Migration and Writing

Editorial

Migration has always played a significant role in carving the literary paths. May it be the ethos of developments encountered by the world in the post-colonial, post-industrial era, or the present-day sophisticated routines resulted from global economic shifts, writings have always been in the epicenter. At times, to understand and interpret the complex phenomena of international migration, critics and researchers have adopted a wide range of pieces of literature like personal letters, diaries, journalistic articles, monographs, fiction, and poetry in their analyses. Reading these texts has depicted hope, sentiments, emotions, pain, nostalgia, and the triumph of lives lived in places where the immigrants were considered strangers.

Migration alters the way we were and the mentalities we had. New experiences come with a whole lot of different notions that give rise to a new form of identity that is deeply embedded in new ways of clothing, eating habits, political ideologies, and new forms of music and literary productions, to name a few. These new forms influence both the individuals and the communities as a whole.

Owing to the subsequent migration events, we are destined to construct a “complex conglomerate identity” that is often difficult to interpret. Our children have been surviving the multi-dimensional facets of the conflicts and compromises of everyday life. In academic discourse, a reliable conceptual framework might be needed to analyze the dynamics of a complex phenomenon like this one; however, the sketches drawn on the literary canvases provide us with other opportunities to shed light on these societal transformations. And what we only need is to paint these canvases, with what we can, with how  we can.