Between Remembering and Confession: A Refugee Narrative in Dina Nayeri’s Refuge
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Mariya Shymchyshyn
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Svitlana Chernyshova
Abstract
This article focuses on the retrospective narrative in the Iranian American novelist Dina Nayeri’s Refuge (2017). We argue that the novel’s interpretations of acts of remembering, which presuppose confession and re-evaluation, define the ways of constructing the refugee identity of the main character, Niloo. Within the discourse of retrospection, the self appears in the mode of reflection over past events, and thanks to temporal distance, the self can verbalize changes in perception of the past self. Thus, retrospection becomes a psychological and narrative endeavor during which identity is created through the experience of re-evaluation. The interaction between then and now as well as their final convergence in the end of the novel result in the continuity of experience and coherence of identity. Niloo’s ontology of becoming is possible through the re-living of the past, its interpretation, and its integration into the present. In other words, the possibility of reflection over experience is the very condition for her becoming. The main character concentrates on her meetings with her father in different cities (Oklahoma City, London, Madrid, and Istanbul) and her re-evaluation of her emotional experience during those meetings. These moments of re-evaluation explicate the dynamics of her identity construction, which shifts from a rejection of her past to an embrace of it.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
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- Light and Divine Wisdom: An Alternative Interpretation of the Iconography of the Fuller Brooch
- Tu beoð gemæccan: The Key Concept of Maxims I Representing One of the Fundamental Principles of the World Order
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- Influences of George Gordon Byron on Asdren
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- On Literary Apathy: Forms of Dis/Affection in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)
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- Kai Wiegandt. 2019. J. M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human: Posthumanism and Narrative Form. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ix + 280 pp., € 90.94.
- Linda K. Hughes, Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Andrew Taylor with Heidi Hakimi-Hood and Adam Nemmers (eds.). 2022. Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776–1920: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 808 pp., 60 illustr., £ 29.99/$ 39.95.
- Juliane Braun. 2019. Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans. Writing the Early Americas 4. Charlottesville, VA/London: The University of Virginia Press, 280 pp., 12 illustr., $ 69.50.
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- Daniel Stein. 2021. Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre. Studies in Comics and Cartoons. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, xv + 315 pp., 28 illustr., $ 34.95.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Light and Divine Wisdom: An Alternative Interpretation of the Iconography of the Fuller Brooch
- Tu beoð gemæccan: The Key Concept of Maxims I Representing One of the Fundamental Principles of the World Order
- Wulf and Eadwacer Reloaded: John of Antioch and the Starving Wife of Odoacer
- Sensational News about Nature: Risk and Resilience in Satirical Ozone Poetry of the Victorian Era
- Influences of George Gordon Byron on Asdren
- Construction of Identity/World and ‘Symbolic Death’: A Lacanian Approach to William Golding’s Pincher Martin
- The Anatomist of Love and Disease in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body
- Conventions of the Ungendered Narrative
- “In My Mind’s Eye”: On the Relocation of Hamlet’s Story by Michael Almereyda
- ‘Force’ and ‘Chi’: Duality, Identity, and Struggle in Star Wars and Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde
- Anxious Dynamics of Exile and the Ambivalence of Arab American Identity in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent: Critical Reflections and Contemplations
- Between Remembering and Confession: A Refugee Narrative in Dina Nayeri’s Refuge
- Orfeo: A Posthuman Modern Prometheus. Uncommon Powers of Musical Imagination
- On Literary Apathy: Forms of Dis/Affection in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)
- Reviews
- Roberta Frank. 2022. The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse. Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies 2010. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, xxx + 265 pp., $ 65.00.
- Claire Breay and Joanna Story (eds.), with Eleanor Jackson. 2021. Manuscripts in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Cultures and Connections. Dublin: Four Courts Press, xvii + 256 pp., numerous colour illustr., € 58.50.
- Mark Amsler. 2021. The Medieval Life of Language: Grammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 264 pp., 2 figures, 2 tables, € 106.00.
- Alexandra Barratt and Susan Powell (eds.). 2021. The Fifteen Oes and Other Prayers: Edited from the Text Published by William Caxton (1491). Middle English Texts 61. Heidelberg: Winter, xxxvi + 54 pp., € 44.
- Carolin Gebauer. 2021. Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel. Narratologia 77. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter, xvii + 378 pp., 5 tables, 5 illustr., € 99.95.
- Kai Wiegandt. 2019. J. M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human: Posthumanism and Narrative Form. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ix + 280 pp., € 90.94.
- Linda K. Hughes, Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Andrew Taylor with Heidi Hakimi-Hood and Adam Nemmers (eds.). 2022. Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776–1920: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 808 pp., 60 illustr., £ 29.99/$ 39.95.
- Juliane Braun. 2019. Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans. Writing the Early Americas 4. Charlottesville, VA/London: The University of Virginia Press, 280 pp., 12 illustr., $ 69.50.
- Lisa Gotto. 2021. Passing and Posing between Black and White: Calibrating the Color Line in U. S. Cinema. Film Studies. Bielefeld: transcript, 247 pp., 30 figures, € 49.00.
- Daniel Stein. 2021. Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre. Studies in Comics and Cartoons. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, xv + 315 pp., 28 illustr., $ 34.95.
- Books Reviewed: Anglia 140 (2022)
