This article is published in AL-QALAM Journal of Languages and Literary Studies, Vol. 1, Issue 1, December 2025 (A Publication of the Department of English and Literature, Federal University Gusau, Zamfara State, Nigeria)
TRANSNATIONAL DISCOURSE AND CONTESTED IDENTITIES IN TAHAR
BEN JELLOUN’S A PALACE IN THE OLD VILLAGE AND ABDULRAZAK
GURNAH’S THE LAST GIFT
By
Okache C. Odey
Author’s Email and Phone No: co.odey@stu.unizik.edu.ng +2348028680907
Abstract
Immigrants often struggle to settle in their adopted country due to differences in identity drawn along race, religion and nationality. The offspring of these immigrants, born in the new country, equally struggle to reconcile their conflicting identities, claiming ties to two vastly different countries. While the parents often maintain cultural and religious ties to their countries of origin, the children are often caught between their parents' countries and their own birth country. This paper examines how migration influences the concept of identity in relation to first-generation and second-generation immigrants in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift. Postcolonial concepts such as otherness, hybridity, belonging and marginality are employed to examine the experiences of the characters in the two novels. The study not only illuminates the predicament of the characters but also highlights how they negotiate their identities as first-generation and second-generation immigrants. This study equally reveals how an immigrant’s identity is contested as a result of traversing international borders. This paper concludes that citizens of a country do not necessarily have to share the same ethnicity, race and religion.
Keywords: Migration, Immigrants, Belonging, Identity, Hybridity.
Introduction
It is often the case that when people leave their home country to settle in a foreign one, they discover that the everyday
understanding of national identities is contested as a result of crossing
international borders. First-generation immigrants are individuals who leave their country of origin for various reasons to settle in a
foreign country. These individuals possess migration experience as they transit
from one national space to another. They usually experience discrimination as they try to find their place in the new environment on the grounds of race, culture, language,
accent, gender, religion and national origin. Many of these immigrants continue to maintain ties with their homeland, as seen in Muhammad Abdullah in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The
Palace in the Old Village and Etiaba in Maik Nwosu’s A Gaeko’s
Farewell. Other immigrants, due to the reasons
that led to their displacement
to a foreign land, tend to sever ties with their country of origin as seen in
Abbas in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift.
Second-generation immigrants according to
Schneider, are individuals who were born in the country of immigration and who
may have one parent who is not an immigrant (3) like
Anna and Jamal in The Last Gift equally face
discrimination. These immigrant groups find themselves in a complex
situation where they need to juggle the idea of reconciling the fact that they are of dual identities due to the transnational status of their parents. Second-generation immigrants often find themselves in a situation akin to what Said describes as a “state of being neither here nor there, but rather in-between things” (99). When individuals experience a conflicting sense of self, it creates as Fanon argues “individuals without anchor, without
horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless” (176) just like some of the
characters in the novels of Jelloun and Gurnah. Gilroy asserts that immigrants, their children, and even
grandchildren may never feel they fully belong in a foreign land as they are “trapped in the vulnerable role of perpetual outsiders” (After
Empire, 135). It does not matter the number of
years an immigrant resides in a place; the politics of origin
will continuously place the individual as an outsider due to differences in
race, nationality, and ethnicity. Grillo notes that “There is scarcely any country in Europe, and indeed elsewhere – from North America to Australasia – where immigration, ‘integration’ and multiculturalism have not become hotly contested” (10). The reason for this according
to Cooper, is that the West today “has become an amalgam of different cultures
and languages” (7). No country in Europe, Africa, the United States or elsewhere is a
monolithic entity anymore. Cultural purity is no longer tenable in any society due to the movement of people from one
place to another. According to Gilroy, the typical construction of a nation as
an “ethnically homogeneous object” (The Black Atlantic, 3) is far from the reality in many countries today. There is a palpable question of acceptance and belonging that immigrants and their children face in a new country. Difference in identity is enacted to exclude those
who are dissimilar to the dominant group in a given society.
Identity is an individual's perception of
oneself and how others perceive the individual. It is also how a group of people view themselves and how others view the group. Hall argues that identity is not easy to explain because it is not
transparent or unproblematic as many people see it (222). He goes further to
define identity as a “production which is never complete, always in process, always constituted within, not outside, representation” (222).
