Nisha’s mother is dead, she lives with her younger brother, grandmother and a Muslim cook. The father is a practicing Hindu doctor who married a Muslim woman.
Nisha is a 12-year-old who struggles not only to express herself in words but with her identity as well. The story is about a Hindu family living in the region with Muslim majority that later became Pakistan. This narrative is based on the historical event and its impact on the everyday humans who were forced to leave their secure existence for a new land due to their religion. The beautifully articulated The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani places the narrative and the characters right smack dab in the middle when the partitions of the regions were taking place. The agenda of Britain was always to “divide and rule,” more so in joint India than ever before. East and West Pakistan had approximately 1200 miles of India dividing them and in 1971 when the regionally smaller but population wise larger, region became present day Bangladesh after a bloody revolution and a resulting war between India and Pakistan. The lands with majority Muslim populations were split into further two pieces: East and West Pakistan by the British government as they were forced to leave, and India/Pakistan as sovereign states came into existence. SEEMI: For the first week we begin with the historical past, with one of the largest migration of humans in recorded history of the world that of India splitting into two/three pieces, as Pakistan came into being on Augafter being allowed to be carved out of India by the ruling British Raj. The five books to be discussed each week are The Night Diary, The Bone Sparrow and Guantanamo Boy, Internment, Amal Unbound, and Saltiepie. The textset within this forum includes strong narratives that speak to the issue in various parts of the world, some as historical present and others as historical past that still seems relevant to today.
With the present day global and national focus on anti-immigration and children being kept is cages point towards the necessity of giving this theme attention in any or all forums that we as citizens have access to. We focus on the theme of displacement and its representations in young adult and children’s literature in this July’s My Take/Your Take. By Seemi Aziz, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ and Celeste Trimble, Celeste Trimble, St.
0 kommentar(er)
