Memory, Home, Trauma And Diaspora In Shyam Selvadurai’s ‘Funny Boy’ And Monica Ali’s ‘Brick Lane’

Abstract

The postcolonial cultural situation causes trauma and postcolonial fiction to become more indistinguishable. In postcolonial literature, trauma is often a central topic, especially in the works of British authors of colonial ancestry. As a multidimensional concept, 'home' has garnered increasing critical attention, particularly in Diaspora Studies. As a result of a globalising discourse, the term 'home' elicits a variety of emotions and feelings. Its meaning is not only affected by the location from which it is articulated, but also by factors such as ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Jasbir Jain contends in The Diaspora Writes Home: Subcontinental Narratives that when the diaspora chooses to "write home," "location, space, and time" disintegrate into multiple discourses. Writing home is not only a creative outlet for them, but also a form of connection, "as if answering a summons" (11). This paper examines Shyam Selvadurai's depiction of Sri Lanka in his novels Funny Boy (1994) and Monica Ali's depiction of Bangladesh in Brick Lane (2003) through the lens of Jain's argument. In doing so, this paper attempts to trace Ali and Selvadurai's fluctuating relationship with their native countries, Sri Lanka, and to problematize the use of memory, history, trauma, and dislocation in their respective narratives. It also attempts to interpret their representations considering their own emotional and intellectual understanding of the sociopolitical turmoil in his country. In this paper, I contend that both texts present two significant modes of postcolonial memory: first, the nostalgic mode, a form of nostalgia for a fleeting colonial past that plagues the cultural consciousness of colonial sympathisers in the novel. The second mode is traumatic retrospective.