Bhabha avers that in the postcolonial text, the problem of identity is a
recurring issue as it interrogates the space of representation and also confronts differences in identity (66). According to Bhabha, identity is contested and negotiated in the interstitial space that entertains difference or that
articulates the inclusion of the “other” (5). Identity as Appiah asserts can give an individual
a sense of how they fit in a society (9). Within the national space, there is not so much a question of a blurred vision of identity as when people traverse international
borders. The binary questions of aliens/citizens, insiders/outsiders, and us/them begin to unfold and according to Brah, “are staked out, contested, defended and fought out” (199) across international
borders. Immigrants’ survival mechanism in the new society requires an alteration of the perception of identity because Bhabha argues that postcolonial migration is no less
“a transitional phenomenon than a translational one” (321).
This paper explores how the characters in
Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village and those in Gurnah’s The Last Gift contest their national identity as first-generation and second-generation immigrants in Europe.
Transnational Migration and the Contested Notion of Nationality in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in
the Old Village
Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel explores the idea that migration is not just the dislocation of an individual from one place to another but also the dislocation of the
cultural, ethnic, religious and national identities of that individual as a
result of traversing international borders. A Palace in the Old
Village depicts how immigrants contend with the reconfiguration of
their various identity ties as they transition from their country of origin to settle in a foreign country. The novel captures the experiences of Mohammed Abdallah, a Moroccan émigré in
France who is on the verge of retiring from an automobile company where he has
worked for over forty years and his struggle to come to terms with the hybrid
identities of his children.
Mohammed’s relocation to France is driven by economic reasons. To him, the relocation to France
from his village in Morocco is simply to work and nothing more. He says, “La
France is my workplace”
(75). He departs his village with the
determination to maintain his religious, cultural, ethnic and national
identities. Throughout the novel, he remains focused on why he is in France and the need to return to his village in Morocco after his retirement. This resolution perhaps accounts for why he is never fully integrated into French society and also; why he tries
albeit unsuccessfully, to ensure that his five children and his nephew do not
adopt French values. Bhabha argues that the survival of the migrant in a new
environment requires a translational process but Mohammed experiences very little of the translation phase that is typical
of immigrants in a foreign land. He does not therefore, experience the
recreation of self that is sometimes required of immigrants to access the
socio-economic opportunities in the foreign land. Mohammed holds tenaciously to
what defines him as a Muslim Berber in France. He constantly questions certain
French values as a way of preserving his sense of self which aligns with
Guccione’s position that some first-generation immigrants “prefer to have little contact with the host community to preserve their tradition and
culture” (35). Brah equally asserts that “The early migrants were quite secure
in their sense of themselves, rooted as it was in the social milieu from which
they originated” (24). Mohammed’s religious identity defines him as a human
being whether in his village in Morocco or the transnational space of Yvelines,
where he resides in France. He
lives in France as though he were in Morocco. The Koran, the holy book of
Islam, has a special place in Mohammed’s life:
It was the only book he’d taken with him on the day he’d
left Morocco. It was wrapped in a piece of white cloth that had been cut,
following tradition, from his father’s shroud. This book was everything to Mohammed: his culture, his identity, his passport, his pride,
his secret. He opened it delicately, pressed it to his heart, brought it to his lips, and gently
kissed it. He believed that everything was there. Those who can read find within it all the
wisdom of the world, all its explanations. (8)
While Mohammed can largely maintain his sense
of self and identity in France, the situation is different for his five children, who were born in France. Mohammed’s children do not share his perspective
of embracing the cultural and religious values of Morocco. Although Mohammed
often travels with his children to Morocco on vacation, they do not have strong
ties to their parents’ country of origin. The children feel no connection to their parents’ homeland, acting as “tourists in their own country” (24). None of the children considers Morocco their country which
aligns with the observation by Calaivanane et al. that the children of immigrants view their parents’ homeland not as a home but as a place to go on vacation
(411). Calaivanne et al also observe that
while Mohammed is very much rooted in his roots and identity, his hybridised
children are attached to France, as cultural purity (412) is not tenable in the
transnational space they find themselves.
