Abstract
This article discusses the mechanisms of memory and the schemes of transcending past recollections in Chinese American novelist Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Arab American novelist Susan Darraj’s Inheritance of Exile (2007). Both texts highlight the dialectical representations of remembrance in diasporic narratives. Consequently, the article underscores the intersectionality of memory, healing, and ethnic identity in both novels. Tan’s and Darraj’s novels foreground memory narratives in which self-recovery and wholeness of identity are closely examined. The paper is a comparative study that examines the dialectics and divergent forces of memory representations in Tan’s and Darraj’s novels through scrutinizing the power of remembering in strengthening and/or justifying the characters’ enchantment of the present or their glorifying of the past.
Highlights
This paper examines how female protagonists in Chinese American novelist Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and in Arab American novelist Susan Darraj’s The Inheritance of Exile (2007) negotiate and resist exile through memory
The Joy Luck Club and The Inheritance of Exile form a tapestry of immigrant stories and memories
Both narrate the stories of four Chinese and Arab mothers and their American-born daughters living in America
Summary
This paper examines how female protagonists in Chinese American novelist Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and in Arab American novelist Susan Darraj’s The Inheritance of Exile (2007) negotiate and resist exile through memory. The study examines how Tan’s and Darraj’s novels are both stories of geographical displacement and immigration and how both texts represent the workings of memory in notable ways Both texts narrate a mother-daughter relationship and the impact of this troubled relationship on the forcing of Chinese / Arab cultural identities. The Joy Luck Club and The Inheritance of Exile form a tapestry of immigrant stories and memories Both narrate the stories of four Chinese and Arab mothers and their American-born daughters living in America. The mothers’ past recollections serve as an empowering vehicle in the text Their narratives come to inject a missed part of their daughters’ identities; that is, the ethnic Chinese part. The drafting of a short historical background of Chinese and Arab immigration and settlement in the United States seems to be vital for properly analyzing both novels
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