Common Tropes of Refugee Literature in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and their Reflections in the Contemporary World
This study will explore and discuss the prevalent metaphors I have encountered in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (2018) and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2018). Besides, this study will discuss the liquid emergence of colonialism and its scope in this context. Some common tropes I will be using in this research are as following: refugee, boat, wall(s), paper(s), water, camp, time, borderline(s), space, and door(s). Corina Stan, in “A life without a shoreline: Tropes of refugee literature in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone” (2018), discusses; wall(s) as “generative of an ethical reflection on history, language and the violence of hierarchies” (2018, 797);, paper(s) “ [...] the impersonal bureaucracy relying on the identification of names, and grounding an ethos of individualism and nationalism [...]” (805);, and water “[...] the liquid tomb where lives have been lost, lives that return to haunt the living” (804). Thus, just as Michel Foucault's notion of dispositif, which he argues in The Confession of the Flesh, performs as an "apparatus" to function in the relationship structure (1980, 194). In this analysis, I will connect this term with the tropes of refugee literature to find out how refugees/asylum seekers become, through Giorgio Agamben's concept, "bare 2 life" constituents in selected novels (1998). In short, the purpose of this study is to provide a different perspective on refugee studies concerning colonialism.
Key Words: Refugee, Tropes, Colonialism, Travel Mobility.
About Munise Betül Kandiraz:
Munise Betül Kandiraz is a master student studying English-Speaking Cultures at Bremen University. Her research interests include postcolonialism, refugee literature, and trauma culture. She is at the last stage of her studies.
Works Cited
Primary
Erpenbeck, Jenny. Go, Went, Gone. Translated by Susan Bernofsky, Portobello Books, 2018.
Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. Penguin Books, 2018.
Secondary
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1998.
Foucault, Michel ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 194–195.
Nisbet, Robert A. Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Stan, Corina. “A Life Without a Shoreline: Tropes of Refugee Literature in Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 54.6 (2018): 795–808.