Muslims in Diaspora: Negotiating Identity in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers

Abstract

This paper explores the challenges Pakistani Muslim immigrants in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers face while negotiating their identities in diaspora. The immigrants, whose individual and social lives were guided predominantly by religion back at home, face an ontological problem when they encounter the secular Western culture in Britain, which destabilizes and threatens their individual and collective subjectivities in diaspora. As a result, they find themselves in what Homi Bhabha calls “unhomely” space. To make the “unhomely” space homely, the immigrants adopt different strategies, but all their efforts to find home in diaspora turns out to be an impossible enterprise leading them to disillusionment, disintegration, and despair. Examining various strategies used by the immigrants in the novel, I argue that the Pakistani immigrants in Maps try to negotiate their cultural and religious identities either by retaining their preconceived subjectivity or by reconstructing and readjusting it in the context of a new society and culture, and the difference in their attitudes toward the host culture stems from their different subjectivities formed in the homeland, the nature of their migration, their memory of home, and the desire for a community based on similar religious and cultural values.