Forever Displaced?: Identity, Migration, and the Concept of Home in the Works of Manzu Islam, Neamat Imam, and Tahmima Anam

Abstract

This paper explores the meaning of identity and nation, home and belonging, through the study of internal and international migration in three novels. In doing so it encoun- ters the construction of collective identity in Manzu Islam’s Song of our Swampland, the dystopian dislocation in Neamat Imam’s The Black Coat and the concept of meta-home in Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace. The complex, unstable space of diaspora seems ever evolving and forever shifting. Here ‘home’ becomes what Homi K. Bhabha has ex- pounded as “a mythic place of desire.” In this fluid construction of diasporic existence the paper examines the concepts of “de-territorialization,” “unhoming,” “dislocation,” “iden- tity,” and “belonging.”