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Self-identity is a fascinating term for a human being. The quest for identity is an inevitable process in man’s life. Humans though, established his self in economic soundness in the migrant land but, tracing ancestral rootedness and correlating oneself with ancestral inheritances enthralled human beings for their self-identity. An ancestral inheritance such as history, race, language, and religion values one’s mere existence in the world. Generally, Immigrant writers express a deep sense of identity crisis and they try to reclaim their sense of identification with their ethnicity, race, class, caste, culture, custom, ancestry, linguistics, and history. Many ethnic writers are at the threshold of identical loss in the migrated land. Social marginality and hybridization urge the sense of the critical position of living in an alienated nation. Salman Rushdie expresses explicitly his perception of immigrant writers and the urge to reconnect with their home in his book Imaginary Homeland.
Writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are hunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge-which gives rise to profound uncertainties-that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind (10).
Paul Brians asserts that the novel is a source of “intricate mystery in which people slowly reveal themselves and their histories as their lives become increasingly entangled with each other” (178). Many diasporic writers believe that the restoration of one’s community will give a sense of identity. The identity crisis had demonstrated its power as one of the major thematic concerns in literature. They use literature as a reflection of the mirage of the inner self which expresses complicated living in society. Hence, migrated writers have chosen the genre of novel to express a sense of identity loss in their newly landed host country. Nostalgia is the predominant feeling of diasporic writers. It urges to look back homeland so, diasporic writers urge a sense of reconnecting genealogical origin and familial memories due to dislocated condition from their homeland. The stranded condition of writers explores ancestral history through their fragmented memories which is the predominant theme in their works. Thus, the characters always impose the implication of these aspects.
Homi K. Bhabha affirms that history and cultures have always meddled themes in the concept of hybridization in the book The Location of Culture. Contemporary writers have always expressed alternative communities due to hybridization which explores the theme of identical loss of self and society of them, and their trauma and oppression endures in foreign countries. In the same way, Rushdie argues in his book Nation and Narration about the position and perception of immigrant writers are being as outsiders in their alienated nation. The displacement and dislocation from the homeland of immigrant writers intensify their identity crises and their writing shows identical loss which makes them concentrate on “universal significance and appeal”.
It may be argued that the past is a country, from which we have all emigrated, and that its loss is part of our common humanity. This seems to be self-evidently true, but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being ‘elsewhere’ (12).
The works of Rohinton Mistry and Michael Ondaatje have been taken for analyzing the theme of an identity crisis and reclamation of ancestral memories. On exploring the texts of two South Asian-Canadian writers Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey (1991) A Fine Balance (1995) Family Matters (2002) and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982) In the Skin of a Lion (1987) Anil’s Ghost (2000) expresses identity crisis in the migrated land. As Rushdie rightly comments such work “deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost” (11) in the book Imaginary Homeland. Sometimes, this may lead them to feel a distant memory which creates an insecure feeling in the migrated land. This chapter attempts to explore the identity crisis of writers through characters and their attempt at reclamation of identity from the memories of the homeland.
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