In Tayeb Salih’s, Season of Migration to the North, the reader encounters the story of one of the main characters, Mustafa Sa’eed. In Stuart Halls’, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, we get an insight on what forms an identity and what molds it to be the way it is. Throughout Season of Migration to the North, the narrator attempts to discover the true identity of Sa’eed, but instead, finds himself as well. Cultural differences help mold one’s identity into one’s being, versus what they become. Halls’ article about cultural identity can be correlated to the experience the narrator goes through in order to find out more about the mysterious Mustafa Sa’eed.
Stuart Hall’s addresses how the voice of a person representing themselves says a lot about them. He goes on to question, “From where does he/she speak? Practices of representation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write - the positions of enunciation” (Hall 222). The way we speak can give away almost everything, ranging from perhaps guessing their country of origin, to level of education, and can even go as far as being a clear indicator of social class. That’s why in the novel the beginning is introduced with a nameless character who returns to his small and simple hometown of Wad Hamid, after having studied in Europe for seven years. The nameless character (who will be referred to as ‘the narrator’ for purposes of establishing character identity) becomes mesmerized with the cool and mysterious vibe he gets from Sa’eed. The narrator is bothered by the questions those around him ask about his long adventure in Europe. The narrator believes that because of the disadvantages in terms of economic advancement and development of education that are not available i...
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... ‘one people’ with the colonizing efforts, changes by the end of the novel. By the end he understands how he is metaphorically ‘stuck in a river’ in which he has no hopes of getting out of. The effects of colonization take a toll on his ‘being’.
Through the ‘diaspora experience’ that Mustafa Sa’eed and the narrator end up going through, the audience sees how though very similar, their cultural identities were anything but the same. In the efforts of the narrator discovering the misfortunes of what Sa’eed was going through and why he chose the life he did, we see the narrator ‘become’. Unlike Sa’eed, he is not fixed, and though at first a bit worrisome that he would leave himself to die drowning in the river, the audience understands the difference between the two characters when the narrator chooses to save his life because of the want to smoke a cigarette.
Identity is 'how you view yourself and your life.'; (p. 12 Knots in a String.) Your identity helps you determine where you think you fit in, in your life. It is 'a rich complexity of images, ideas and associations.';(p. 12 Knots in a String.) It is given that as we go through our lives and encounter different experiences our identity of yourselves and where we belong may change. As this happens we may gain or relinquish new values and from this identity and image our influenced. 'A bad self-image and low self-esteem may form part of identity?but often the cause is not a loss of identity itself so much as a loss of belonging.'; Social psychologists suggest that identity is closely related to our culture. Native people today have been faced with this challenge against their identity as they are increasingly faced with a non-native society. I will prove that the play The Rez Sisters showed this loss of identity and loss of belonging. When a native person leaves the reservation to go and start a new life in a city they are forced to adapt to a lifestyle they are not accustomed to. They do not feel as though they fit in or belong to any particular culture. They are faced with extreme racism and stereotypes from other people in the nonreservational society.
At many points in life one may ask themselves, who am I, how do I see myself versus how do others see me? The question is very complex today as it was in the Old World Diaspora such as in the Indian Ocean, Egypt and Nubia. Identity is a very wide and broad concept influenced and based on seven factors that constantly evolve and change over time. The seven factors are race/ethnicity, gender, religion, socio economic status, sexual orientation, age, and physical/mental ability. Within these seven are gender and sexuality and they are some of the main contributors that forms one’s identity. The formation of identify starts from birth and has influences from the seven factors as well as life experiences. Gender as well as sexuality are sole indicators
As Josselson (2012) argues, it is simpler for the people to fix multicultural or multiracial individuals into a single cultural or racial identity, although realistically, most people find it difficult to categorize oneself in a single-margin. This is apparent in the reading White Teeth and Tar Baby, where the character’s identity is influenced by a socially embedded habitus of values, expectations and self-understanding, or lack there-of. In order to understand the challenges of racial and cultural identity in these novels, I will first look at characters Son and Jadine from Tar Baby and Samad and his twin sons, Millat and Magid from White Teeth.
The narrator continues with describing his resentment towards his home life, 'Coming home was not easy anymore. It was never a cinch, but it had become a torture (2).'; This excerpt provides the reader with an understanding of the sorrow that the protagonist feels at the beginning of the novel and throughout the first half. Further narration includes the protagonists feelings of distance from the land and blame that he places upon himself, 'But the distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me (2).'; Thus, as the reader, we understand that the narrator has removed himself from the land and his culture.