Mohammed remains determined that after his retirement in France, he will return to build a kind of palace in his hometown in Morocco
to strengthen family ties and instil a national sense of identity in his
children. Brubaker asserts that in the imagination of many in diaspora communities, the ancestral homeland is the real and ideal home
to which they will eventually return (7). Mohammed tells his children that none of those who left Morocco with him ever desired to be French citizens because they are aware that they will “never be one hundred percent
Frenchified…. We’re Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Libyans – we’re not going to pretend, just to get some document” (42). How Mohammed sees France is very vital. He admits
earlier in the novel that in Yvelines he has “never felt at home in our home ….
I am not at home where I live.” He perhaps understands that despite living in
France for a long time, due to his ethno-national, religious and cultural differences, he will never truly be seen as a full member of French society. Again, his refusal to reconstruct his
identity in France makes his existence a contentious one.
Mohammed’s children are unambiguous as to
their nationality. Nationality, just as every other identity, to Mohammed is derived from one’s parents. His elder sister tells him during one of the vacations
in his village, that to the children, Morocco “isn’t their country, let me explain this to you: it’s your country,
you’re the one who’s attached to it,
while they see it through the eyes
of foreigners” (24) but he
refuses to accept that
fact. Mohammed’s children, especially Rachid, his second child, have strong
ties to France rather than Morocco. Rachid changes his name to Richard to the dismay of his father but to feel a sense of belonging in the adopted country of his parents. He
informs Mohammed that he is French and European but to the father, Rachid’s
identity will always be a contested issue in France as he educates him:
Don’t forget where you come from, where your parents come
from; it’s important; wherever you go, always remember that your native land is written on your face, and it’s
there whether you like it or not. Me, I never had any doubt about my country;
you kids today, you don’t know what country you’re from, and yes, you say
you’re been Frenchified, but I think you’re the only ones who believe that – you think the police treat you like a 100 per cent
Frenchman? True, if you go to court the judge will say you’re French, he has
to, but he considers you a foreigner, or else a bastard. It’s as if LaFrance
had a bushel of babies with someone from someplace else and then forgot to
declare them; what I mean is
recognise them. It’s very strange, but in any case, nothing is going to
be easy for you. (46)
Mohammed’s children succinctly capture the predicament of many second-generation immigrants in multicultural
societies around the world today. In the country where they are born and where
they live, the nationality of the children of immigrants is connected to that of one or both parents who are immigrants. Immigrants and their
children often experience a feeling of not belonging to the host society due to
the question of origin. Brah notes that immigrants are viewed as outsiders no
matter the number of years that they have spent in a place due to their ethno-national and cultural identities (3). Oftentimes, children of immigrants
are emotionally distressed as they are made to feel no sense of belonging
either in the host country or the
country of origin of their parents and this is in line with Pireddu’s position
that the immigrants in Jelloun’s
novel experience “double estrangement, both from their Moroccan roots and their acquired Frenchness, alienating hybridity caused by
migrancy, neither totally European nor truly Moroccan” (28). Second-generation immigrants find themselves in what Bhabha refers to as an “interstitial passage” (5), where identity or any form of difference is contested as a means of birthing a hybrid identity.
Throughout his stay in France, the positional disposition of Mohammed in his country of residence
is of an immigrant who prefers to function at the sociocultural and religious
margins of the host society because he refuses, as required of immigrants in a foreign country, to resolve what Bhabha describes as the
“tension between cultures and countries” (x) just like Abbas in Gurnah’s The Last Gift. He learns the French
language but he refuses to speak it as a way of preserving his Berber language and also because he is not well
educated to speak it properly. While he does not
speak French at home to his children, they in turn, talk to him
in French because they understand little of Berber.
It was only thanks to his children that he knew a few words
of it because they would speak nothing but French to him, which made him deeply
unhappy. He had patiently taught them a few elements of Berber, but for nothing: they persisted in speaking French and made fun of him when he
mispronounced it. (15)
Mohammed does everything to keep his children from embracing the way of thinking and
values of his host country. To connect the children to their Moroccan roots, he decides to build a palace-like house in his village in Morocco.
Reverse Migration, Familial Obligations and Contested Identities
When Jelloun’s protagonist retires from the automobile company in The Palace in the Old Village after forty years, he decides to embark on reverse migration to his village to build a big house for his family. He nurtures a stubborn dream
of building a large house in his village in Morocco just as he stubbornly
refuses to reconstruct his ethno-religious and cultural identities in France. The essence of building the house
is to strengthen his children's ties to Morocco or according to Calaivanane et al., to bring “back the children
to their roots” (411) or succinctly put, to instil Moroccan identities in them.
