Diasporic Trauma in Unaccustomed Earth

Abstract

Jhumpa Lahiri is a famous Indian American author whose works consistently deal with the themes like diaspora, dislocation and belonging. She explores the trauma of diaspora in her third book Unaccustomed Earth in which the characters suffer from the loss of a traditional culture, death of a family member, the sense of rootlessness, double consciousness and generation conflicts. This paper argues that only by renegotiating the relationship between the past and present, keeping the balance between memories and forgetting, can characters in the novel gradually work through their trauma and reconstruct a new identity.