Translating the Gulf

Abstract

Abstract This chapter looks at the specific ways in which select pieces of Malayalam Gulf narratives establish equivalences between the Gulf migrant experiences and life in Kerala. The chapter begins with arguing for a concept of migrant literature as different from diasporic literature. The changed conditions of contemporary life require us to study migrant narratives beyond the framework of alienation and trauma. The subsequent sections of the chapter focus on select Gulf memoirs and novels. The Gulf is constructed in these works as singular and private experience of the migrants. At the same time, the authors employ multiple strategies such as relay of signifiers, metaphors, idioms, and so on through which such a singular experience is sought to be translated, however inadequately, into a collective experience that may spur collective action.