Unhomely Lives: Negotiating Diasporic Alienation and the Collapse of Communal Belonging in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers

Abstract

Pakistani migrants in Britain tend to live 'in-between' cultures but enclaves that seek to maintain 'home' can serve to reinforce social exclusion. This article makes a case that cultural preservation in Pakistani diasporic communities is a means of social control, which in turn creates structured alienation and not integration. Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers shows how transplanted norms/values and honor codes escalate into generational and gender conflicts and finally to honor violence. This study follows the theory of diaspora as a “narrative of displacement” of Hall and the theory of hybridity of Bhabha, to understand the reasons for Pakistani immigrants not being integrated into Britain. Maps for Lost Lovers and sociological studies reveal the insular entrapment of community enclaves developed to preserve heritage. How enclaves reinforce the othering is exemplified by the novel's depiction of a “familial space…where the white British are regarded as the other”. The first-generation elders enforce rigid traditions and have conflicts with westernized youth. Women are burdened with extra responsibilities: communal norms “restrict the agency and autonomy” of female migrants. The novel's violent honor killing is a vivid enactment of the deadly culmination of these norms. The results indicate that a sense of belonging is still not achieved in this diaspora: collective memory and identity claims unite the community while at the same time they divide it. The study ponders on the complexity of belonging in migration scholarship by deconstructing the assimilationist discourse and poses the question of cultural preservation as control.

Keywords: Diaspora, Cultural Identity, Hybridity, Intergenerational Conflict, Pakistani Immigrants and Honour Violence.