Mohammed’s effort to inculcate Moroccan values in his children in France is
futile and he blames France for his children embracing French identity over Moroccan identity. To Mohammed, “The spirit of family, as he saw it, was no longer honoured in France. This slippage shocked him” (68). He believes familial ties will reconnect his children to their ancestral homeland. He tells his children, “We’re not Europeans here. The family is sacred!
That’s how it is, and that’s that” (75) but when they defy him by marrying
non-Muslims and embracing France rather than Morocco, he admits that his “family had broken up” (103). Still, he is determined to fix the
situation.
To reunite the family, Mohammed sets out to
build a palace in the old village. He believes that a strong family structure
will ensure that the children obey him, and this, in turn, will foster their
sense of belonging to Morocco instead of France. The family structure as he
sees it, will ensure that future generations of his family continue to maintain
strong ties to Morocco as he says,
I lived as my father lived, for I am only
following the path laid out by those who came before us and who know better than
we do what is good for our offspring.
I’ve provided everything, everyone has a bedroom …. Me, I figured it all out: to work and save money we needed LaFrance, but
LaFrance is good for the French, not for us. We don’t belong over there. They have their religion, they marry and divorce like anything, but then there’s us, who have our religion, and we marry, it’s for life, for always. So you understand: I’m going to save our children, I’ll rescue them from the other religion, bring them back to us to
keep living the life our parents
and grandparents did, because the solution is nowhere else but here, where
there is plenty of space, and besides, here the earth is good. (121- 122)
Jelloun, a Moroccan immigrant writer himself
based in France, uses Mohammed’s experience to challenge the assumption that the transnational space is not just one of transition but also one of translation for immigrants as his protagonist is “proof that a man can go abroad and return to his village unchanged”
(121). Jelloun’s protagonist may have resisted moving between cultural traditions that Bhabha avers reveal
a hybrid identity (xiii); nevertheless, he realises that religious, cultural, and ethnonational identities take up new meaning when an immigrant settles in a foreign country. It is Mohammed’s inability to accept this fact
that continues to cause a rift between him and his children. He is unable to accept that identity and cultural values assume new meanings
as migrants move across international borders. Brah argues that the process of
migration involves a major shift in socio-cultural and equally religious values
(42) but Mohammed despite traversing international borders, tries to
maintain his cultural and religious values in France
because:
When he thought about his family, their image became blurred; he did not realize that he
was passing from one time to another, one life to another. He was changing
centuries, countries, and customs. He felt his head was too small to deal with all that, and he paced like a caged animal. Too many
new and unexpected things. Too many changes. (87)
Hall argues that identity emanates from somewhere (225) and to an immigrant like Mohammed, it
derives from the religious
and cultural values of his
homeland. The family reunion in the palace in the old village, Mohammed hopes, will be the genesis of
redirecting his children back to their roots. Against the good counsel of his
wife who is in tune with reality, he refuses to face facts about the hybridised
identity of his children. He wants them to adopt one instead of a dual identity. The reunion fails to take place on the big
Muslim festival when the children are supposed to assemble in the village
despite Mohammed’s elaborate preparation to host them:
No one came. No sound of a car
engine, no cloud of dust, nothing. The silence was unnatural. No birds or
insects fly by. Nothing moved. Everything froze in place. It was as if the
whole world had gone quiet. The
silence inside Mohammed was
engulfing that of the world. He
was there, his heart full of questions and expectations, with only one prayer,
murmured like a last wish. (140-141)
None of Mohammed’s five children deem it as a filial obligation to heed their father’s ‘one prayer’
(140). His dutiful wife of course, returns shortly to Morocco after her husband. The other person who comes
when Mohammed’s situation gets worse is Nabile, his sister’s son who has Down syndrome. Mohammed's descent into despair takes root firmly from that point. Just like Mohammed, his deaf-mute nephew, he asks to
wait at the entrance of the village to show his children to the house, equally
accuses France of turning the children against their parents and upturning the
cultural order of things. The deaf-mute nephew attributes his cousins' dismal
attitude to their dual identity, as he perceives “France as the devourer of
children and decided that all in all, he was fortunate never to have left the
country” 145). To Mohammed and his nephew, migration erodes the family values
and identity of migrants. Jelloun’s novel illustrates how cultural, religious
and ethnic identities are reconstructed as individuals migrate across
international borders.
