Undoing Dualities: Grounding the Transcultural Narratives in Select Works of C.N. Adichie

Pages:35-37
Narendra Kumar Jangir (Department of English, Central University of Rajasthan, Rajasthan)

This paper would be magnifying the aspects of dualities in the course of displacement being uprooted from the homeland and discovering the sense of acceptance in alien society. Therefore, terms like mobility and displacement are significantly deserve interrogation to dwell upon the characterization of dualities. The term mobility flung out from Latin word mobilitate meaning movement in accordance with “property and quality of what is on the move to obey the laws of movement” (Michaelis). Furthermore, the dictionary explanation of mobility is as straightly as, “easy movement from place to place or easy movement to a different job social class or place to leave” (Oxford English Dictionary, p 928). The basic nature of Mobility is its ubiquity that causes in the form essential movement in the normal life of a creature. Tim Cresswell states that mobility is elusive object with various significant aspects involved beyond the ordinary features of moving things around in the world. Beginning from stating body lying on the and blood circulating in the veins, to machines through which we statically moves from place to place and thus a new alien place determines one’s status form native to immigrant. The ubiquitous movement in literary discourse assimilates societies through the bodies and conceptualization of location and cultures which are no more rooted at one geographical boundary on the map rather along with moving bodies, societies float towards wider space of hybrid and dynamic cultures. Human is the prominent source of the culture and with S/he traveling across locations also carries cultural aspects to spread around. For example, Greek hero Odysseus of the epic the Odyssey emphasizes on the move away from the home and indulges in most significant action of life of the hero i.e. war of Troy and the whole of the text centered on the journey itself. As Cresswell discusses mobility at another degree serves in opposition with fixity to bring the meaning from two visions categories, one sedentary and nomadic. In the former, “mobility is seen through the lens of place, rootedness, spatial order, and belonging. Mobility, in this formulation, is seen as morality and ideologically suspect, a by-product of a world arranged through place and spatial order.” (26) This perspective reflects the domain of migration and nation-state as people moving into a land from another place are foresighted suspiciously and a threat to the land for example Rohingya population breaking-in in India from east borders. Such notion of skepticism obviously formulates a sense of alienation towards the site as in gypsy-traveler and wandering Jews. Malkki argues that identities rooted in the “soil of home” are deeply metaphysical because in our human obsession in dividing the world into territories, we end up producing “sedentarist metaphysics”.