Chronotopes of Immigration: The Configurations of Spatio-temporal Relations in Mohammad Abdul-Wali’s novella They Die Strangers

ABSTRACT

‘Space’ and ‘time’ have been frequently discussed in diaspora studies. Yet, these studies generally approach the temporal and spatial dimensions of diaspora as separate issues, filtering them through postcolonial insights. Following in the footsteps of 7Mikhail Bakhtin, who first highlighted the mutual interdependence of ‘space’ and ‘time’, calling it ‘chronotope’, this paper traces the configuration of spatio-temporal relations in Mohammad Abdul-Wali’s novella of immigration, They Die Strangers (2001[1971]). Studies of immigration narratives that have referenced Bakhtin’s theory focus mainly on one dominant or minor chronotope of immigration. Moving research forward, the present study examines the multiple chronotopes that have been devised in They Die Strangers. It shows that within this narrative of immigration, we can trace various and highly artistically expressed forms of chronotopes. We call them ‘chronotopes of immigration’, because they determine to a significant degree the generic distinction of immigration narrative. The present study reveals that the theory of ‘chronotope’ is fundamental to understanding the spatial and temporal connections in the narrative of immigration, is critical for comprehending immigration literature, and interestingly aligns with diaspora studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• narrative
• chronotope
• homeland
• host land

Acknowledgment

The authors are thankful to the Deanship of Scientific Research at Najran University for funding this work under the General Research Funding program grant code (NU/DRP/SEHRC/12/2).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mark Shackleton, “Introduction,” Diasporic Literature and Theory-Where Now? Ed. Mark Shackleton (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), ix–xiv.

2 Anne Fleig, “Time and Space,” Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction. Ed. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2019), 410–415.

3 See, for example, Pauliane Amaral and Rauer Ribeiro Rodrigues, “Bakhtin’s Chronotope in the (Auto) Biography Novel: From Antiquity to Contemporaneity,” Bakhtiniana:Revista de Estudos do Discurso 10.3 (2015): 123–143; Vanilda Meister Arnold et al., “Dialogy and Chronotopy in the Historical Novel, Verde Vale by Urda Klueger,” Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso 17 (2022): 129–155; Luma Balaa, “The Chronotope of the House and Feminist Matrilinealism in Nada Awar Jarrar’s Somewhere, Home,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 22.1 (2021): 70–82; Zamira Baltaeva, “The Literary Chronotope Forms in the Poetry of Erkin Vahidov,” Eurasian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 8 (2022): 32–36; Petra Eckhard, Chronotopes of the Uncanny: Time and Space in Postmodern New York Novels, Paul Auster’s City of Glass and Toni Morrison’s Jazz (Berlin: Transcript-Verlag, 2011); Ingrid Johnston, “The Chronotope of the Threshold in Contemporary Canadian Literature for Young Adults,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4.2 (2012): 139–150; Muneera Muftah. “Translating Routine Phrases from Arabic into English: Between Functional Translation and Cultural Specificity,” Comparative Literature: East & West 7.2 (2023): 151–165. doi:10.1080/25723618.2023.2238964; Ljuba Tarvi, “Chronotope and Metaphor as Ways of Time-Space Contextual Blending: The Principle of Relativity in Literature,” Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso 10 (2015): 193–208; Ibrahim Gichingir Wachira, “Representations of Chronotopic Cycles and Consciousness in Selected Novels of Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, Alain Mabanckou and Mia Couto,” Dissertation (Kenya:Kenyatta University, 2021), <http://ir-library.ku.ac.ke/handle/123456789/23407/>.

4 See Miranda Levanat-Peričić, “The Chronotope of Exile in the Post-Yugoslav Novel and the Boundaries of Imaginary Homelands,” Colloquia Humanistica 7.1 (2018): 82–97; Sahar Jamshidian and Pirnajmuddin Hossein, “The Chronotope of Third Space in Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘The Management of Grief’,” Cogent Arts & Humanities 6.1 (2019): 1–17.

5 See, for example, Mohammed Al-Balawi, “Losing Identity, Abandoning Values, and Alienating Self: The impact of immigration in Mohammed Abdul Wali’s They Die Strangers,” Linguistics and Literature Studies 3 (2015): 100–110; Abdul Aziz Al-Maqalih, “Aldhat Almanfyah fī Yamūtūna ghurabā' li-MuḥammadʻAbd al-Walī,” Maǧalat Kūlyat Alādāb 26 (2003): 7–18; Mubarak Altwaiji, “Socio-Political Realities in Yemeni Novel: A Study of Mohammed Abdulwali’s They Die Strangers,” Literary Voice 11.1 (2019): 90–96; Al-Yahya Wadhaf and Omar Noritah, “Identity, Nationhood and Body Politics: Pathways into the Yemeni World of They Die strangers,” 3L Journal of Language Teaching, Linguistics and Literature 13 (2007): 1–32; Fatin Abdulla J‘ ym, “‘tabata Albydayah wa Alnhayah fī Rwayaty Muḥammad ʻAbd al-Walī,” Maqamat lildrasat alinsanyah wa aladabyah wa naqdyah 6.3 (2023): 53–76; Abdul Aziz Khan et al, “On Entrepreneurship and Fiction: the case of Abdul Wali’s They Die Strangers,” Think India Journal 22.10 (2019): 1586–1593; Riyad Manqoush, “National Identity and Sense of Belonging of the Yemeni Migrants in Ethiopia: A Critical Analysis of Abdul-Wali’s They Die Strangers,” Asian Journal of Humanities and Social Studies 2.1 (2014): 36–42; Riyad A. Manqoush, “The Cultural Dilemma of the Yemeni and Chinese Migrants: Mohammad Abdulwali’s They Die Strangers vs. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club,” Asian Journal of Humanities and Social Studies 3.6 (2015): 461–471; Arwa Obaid, “The In-between World of They Die Strangers by Mohammad Abdul-Wali,” Electronic Journal of University of Aden for Humanity and Social Sciences 3.2 (2022): 131–138; Wahbīyah Aḥmad Ṣabrah, Al-Binyah al-riwā'īyahfīYamūtūnaghurabā' li-MuḥammadʻAbd al-Walī (Ṣanʻā': Markaz al-Dirāsātwa-al-Buḥūth al-Yamanī, 2002).