Ethno-National Identity, Rootlessness and the Gift of Identity in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift In Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel, A Palace in the Old Village, the protagonist tries to maintain a monolithic sense of identity in a transnational space. Abdulrazak Gurnah's The Last Gift explores the
diverse nuances of an intergenerational
immigrant family's experience in England. Abbas, an African immigrant from
Zanzibar, unlike Mohammed, is not enthusiastic about adhering to his cultural,
religious, and ethno-national identities in England. The reason for leaving the
homeland often determines whether the immigrant will return. For Abbas, the
surreptitious way in which he abandons his pregnant wife in Zanzibar because he
feels that the baby may not belong to him makes it difficult for him to return
to his homeland. He tries to erase that period of his life from his memory. He
wanders for fifteen years moving from one country to another as a seaman,
before eventually settling down with Maryam, a mixed-race woman, in England.
For forty-three years, Abbas maintains
complete silence about his homeland, never visiting or speaking of it to
anyone, not even his closest family members – his wife and two children, Hannah
and Jamal. Due to the incident
that uprooted him from Zanzibar, he moves from one place to another, refusing to be rooted in any particular place. Even in
England where he starts a family, he assumes “the habit of a stranger
unreconciled to his surroundings” (4). He does not feel part of the society of
his adopted country as his daughter, Hannah, says he remains “still a stranger after all these years” (119). For much of their life together, he is unable to tell his wife and children about his family back home and where precisely he comes from. Abbas’ predicament
aligns with the experience of certain displaced people whom Bhabha argues are
sometimes afflicted with “the unspoken, unrepresented past that haunts the historical present” (18). Unlike
Mohammed in Jelloun’s novel, Abbas' suppressed feeling of guilt together with
shame about abandoning his young wife back home, an act his people deeply
despise, muddles up his sense of identity in England in such a way that he neither identifies with his homeland of Zanzibar nor is he enthusiastic about establishing strong roots in England.
Story and Identity
In Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the
Savannah, one of the characters, the leader of the Abazon delegation, tells his people that aside from the fact that the story outlives the sound of war and the exploits of the warrior, it is also important because it “saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars” (114). He goes further to say that
stories guide people and leave a lasting mark on them, setting them apart from
others. In transnational discourse, the story of origin is crucial in connecting second-generation immigrants to the place where one or
both of their parents come from. While Abbas seems determined to erase the
memory of his homeland, his wife’s obscure background as an abandoned child
leaves Hannah and Jamal ‘blundering like blind beggars’ because their parents,
especially their father, refuse to tell them the story about where he comes
from. It leaves the children without roots, without living relatives and without
a history. Hanna and Jamal feel like they are floating as they are not exactly rooted
in any place. The lack of a
story of origin diminishes the children’s sense of self and identity. They find their claim to be British contentious. The children experience a flustering sense of
identity because as Femi rightly tells the twins in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana
Must Go “One should know where one comes from” (173). It is precisely why Maryam wants Abbas to tell the children about his homeland because, according to her, the children are in a foreign
land and have been given only bewildering stories about who they are, which
makes the children “unsure and afraid about themselves” (242). But Abbas is silent
about where he comes from because it is a way of
dealing with his painful departure from his pregnant wife and his homeland.
When Maryam and children prod him about
where he comes from he is evasive. He tells them he is a monkey
from Africa. His silence
unsettles his children, especially Hannah.
Unlike Mohammed in Jelloun’s novel, Abbas
does not feel the need to inculcate his country’s religious, cultural, and
ethno-national identities in his wife and children as he has already severed
his ties to the land of his birth. Apart from marrying Maryam, he remains
largely outside the mainstream society of his adopted country. Like Mohammed,
Abbas undergoes a transitional, yet not a translation experience as an immigrant in England. While Mohammed
maintains his religious and ethno-national identities in a transnational space,
Abbas is less inclined to preserve his cultural and spiritual identity. He is a
nominal Muslim, which is why his children's disposition to Islam is lukewarm. His wife and children exhibit a sense of
floating without an anchor, a feeling of
rootlessness. The family is
adrift, with no sense of
belonging to any definite place.