In Stuart Hall’s “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference,” he claims that identity is a volatile social process through which one comes to see the self. Hall argues that identity is not a thing rather a process “…that happens over time, that is never absolutely stable, that is subject to the play of history, and the play of difference.” These factors are constantly entering the individual in a never-ending cycle, re-establishing and affirming who one is.
This new identity issue not only arises because the narrator realizes that he is African American but also because he is bi-racial and can and had passed as being white until this discovery. From this point on the narrator continues his life learning and experiencing the differences between...
During our class discussions, the issue of identity in Marjane Satrapi’s novel, Persepolis (2004), became a contentious issue. The question was asked whether Persepolis might be understood to being in-dialogue with western ways of seeing and did the effects of modernization influence the identity of Marjane’s protagonist in Persepolis. How does the novel involve the issue of identity? I will extend the argument and, through the exploration of Marji’s changing ideologies, I will attempt to prove that Marji is caught between the traditional eastern culture and western modernization.
The main character described in the novel is Amir. Amir is the narrator and the protagonist in the story. Although an impressionable and intelligent son of a well-to-do businessman, he grows up with a sense of entitlement. Hassan is Amir’s half-brother, best friend, and a servant of Baba’s. Although considered an inferior in Afghan society, Hassan repeatedly proves himself to be a loyal friend to Amir. Baba is the wealthy, well- respected father of Amir and Hassan. He is willing to risk his life for what he believes in, but is ashamed of having a child with a Hazara woman, leading him to hide the fact that Hassan is his son. Ali is another modest man, who is a fatherly figure to Hassan and a servant to Baba.
Modern identity often takes shape in the blending of lines that weren’t supposed to blend. No matter how coded or enforced, labels never hold all of one’s identity in place. The lines bounding the identity of the refugee are determined by the UN, and dictate a system of values foreign to many would-be refugees. For the Tamil mother from Sri Lanka, individual status as a refugee does not make sense; she is connected to the bones of her son and the soil in which they lie in Canada (Daniel 278). Terms of individuality are relative in the cultural understanding of many displaced peoples: collective identity in family structure supercedes that dictated by Western nation states, though the argument for asylum depends upon cognizance of Western value systems.
The first way describes cultural identity as a shared culture by many people; a culture is like a collective self. As he further argues that cultural identities always highlight the same practices of past which give people stability, unshifting and constant frames of reference and meaning beneath the shifting divisions and shifting in their actual history (6). Hall shares his personal experience of immigration in Minimal Selves (1987) that when he thinks about identity, he got to know that he has always felt that he is a migrant amongst the foreigners. Similarly Lahiri’s fiction is autobiographical she explains her sorrows as a migrant and suffering in a foreign
Bhabha, Homi K. Interview by J. Rutherford. Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. 1990. J. Rutherford. London, Lawrence and Wishart: 207-221
Although from a formalist perspective Ishmael is clearly the sole narrator, the tale remains markedly divided in expression; that is, the tone, diction, register, and underlying psychology of the account describe two radically different modes of experience. Ishmael in his own voice is empirical, democratic, sane, philosophical, comedic; while Ahab’s discourse is transcendental, autocratic, mad, rhetorical, tragic. Still, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (whose class, values, and mind set are separate and discrete) Ishmael, the common sailor before the mast, and Ahab, the demonic ship captain, finally emerge as disjoined fragment...
The question of the racial, religious, and socioeconomic identity of Shahid becomes a central question posed as Shahid undergoes translation from his Pakistani ancestry to his desired identity as a Briton. Shahid's translation parallels the translations of the former Asian colonies of Britain into their new postcolonial identities. Unfortunately for Shahid, the struggle over The Satanic Verses catches him as he is translating himself, presenting him with a series of tough choices.
Throughout Salih's novel the main character's identity is unclear. While the reader learns much about his background: educational, familial, and professional, his name is never mentioned. A surname is used in reference to his family, but is never applied to him. In once instance he is referred to by another character as "effendi" (85). This phrase, however, is an Arabic title roughly equivalent to "sir" rather than a name. The central character's namelessness serves to focus attention on another character with whom he develops an uneasy friendship: Mustafa Sa'eed.
The topic of belonging and identity has become very topical especially with recent increases in migration and debates on cultural identity (Guibernau,2013 ; Adams,2009; Ahmed,1999). It has been noted by writers like Erikson (1968) that through different stages of an individual’s life they experience the forming and the reformation of their identities which become more complex as an individual develops from childhood to adulthood. However, the process of identity formation is generally complex and difficult when it comes to second generation West African immigrants in the United Kingdom. Thus, this process can often be especially difficult, resulting in struggles to identify a clear sense of belonging and identity.