6 Shelagh Weir, “Introduction,” They Die Strangers, Mohammad Abdul-Wali. Ed. Abubaker Bagader and Deborah Akers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 1.

7 Weir 1.

8 Weir 1.

9 See ‘UmarAl-Jawi, “Introduction,” Yamūtūna ghurabā', Muḥammad Aḥmad Abd al Walī (Bayrut: Dar al-'Awdah/ San’a’: Dar al-Kalimah,1978): 3, and Weir 1.

10 Silvia Chelala, “The Stories of the Forgotten,” Al Jadid Magazine, 2002. <https://www.aljadid.com/content/stories-forgotten>.

11 Robina Mohammad, “Marginalisation, Islamism and the Production of the ‘Other’s’ ‘Other’: Gender, Place and Culture,” A Journal of Feminist Geography 6.3 (1999): 221–240. doi:10.1080/09663699925006, and Abdulbari Taher, “The Combination of Two Worlds: A Critical Reading on They Die Strangers,” 2004. <http://www.ywriters.org/index.php?action=showDetails&id=55>.

12 The city in which the story takes place, namely ‘Marqatah,’ is a real place in Addis Ababa, where Yemenis built mosques, Yemeni community school and had a Yemeni open market (Sophia Pandya, “Yemenis and Muwalladīn in Addis Ababa: Blood Purity and the Opportunities of Hybridity,” Journal of Arabian Studies: Arabia, the Gulf, and the Red Sea 4.1 (2014): 100).

13 The Republic of Yemen that time was divided into two countries: The northern part that was Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen and became The Yemen Arab Republic in 1962 and the southern part that was under the British Control and after independence it became The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.

14 The word ‘Sayyed’ here means ‘sheikh’, a religious leader.

15 Mikhail. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258.

16 Bakhtin 84.

17 Anna De Fina, “The Chronotope,” Handbook of Pragmatics: 25th Annual Instalment. Ed. Frank Brisard et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2022), 49–65. doi:10.1075/hop.25.chr1.

18 V. Sangeetha, “Bakhtin Theory of Chronotope in Literary Works,” Research Journal of English (RJOE) 4.2 (2019): 36. <https://www.rjoe.org.in/Files/SI2/(35-38)>.

19 Bakhtin 97–98.

20 Bakhtin 252.

21 Gary Saul Morson, and Caryl Emerson, Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 382.

22 Muneera Muftah. “Promoting Identity and a Sense of Belonging: An Ecocritical Reading of Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Where the Streets Had a Name,” Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature 16.2 (2022): 87–102. <https://journals.iium.edu.my/asiatic/index.php/ajell/article/view/2650<; Esther Peeren, “Through the Lens of the Chronotope: Suggestions for a Spatio-Temporal Perspective on Diaspora,” Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics. Ed. Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser, and Yolande Jansen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 67–77.

23 Peeren 72.

24 Peeren 71.

25 Peeren 72–73.

26 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

27 Violeta Avetisian, “The Chronotope of Remembrance in Vladimir Nabokov’s Mashenka and in Grigol Robakidze’s The Snake’s Skin,” European Narratology Network 3 (2013).

28 Sahar Jamshidian and Hossein Pirnajmuddin, “The Chronotope of Third Space in Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘The Management of Grief’,” Cogent Arts & Humanities 6.1 (2019): 1–17. doi:10.1080/23311983.2019.1656935.

29 In his introduction to the novella translated into English, Shelagh Weir points that “Abdul Wali was primarily writing for fellow Yemenis, who would have implicitly understood his often subtle cultural and political references and contexts of his stories” (Weir, 2001, 5).

30 Bakhtin 84.

31 Bakhtin 248.

32 Bakhtin 248.

33 Bakhtin 248.

34 Bakhtin 243.

35 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Colonial discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 2013 [1993]), 392–403, 394.

36 Hall 394.

37 Bakhtin 250.

38 Homi K. Bhabha, The location of culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1–2.

39 Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 223.

40 Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 152–153.

41 Naficy, An Accented Cinema 153.

42 Ernst Bloch and Mark Ritter, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics,” New German Critique 11 (1977): 22–38. doi:10.2307/487802.

43 Avetisian 2.

44 Peeren 72.

45 Peeren 72.

46 Harry Olufunwa, “Achebe’s Spatial Temporalities: Literary Chronotopes in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God,” Critical Survey 17.3 (2005): 61. <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233636128>.

47 Naficy, An Accented cinema 153.

48 Bhabha, The Location of Culture 1.

49 Bhabha, The Location of Culture 18.

50 Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, Vol. 11 (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 448.

51 Bhabha, The Location of Culture 9.

Additional information

Funding

The authors are thankful to the Deanship of Scientific Research at Najran University for funding this work under the General Research Funding program grant code (NU/DRP/SEHRC/12/2).