Paper Summary:

Speaking of his homeland, India, Salman Rushdie once wrote, "if we look back, we must also do so in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties - that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; we will, in short, create fictions....imaginary homelands" (10). In essence, the past is an alien territory and our ancient homelands are world that exist only in the chambers of our mind; we cannot go home again. Over the next few pages, I will explore the idea of "Home" as something irretrievable by looking at works by Elie Wiesel, Janice Mirikitani, and Lan Samantha Chang; in each instance, the past is irretrievable and perhaps better off as irretrievable - though only Mirikitani seems to eagerly embrace discarding what was. Beyond that, one may say that it is foolhardy to live in the past because it gnaws away at the present and future; certainly, looking at the case of Wiesel in particular, it seems as though returning to the past brings him only sorrow while the embattled Chinese family in Chang's tale suffer because they find themselves in a world that wants them to discard the old one even as they cling to a homeland - a homeland of the mind - that is simply no longer in existence. When all is said and done, transformation is the one constant in life and that makes returning home a sheer impossibility - even if it is also true that "home" never really leaves your side.

From the Paper:

20587 Outline The outline of my final paper is actually quite simple: in his text, Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie talks about how immigrants who leave one place to head to another place tend to construct an image of the place they left behind - an imaginary homeland that, for all intents and purposes, exists only in the mind. In this paper, I will use that as a theme to highlight how memories shape our current-day lives and can cause us pain and also hope for the future. To accomplish the aforementioned goal, I will discuss three works of literature - Elie Wiesel's, "The Watch," Janice Mirikitani's, "Breaking

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