Dislocation and Remaking Identity in Selected Contemporary Australian and Persian Fictions; Creative Novella with Dissertation

Abstract

Dislocation, whether enforced or self-inflicted, can in many ways be a disaster for a writer, who immigrates to a new country but does not experience a sense of belonging. However, a greater creative capacity can also be cultivated and even become a source of creative expression, once the individual in question experiences transnational existence and the feeling of belonging. This study, therefore, reflects upon writing from the experience of settling in a place away from home or even at home where characters re-evaluate their perceptions of expected life journeys after experiencing the unlikelihood of surpassing the ties of location. There are two major components to this work. The exegesis examines dislocation and writing by highlighting how writing can express the affective force of deep experiences of individual subjectivity and unity with their surroundings and other beings. It includes a literary analysis of dislocation, with its social and psychological manifestations, expressed as an evolving process of remaking identity in Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men (1989/ Eng.1998) and David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978). By discussing writers both from Iran and Australia, this research shows that despite the uniqueness of each individual’s experience of dislocation, a writer is always in a process of redefinition and re-articulation in response to place, whether it be exile in Malouf’s Ovid, or socio-cultural/psychological dislocation in the case of Parsipur’s women. I draw on this analysis in order to explore these themes in the second part of the project, my novella, ‘And the Raindrops Fill the Sea’ (2016). My novella shares with An Imaginary Life and Women Without Men not only moments of physical and existential dislocation, and a socio-cultural sense of loss and alienation, but also a search for connection through interpreting and making story. My premise is that sense of place functions as a touchstone for remaking individual and national identity. This happens through the interrelationship between landscape, individual and society and the influence that changes in surroundings have on individuals’ perspectives and experiences of being. I focus on the imagination’s creative force in my chosen authors, and on their characters’ quests to remake their identities in a new context; I aim to show that although a dislocated writer might not be able to develop a sense of absolute belonging, there is no internal limit to the imagination to help the writer to make new connections through writing place. In sum, this study investigates writing and the idea of the self in exile in three ways: through reflections on my sense of personal and cultural dislocation from the familiar, and through the act of writing my novella ‘And the Raindrops Fill the Sea’ (2016), through a reading of An Imaginary Life, with reference to Ovid’s experience and changing perceptions of his banishment from Rome; and finally through a reading of Parsipur’s Women Without Men, where I explore the idea of the feminine and women’s writing in a society where female identity is defined by dissonance and dislocation.