Exile and Alterity: Questioning the African Immigrant's Hybrid Identity in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique
Document Type
Presentation
Location
436 Hodges / Zoom Room B
Start Date
29-3-2025 1:25 PM
End Date
29-3-2025 1:45 PM
Description
This essay offers a pessimistic perspective of hybrid identity in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique. Through the protagonist Salie’s experiences, the essay underscores the tensions between African cultural heritage and Western modernity, exposing how exile fosters a hybrid identity marked by liminality and disconnection. Salie’s criticism of her homeland and preference for life in France reveal the challenges of balancing her hybrid identity. Her resistance to permanent return, coupled with her reliance on memory as the foundation of identity, highlights the challenges of reconciling competing cultural affiliations. The analysis further addresses Salie’s yearning for a transcultural, inclusive space, represented by the metaphor of the Atlantic, which bridges continents yet eludes physical realization. Ultimately, the essay argues that Salie’s identity is rooted in mobility and self-expression, exemplifying a fragmented, traumatic memory-driven self that resists the binaries of nation and tradition yet this hybrid self is marked by solitude and an increased distancing from native land.
Exile and Alterity: Questioning the African Immigrant's Hybrid Identity in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique
436 Hodges / Zoom Room B
This essay offers a pessimistic perspective of hybrid identity in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique. Through the protagonist Salie’s experiences, the essay underscores the tensions between African cultural heritage and Western modernity, exposing how exile fosters a hybrid identity marked by liminality and disconnection. Salie’s criticism of her homeland and preference for life in France reveal the challenges of balancing her hybrid identity. Her resistance to permanent return, coupled with her reliance on memory as the foundation of identity, highlights the challenges of reconciling competing cultural affiliations. The analysis further addresses Salie’s yearning for a transcultural, inclusive space, represented by the metaphor of the Atlantic, which bridges continents yet eludes physical realization. Ultimately, the essay argues that Salie’s identity is rooted in mobility and self-expression, exemplifying a fragmented, traumatic memory-driven self that resists the binaries of nation and tradition yet this hybrid self is marked by solitude and an increased distancing from native land.