all, self-identification cannot exist in a vacuum.

Novels are, moreover, excellent tools for promoting understanding through the depiction of culturally and racially diverse subjects, Postcolonial writers have added greatly to readers’ knowledge of, experience with and empathy for the issues facing the potentially fragmented subject attempting to acquire a cohesive and coherent identity. In addition, novels are perhaps particularly well suited to the discussion of Postcolonial subjects because they provide immediacy and an ease of identification with the subject, erasing or diminishing cultural divisions that may otherwise separate individuals within a multi-cultural society. A reader who would not be able to identify with a subject represented through statistics or other objective forms of representation may readily identify with such a subject within the rich context provided by a novelist.

For a writer dealing with themes that are related to Muslim culture, the novel has a particular significance in that it provides a forum for the exploration of a shifting sense of social, political and religious identity. Edward Said states:

The one place in which there’s been some interesting and innovative work done in Arab intellectual life is in literary production generally, that never finds its way into studies of the Middle East. You’re dealing with the raw material of Politics… You can deal with a novelist as a kind of witness to something. (Middle East Report 1988: 33)

Said implies that it is through literary production that the subject can be represented relatively free from external influence and foreign contextualization or explication. Whereas supposedly objective and unbiased non-fiction sources may carry and reproduce the bias of the dominant culture, the novel (at least potentially, appropriation issues notwithstanding) provides a forum in which the Postcolonial subject can speak for himself or herself.

The Postcolonial subject’s identity is hybrid because it is based on based upon multiple notions of home. The subject is a liminal figure because he exists on the threshold of multiple realities, navigating between them and potentially forming an identity based on hybridity. While it is appealing, on a theoretical level, to present such hybridity as strength, it can just as readily be experienced as conflict and weakness, and evaluation of the subject’s position must take into account a multiplicity of experiences. The formation of a liminal identity as the result of the loss of one’s original home and the need to adjust to a new one may even be liberating, as it may free the subject to form novel and unique identities which carry their own strength. Ultimately, both the positive and negative effects of hybridity must be considered. Personal limitations cannot be minimized or discounted; nor should they circumvent exploration of the fertile possibilities presented by increasingly varied identities, some of which have not been covered by prior literary criticism.

This book attempts to demonstrate how the selected literary texts promote an increasingly multifarious and resilient vision of the Postcolonial Muslim subject’s identity. The subjects under examination are both empowered and limited by the parameters of memory, history, tradition, belief, and personal experience, and sometimes reach unprecedented forms of cultural participation. A study of these Postcolonial Muslim subjects allows us to analyse closely the process and outcome of identity formation in cases where that process is fragmented and outcomes are unpredictable. The eventual formation of identity in these subjects is testimony to the resilience and ingenuity of the characters as well as the authors who create them.

Postcolonial theory and criticism support the notion that the liminal position may be one of strength, creativity and promise, notwithstanding the challenges associated with occupying such a position due to displacement from one’s homeland. According to some critics, alienation itself is a catalyst. Memory is identified as the factor primarily responsible for the imaginary reconstruction of home, but it is noted that: Memory does not revive the past but constructs it (Hua, 2006: 198). For those separated from their homeland, history, and language, marginalized and perhaps discriminated against in a new environment, and forced to rely on that inherently unreliable element—memory—to produce identity, diverse and creative methods of constructing the self have become necessary.

Poet Derek Walcott’s statement I’m either nobody, or I’m a nation (Walder, 1998: 123) aptly describes the essential paradox inherent in the expatriate’s search for identity. While identity might indeed be fragmented, lost, repressed or irretrievable, or otherwise indicative of loss or dysfunction, it may also be true that the Postcolonial subject’s identity, once formed, is such a novel conglomeration of disparate parts that the result is the production of a unique nation of one, which flourishes in ways previously undreamed of.

Immigrants, expatriates and exiles seem at an obvious disadvantage with regard to their ability to evolve a sense of self and of home. As the selected texts illustrate, when the move is to a new country with a different religion, culture, and set of values, alienation from one’s past and present surroundings may occur. Ultimately, there is a shift in values, but this does not occur in a linear or predictable fashion. The individual is subject to multiple and complex influences. As one critical source states, Identity is the product of history; on the personal level, of memory… the sense of lack, or loss, of living in a cultural vacuum, may [hold] back achievement; there is a drive, therefore, to [forge] a new present and future out of many pasts (Walder, 1998: 121-3). Marginality in and of itself can have a positive effect, driving subjects toward creative and novel identity formation. This ‘creative energy’, once unleashed, takes on multiple forms. Describing the work of Salman Rushdie and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a critic notes that these and other writers, in constructing a transnational sense of identity,

. . . use constructs of magic or the ‘esoteric’ to transcend traditional notions of geographical borders, boundaries of time and space, and limitations of identity. They propose magical spaces (and people) with which to redefine human abilities and communication, and to re-examine issues such as intercultural violence, ethnic identity, and an individual’s responsibility for war. Sacred, or what I will discuss in the context of the novels in this chapter as a ‘magical’ space, allows for alternative readings of both past and future (Grace, 2007: 117-18).