Although Hannah and Jamal are both born and raised in England, they do not particularly feel they
belong there because, as second-generation immigrants, they are bereft of the origins of their parents. They are both unsure of their place in Britain due to their father’s ancestry. A sense of belonging to a place helps in shaping one’s identity. Appiah asserts that having
a proper sense of identity will give an individual an understanding of how they fit into a particular place (9). Hannah and Jamal have a convoluted sense of who they are and where they truly belong. Any discourse on origin troubles Hannah just like it does her younger
sibling, Jamal.
There is a noticeable desire in Hannah just
like Jamal to redefine herself. Maryam observes in Hannah’s “voice and the
movement of her eyes, in the way she dressed, as if complicated choices were
involved in the way she looked as she did… it was as if she was deliberately
remarking herself from someone she did not like” (31). It is just like the dream about an unfamiliar house that Hannah keeps having.
The house in the
dream that she does not recognise is England,
her home country but one she does
not see as such. Hannah feels the need to reconstruct her identity because she
feels it may strengthen her sense of belonging. So she prefers to be called Anna outside the house because she feels that by changing her name,
she is remoulding herself to fit into the mainstream society. But she realises
that she needs more than the change of name and how she perceives herself to fill that emptiness of not knowing her origin. She is keen to know more about her parents'
origins, as it will give her a sense of identity as Hall avers that identity,
albeit a cultural one, comes from somewhere (225). The notion
of identity is not always a straightforward one in transnational
space, because, as Bhabha argues, it is an interstitial passage between fixed
identities that “opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity” (5). Hannah
blames her family, whom she
considers to be dysfunctional for her conflicted sense of identity. She feels doubly uprooted from her country of birth
and her father's country of origin. She vents her frustration about it to Jamal
that as a family:
‘They are lost,’ she said. ‘Ba deliberately lost himself a
long time ago, and Ma found herself lost from the
beginning, a foundling. What I want
from them is a story that has a beginning that is tolerable and open, and not one that
is tripped with hesitations and silences. Why is that so difficult? I want to be able to
say this is what I am. Yes, I know, and so has every human being who has ever given the matter any thought …. Instead we get snippets of secret stories we
cannot ask about and cannot speak about. I hate it. Sometimes it makes me feel that I am living a life of hiding and shame. That we all are.’ (44)
As children of immigrants in the country,
they call their own, Hannah and Jamal, are still seen as outsiders due to their
hyphenated identity. Brah notes that “In Britain, racialised discourse of the
‘nation’ continues to construct people of African and Asian descent as well as
other groups, as being outside the nation” (3). Identity becomes something of exclusion instead of inclusion. Hannah is insecure and unstable
in her interaction with Nick, her boyfriend and his family. She is always on edge when the issue of national
identity is mentioned like in the dinner scene with Nick’s family. The right of second-generation immigrants to claim citizenship and the right to belong to the national space of the country their parents adopted is often
contested by natives due to differences in colour, religion and ethno-national identities. When Uncle Digby asks Nick about Hannah’s origin and Nick describes her as British, his uncle’s dissatisfaction stems from a
preconceived notion that being British is inextricably linked to being white, echoing Appiah’s observation that the idea that you could be “properly
English and not white” (3) seemed fairly uncommon. So he asks further, “Yes, of
course, Anna’s British,” Uncle Digby said. “But what was she before she was
British?”
(116). To someone like Uncle Digby, a
dark-skinned person like Hannah must come from somewhere because Britain is
ethnically and culturally monolithic. Uncle Digby’s position aligns with
Gilroy’s argument that many natives consider black people settling in Britain
as an “illegitimate intrusion into a vision of authentic British national life
that before their arrival, was as stable and peaceful as it was ethnically
undifferentiated” (The Black Atlantic, 7). Uncle Digby’s words
destabilise Hannah more and reinforce her desire to find out about where her
parents come from.
