Towards a Poetics of Diasporic Narratives

This paper is an attempt towards outlining the dominant structural features of the diasporic narrative works. First and foremost, the diasporic narrative operates based on the way memory works. In other words, the role of memory is quintessential for constructing diasporic narratives through “self-narrating”, hence autobiography is the dominant genre of diasporic narrative. One could argue that the diasporic narrative is either a search of a lost identity endangered by the diasporic experience or an attempt to construct a new identity. Yet the major characteristic of memory is its “translational” act. Just as the way in translation there is a give-and-take parallelism between the source text and the target text, the diasporic narrative is based upon the “translation” between home and host, familiar and unfamiliar, self and other, past and present, here and there, difference and sameness, center and margins, and absence and presence. For instance, in diasporic narrative one could see how home is translated into host and the other way round. This could be observed in the rest of the oppositions. If we accept the fact that the diasporic narratives are always engaged in the act of “translation”, the consequent structural feature of diasporic narrative could be based upon the poststructuralist strategy of “double binds”. In other words, the second contention is that the narrative simultaneously pulls the text to two opposite extremes. On the one hand, the diasporic narrative is intended to keep remembering the past but at the same time it functions as an act of forgetting or being released (purged) of the traumatic burden of the past. The diasporic narrative is the narrative of acceptance and denial. It simultaneously and constantly seems to glorify and accept the home or the host or denies them both. It also demonstrates how the diasporic subject is pulled between the poles of sameness and difference. The diasporic subject is caught in the double bind of becoming the same as the host subjectivity and maintaining his/her difference. Based upon the above contentions, this paper concludes that the diasporic narrative is a liminal narrative which moves on the borders. The diasporic narrative is a translational and transnational accented narrative that works as long as it oscillates between the opposite poles.