Locations of Home: Narratives of Return in Arab Anglophone Memoirs

This dissertation maps out how the trope of homecoming and the representation of ancestral houses are constructed by Arab Anglophone writers whose narratives are set in conflict zones. I investigate the desolation of family homes, as well as the influence of a family legacy of exile in shaping the diasporic return narrative. I examine these houses by focusing on how national crises and conflicts affect both families and their homes. The corpus assembled consists of a transcultural array of diasporic communities from the Middle East: Lebanon, Libya, Iraq and Syria and Palestine. I argue that the memoir serves as another location of home. This dissertation explores multiple geographies of home which are both physical and textual. The texts chart a series of relocations and crossings to highlight the homes made in the diaspora and the homes left behind in the homeland. Where the physical home has been left derelict or abandoned, restitution is configured through the act of writing. The memoir attempts to restore the dilapidated house but also explore the affective experience of homecoming. Therefore, I am interested in the critical role of memoir to study the subject of exile and return narratives. I deploy the term intergenerational to encompass memories, migrations and narratives. The writers depict the physical return to the abandoned homes, but they also imaginatively represent the home in its original condition with the help of ancestral memories.