Religion, Diaspora and the Politics of a Homing Desire in the Writings of Zia Haider Rahman, Tahmima Anam and Monica Ali

Abstract

This paper examines Zia Haider Rahman’s interpretation of cognitive burden of home, Tahmima Anam’s understanding of the blinded soul and Monica Ali’s portrayal of the radical frictions in context of diasporic consciousness. In the shifting consciousness of the diaspora, one’s perceptions – of spatial and metaphysical home, identity, religion, war or memory – are always in the flux and yet dangerously alluring. It works with what Susheila Nasta has referred to as the diaspora’s sense of loss for a lost homeland, and a “desire to reinvent and rewrite home as much as a desire to come to terms with and exile from it†(7). This paper explores the re-presentation of the dangerously seductive power and the politics of home in the novels of the diasporic writers from Bangladesh.