The Theme of Alienation as Reflected in Dinaw Mengestu’s Trilogy: A Sociological Perspective
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Date
2021-04
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This study focuses on the three fictional works of Dinaw Mengestu; “The Beautiful Things thatHeaven Bears” (2007), “How to Read the Air” (2010), and “All Our Names” (2014). Thisresearch aims to investigate the causes of alienation that enumerates by extracting the influencingfactors and the consequence of alienation in a way the fundamental concern that human beingfaces in the course of migration and immigration. This study reveals that theimmigrantcharactersrepresented in the selected trilogy while confronting and challenging the various forms ofalienation in their attempt to co-exist the new immigrant life since alienation has become wordsof such modern man’s everyday language. This study also deals with the major concerns andmatters of the immigrant characters’ reactions of alienation regardless of their reasons for exile.The main reason for focusing on the concept of alienation in the selected novels is that this areaof literary theme has not been given enough attention to be studied comprehensively in the contextof African (Ethiopians) immigrants’ life. Besides, no other Ethiopian literary work has portrayedthe themes of alienation better than the selected three novels which have dealt with the pain andsufferings of alienation in the lives of the. This study tried to explore the immigrants ‘sense ofalienation in the hosting country and in the process of immigration where life as an immigrantwas unbearable, forcing them to try towards the process of economic, social, and culturaladjustment. An attempt is made to explore the multiple dimensions of alienation and the alienatingfactors based on Melvin Seeman’s five aspects of alienation: powerlessness, meaninglessness,normlessness, isolation, and self-estrangement. The selected three literary immigrant novelsreveal the theme of the immigrants’ feelings of alienation as a central preoccupation of the author.
The researcher has used textual analysis to explore the selected literary works and captured theportrayal of alienation of the African immigrants which allows us the understanding, processing,and witnessing of human suffering. The study summarizes that the selected trilogy explicitly orimplicitly points out the various forms of alienation facing the African immigrants in the course ofcreating new life in the host land.
Keywords: Alienation, Dinaw, Seeman, and Immigration
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Keywords
Alienation, Dinaw, Seeman, and Immigration