Jamal is equally insecure and uncertain of
his ties to England. In school, he feels people perceive him as different. His national identity is contested because of his dark skin, because as Brah argues in New
Rights discourse, the essence of being British is to have white skin (164). She
argues further that in “racialised imagination, the former
colonial natives and their descendants settled
in Britain are not British precisely because they
are not seen as being native to Britain; they can be ‘in’ Britain but not ‘of’
Britain
(188). Jamal is unable to refer to England as his country. When the teacher talks about poverty in the world, he cannot resist a glance in
his direction as if poverty is found in places where dark-skinned people like
Jamal inhabit. Even as an adult he still “could not quite make himself say
home, when he meant England, or think of foreigners without fellow feeling” (47). Jamal, like his elder sister, tries to construct an identity
that will make him fit into his immediate society as he struggles with the
notion of England as home, because he feels that people with dark skin are not originally from England. So for people like Jamal, their lack of indigenous status tends
to deprive them of the right to belong in England.
The sense of rootlessness is also discernible in Maryam because she does not know much about her
parents. She is of mixed race which suggests that she is of dual identity like
her children. Jamal finds it disconcerting the way his mother “mispronounced certain words, as if English was a language she had learned imperfectly when in fact she had lived in England all her life and only spoke English” (49). Maryam
also struggles with a contested sense of identity because as a foundling, she does not know where her parents
come from. Maryam and her children feel rootless as a result of a clear sense
of origin that affects their sense of belonging and identity.
Abbas’ The Last Gift
In Gurnah’s The Last Gift, Abba’s
silence about where he comes from deprives his children of a proper sense of identity and where they belong. When Abbas's diabetic crisis leads to a stroke, he begins to unearth memories of his life
before England through a series of recorded tapes. The recorded tapes are
Abbas’s last gift to his wife and children. The parting gift is a worthy one as
it finally gives his wife and children what they have craved for a long time. Abbas’s tale about his origin illustrates how stories can lead
us to our roots. His revelation unearths the missing link between Zanzibar and
England.
As Abbas returns to Zanzibar through memory to reveal his past, his wife, Maryam equally returns
to Exeter to meet her adopted parents, Ferooz and Vijay, to excavate the story of her origin as an abandoned child. Abbas’s series of
recorded tapes and Maryam’s knowledge of her parents' origins become a means of
resolving the family's contentious issue of identity and belonging. A family
without an anchor finally gets one. Hannah and Jamal eventually get the answer
to their unanswered question of identity. They can reconcile with their hyphenated identities as they can now identify with Britain and Zanzibar. The siblings
embrace their Zanzibari and British roots as it aligns with Grillo’s position that “People should not need to choose between their British
identity and other cultural identities. They can be proud of both” (232).
The knowledge of the origin of Abbas and to
some extent that of Maryam also
helps to put a stop to Hannah’s fluctuating sense of self as she confesses,
‘but since knowing these things, I feel myself suspended between a real place,
in which I live, and another imagined place, which is also real in a disturbing way. Maybe suspended is too dramatic, tugged then, tugged in a direction” (278). Jamal, on the
other hand, decides to fully embrace his cultural and religious identities as he plans a family trip to Zanzibar
and also grows a beard to look “properly pious” (265) as a Muslim. He finally
grasps the idea as Appiah argues that national identity does not necessarily
require that everyone is the same (102) and equally, as Appiah further argues “that we can hang together without a common religion or even delusions of common
ancestry” (103). Hannah and Jamal through Abba’s tapes and Maryam’s disclosure,
can find their roots which enable them to embrace their dual identity.
Conclusion
The two novels, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A
Palace in the Old Village and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last
Gift, examined in this paper, explore how the cultural, religious and
national identities of first and second-generation African immigrants are
contested in transnational spaces. This paper revealed that transcontinental
migration shapes the notion of identity as depicted in the experiences of the
characters in the two novels. While the first-generation African immigrant
characters in the two novels, especially Mohammed in Jelloun’s novel, struggle
to maintain their ethno-national and religious identities in a transnational space in Europe, the children of these immigrants born in the country of destination in Europe
are also burdened with an identity crisis.
The two novelists featured in this paper,
Jelloun and Gurnah, explore the different experiences of living as first and
second-generation Africans in France and England. The paper revealed that due
to the ethno-national and religious identities of the African characters and
their offspring, they feel a sense of alienation in the country of destination.
The paper further revealed that for first-generation African immigrants to access the socio-economic opportunities in the West, they may need to reconstruct their identities
to conform to the mainstream societies of their adopted country.
Second-generation African immigrants, on the other hand, need to be in tune with their dual ethno-cultural and national identities. This study concludes that individuals do not necessarily
need to share the same ethnic, racial and cultural identities to belong to the
same country.
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