The Ethics and Aesthetics of Humour in Contemporary Transcultural Migration Narratives: Melatu Uche Okorie’s “This Hostel Life”, and Fadia Faqir’s “Under the Cypress Tree”

Abstract

The voice of the immigrant in Western societies is being heard in the first person in contemporary literature. Therefore, the experience of emigration is no longer or, at least, not necessarily told from the privileged perspective of the white man or woman. And the short story is being a recurrent favourite genre for sharing with readers the diverse causes that force a man or a woman to abandon his/her native land, as well as the conflicts that emerge in the countries of reception. Collections such as The Things I Would Tell You (2017) by Sabrina Mahfouz, or This Hostel Life (2018) by Melatu Uche Okorie, among many others, are offering interesting examples of transcultural renderings of the experience of migration. The purpose of the present contribution is to focus on the use of irony and humour as ethically committed strategies for deploying the possibilities as well as the limits of conviviality in contemporary societies. I study the representative examples of two stories, Melatu Uche Okorie’s “This Hostel Life” (included in the homonymous collection by the author), and Fadia Faqir’s “Under the Cypress Tree”, published in Mahfouz’s collective volume. These two stories are aesthetically brilliant instances of the ethical potential of humour when offering a transcultural view of contemporary migrations that overcomes the limitations of traditional multicultural and intercultural treatments of the topic.