| dc.description.abstract | Dislocation, whether enforced or self-inflicted, can in many ways be a disaster for a writer,
who immigrates to a new country but does not experience a sense of belonging. However, a
greater creative capacity can also be cultivated and even become a source of creative
expression, once the individual in question experiences transnational existence and the
feeling of belonging. This study, therefore, reflects upon writing from the experience of
settling in a place away from home or even at home where characters re-evaluate their
perceptions of expected life journeys after experiencing the unlikelihood of surpassing the
ties of location.
There are two major components to this work. The exegesis examines dislocation and
writing by highlighting how writing can express the affective force of deep experiences of
individual subjectivity and unity with their surroundings and other beings. It includes a
literary analysis of dislocation, with its social and psychological manifestations, expressed as
an evolving process of remaking identity in Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men
(1989/ Eng.1998) and David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978). By discussing writers both
from Iran and Australia, this research shows that despite the uniqueness of each individual’s
experience of dislocation, a writer is always in a process of redefinition and re-articulation in
response to place, whether it be exile in Malouf’s Ovid, or socio-cultural/psychological
dislocation in the case of Parsipur’s women. I draw on this analysis in order to explore these
themes in the second part of the project, my novella, ‘And the Raindrops Fill the Sea’ (2016).
My novella shares with An Imaginary Life and Women Without Men not only
moments of physical and existential dislocation, and a socio-cultural sense of loss and
alienation, but also a search for connection through interpreting and making story. My
premise is that sense of place functions as a touchstone for remaking individual and national
identity. This happens through the interrelationship between landscape, individual and society
and the influence that changes in surroundings have on individuals’ perspectives and
experiences of being. I focus on the imagination’s creative force in my chosen authors, and
on their characters’ quests to remake their identities in a new context; I aim to show that
although a dislocated writer might not be able to develop a sense of absolute belonging, there
is no internal limit to the imagination to help the writer to make new connections through writing place.
In sum, this study investigates writing and the idea of the self in exile in three ways:
through reflections on my sense of personal and cultural dislocation from the familiar, and
through the act of writing my novella ‘And the Raindrops Fill the Sea’ (2016), through a
reading of An Imaginary Life, with reference to Ovid’s experience and changing perceptions
of his banishment from Rome; and finally through a reading of Parsipur’s Women Without
Men, where I explore the idea of the feminine and women’s writing in a society where female
identity is defined by dissonance and dislocation. | |