No longer contained within or limited by an intact history or set of traditional, cultural and religious values, these authors and the characters they depict may have unprecedented freedom to form new identities, constructed from diverse elements of memory, social realities, and individual and collective concerns. It is this potentiality which is of most interest in our exploration of Postcolonial identity and homeland. Key characters in the primary works selected form identities in distinct and diverse ways, within which common themes may be observed.

Despite the commonalities noted, the diversity of characters demonstrates the multiple—indeed, almost infinite—possibilities that exist for identity formation in the Postcolonial era. Zadie Smith and Hanif Kureishi’s works offer ample ground for comparison in terms of voice, style and intended audience. Of course, Kureishi’s comic slant ensures that the characters consist in part of strange hybrids, some of them dysfunctional and ultimately unsuccessful combinations of the two contrasting cultures. Kureishi’s first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, one of the earliest of the genre, presents a portrayal of a Postcolonial subject whose navigation through various personal and cultural influences results in a novel and creative formation of identity and a sense of home, addressing, in the process, multiple issues pertaining to the representation of ‘Other’ (specifically Asian) cultures. Zadie Smith offers us a variety of characters, some of whom successfully create identity, though some remain locked in opposing positions which limit them. Very relevant to both of these works, as well as certain others, is the distinction that some critics make between the ‘immigrant genre’ (i.e. narratives dealing primarily with characters who have voluntarily immigrated) and novels dealing with characters who have lost their original homes.

The ‘immigrant genre’ is distinct from other Postcolonial literary writing and even from the literature of exile, [though] it is closely related to the two (George, 1999: 171). There are profound similarities regarding the loss of home and the construction of an identity and identification with an ‘imagined’ homeland, or one constructed from fragmentary and unreliable memory, because of the distance imposed on the subject. As a result, like the distance that exile imposes on a writing subject, writers of the immigrant genre also view the present in terms of its distance from the past and future (George, 1999: 171).

The central issue, in fact, seems to be a loss of the continuity that a stable and intact sense of home would provide. For subjects who exist in essentially the same home and culture as their forefathers did, and who expect this consistency to continue in future generations, time moves along in a linear fashion, but there may be no consciousness of a sharp division or distancing between past, present and future. Elements of the past and present are, in a sense, within that subject’s reach. On the other hand, for the subject who has been displaced, either through his/her own choosing or involuntarily, there has been a sharp, perhaps irreversible break between his/her own experiences and those of his/her ancestors, to the same degree that home influences experience and identity.

The past is irretrievable and there is a distance between it and the present. Moreover, the life that future generations will forge in the new country is largely unimaginable to the immigrant and exile; thus, there is a perceived break in continuity from the future as well. As George states, this element of distance is consistent in narratives where the characters are immigrants and where they are exiles (171). However, there are multiple distinctions; the ‘immigrant genre’ being marked by a disregard of national schemes, the use of a multigenerational case of characters and a narrative tendency towards repetitions and echoes (through several generations) (George, 1999: 171).

Thus, even though the characters typically experience separation, it is the tendency of the writer to follow characters through multiple generations, perhaps in order to compensate for and derive meaning from and a sense of completion in the narrative, which cannot, in all cases, be accomplished within the history of a single generation.

While the effects of immigration are multigenerational, George also notes that the immigrant genre is marked by a curiously detached reading of the experience of ‘homelessness’ which is compensated for by an excessive use of the metaphor of luggage, both spiritual and material (George, 1999: 171). This is noted with regard to many of the selected narratives, particularly those of Smith and Kureishi. For example, humour is a potent form of detachment.

The interrogation of home and identity in the novels is influenced by formal aspects of the novels themselves. Brick Lane by Monica Ali, being traditional as opposed to postmodern in structure, demonstrates identity formation in a more subtle manner while expressing many of the same characteristics described above. Characters are displaced and alienated, and selectively adapt to elements and values that were foreign to them at the outset. At the same time, this adaptation generally does not consist of a rejection of traditional Islamic values, but a subtle adjustment. Here again, the influence of an absent homeland constructed through memory is shown to contribute to the subjects’ identity formation. Liminal subjects in Salman Rushdie’s and Fadia Faqir’s novels, on the other hand, point out the potential limitations of hybrid identity formation. The principal characters in My Name is Salma and The Satanic Verses are ones who achieve and