Identity Crisis in Diasporic Writing: Critical Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea and Breath, Eyes, Memory
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Central Department of English
Abstract
The present study explores the question of diaspora and identity crisis of Caribbean during the post-colonial era reflected in the novels Wide Sargasso Sea and Breath, Eyes, Memory by Jean Rhys and Edwidge Danticat respectively. In an appreciation of the major issue that how the diaspora personality of Caribbean community face the identity crisis, the study shed lights on how the diasporic sensibility revolves between the spatial and temporal location. Both writers portray the characters Antoinette and Sophie, struggling in contact land to get homeliness and identity. Antoinette suffers from a split identity and searches for a place of belonging with her mixed heritage which is both Caribbean and European. Likewise, Sophie struggles in America, a host country lacking proper language to communicate in English speaking community. She is diaspora in New York, lives in-between the place, Haiti and Brooklyn, America searching belonging. She is not satisfied having material possession in the country - America, rather she longs for homeland, Haiti.
The writers portray the characters Antoinette and Sophie who undergo identity crisis and they live their lives in trauma in the island and the host country due to diaspora. Both of these characters have a sense of nostalgia, isolation and displacement. This sense of not belonging somewhere makes their life diasporic they have suffered from. Moreover, the main purpose of this research is to investigate how diaspora people have sense of longing for their homeland as shown in Wide Sargasso Sea and Breath, Eyes, Memory. In both novels, writers have constructed Sophie and Antoinette struggling for (imaginary) homeland and the novel exposes the unsuccessful attempts to recover the unhomliness despite having home due to their hybrid identity.