Intergenerational identity formation: scars of displacement and trauma in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses

Abstract

Displacement and trauma in the formulation of identity is one of the major areas of discussion in this study with the reference of the primary texts, Mornings in Jenin and Salt Houses. To emphasize the definitive position of the authentic identity and, at the same time, the dialogical relation of protagonists due to the displacement along with the individual and collective trauma, the dilemma could be apprehended from epistemological representations. The epistemological representations imply unbiased convictions where the cultural enunciation in different landscapes and the trauma of both the people who lived inside the catastrophe and outside brought significant details of affecting them in latent or in active conditions. To provide this research with a conventional framework, Cathay Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience, Homi Bhaba’s Location of Culture, and other essays are used, as these have brought the key aspects of discussions, such as trauma in denial and the escape of the moment; then hybridity, discursive ambivalence, cultural difference, and diversity, and so on. The selected primary texts pertain to the theoretical framework; it elaborated the reconciliation of each generation, especially those who have been living in diaspora, from different perspectives, and that it surmized the trauma and collective losses instinctively.