Homeland and Other Homes: A Parallel Study of the Portrayal of Female Diasporas in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Adib Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments

Abstract

The diaspora writers miss what they cannot experience back home and so they write; they write about the memories they can never make, the moments they can never relive, and the “home” they can never actually call home. Monica Ali and Adib Khan’s representation of homeland in their respective novels Brick Lane and Seasonal Adjustments is rather predictable; the same age-old abused East which is a place to be nostalgic about but not a place to settle in. Where Ali’s protagonist Nazneen struggles to create a “home” around her domestic world in London, she does find the freedom, never allowed to her back in Bangladesh. On the contrary, Khan’s minor character Nadira in Seasonal Adjustments has a successful career and life in London, however, fails to call England her “permanent home”. It is said that the females are “internal diasporas” in their own homes, however, they adjust more easily in their adopted land than the male ones as they experience freedom in their exile in the foreign land and can forge an identity of their own which is often denied back home. This paper endeavours to capture the experience of the female diasporas shared in these two novels and tries to understand different diaspora experiences regarding home and other homes, thus acknowledge the fact that all diasporas are not identical and they do not share identical experience regarding their homeland and adopted land.